Homeschooling Phase 5.0 - Year 3 (ideas)

This bulleted list is a typed-out version of my page of brainstorming for the 2022-2023 homeschooling year.  I mostly wanted a digital record (since it's hard to look back and find the pages I want in a notebook) so that a few months into the year, I can see if we're on track and want to add or remove.

Subject Ideas

• Littles - 101 Things to Do book, Blossom and Root curriculum?, Family Math, 1 recipe/week, Wee Sing songs
• Math - EP offline workbook, IXL, Family Math (1 activity/week)
• Bible - Torchlighters, Lessons from the Land (Appian Media), Long Story Short, Leviticus book, Not Consumed, 14:6 The Way Bible Memory, How Great is our God devotions, catechism?, 1-2 hymns/month
• Reading - 40 book challenge (deeply and widely), weekly reflection letter to me, reading to each other, independent reading, audiobook together, ideas from Sarah Mackenzie about teaching reading without a curriculum, conversations about what we're/they're reading!
• Language Arts - EP offline workbook, poetry memorization (IEW), Red Hot Root Words (1/week), spelling as they miss words
• Science - EP biology (2nd semester)
• History - Ancient History (1st semester), D'Aulaire's book of Greek myths
• Foreign Language - Japanese (TalkBox.Mom)
• Art - 1 element/month using art elements book, weekly art time, ancient art?
• Music - piano weekly, recorder?, Blossom and Root/EP music appreciation
• P.E. - yoga pretzels, 1 sport/month

handwriting? geography? poetry teatime? typing? notebooking?

Weekly

• verse(s)
• art time
• recipe
• Family Math activity
• KET NewsQuiz
• write about what they're reading

Monthly

• two hymns
• element of art
• spot
• country? (food, culture, language, etc.)
• geography challenge

Morning Time

• Bible, prayer, hymn, memory verse
• mentor sentences?
• mental math?
• music/art
• poetry memorization
• catechism
• Japanese
• Wordle/Jumble
• team challenge
• history/biology (may happen after a break)

Independent Time

• math, L.A. workbooks
• IXL (math, L.A. skills), Seterra (geography)
• Code.org? Typing?
• independent reading, Bible reading
• writing
• piano
• chore(s)

What We’re Reading Together

    Some people like to read (and finish) one book at a time. I am not one of those people.  

    This is also how I clean the house.  My husband would rather clean one room in entirety.  I'd rather flit around from room to room, making each room a small percentage better.

    In my own reading, I have multiple books I'm reading at any given time, and I have carried this over into read alouds with the boys.  We read picture books every day together, but these are the chapter books/longer books we're currently working through:

• Who Was King Tut? - We actually just finished this one.  In history, we were studying ancient Egypt, and I always love pulling in a Who Was?/What Was? book when I can because I love the series, and we can always learn a lot in a short matter of time.  Last year in history, we read the ones about George Washington Carver, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Helen Keller, the Summer Olympics, and the Civil Rights Movement.
• The Children of Noisy Village - This is by the same author as the Pippi Longstocking books and is also based in Sweden.  I like that the chapters are short (often even short enough to hold the little boys' interest!), and they are each a stand-alone story, so it's okay there's a gap between reading chapters.
• Nate Saint: On a Wing and a Prayer - I had set the goal of reading through three biographies from this series (Christian Heroes Then and Now) this calendar year.  We has already learned about Jim Elliot and Eric Liddell, and I let the boys choose this time around.  I was kind of surprised that they voted for Nate Saint, since the story overlaps a lot with Jim Elliot's.  I have been reading a chapter of this book to the big boys every Sunday after "family church," but since we're almost at the end, we're going to try to finish it this week.
• The Jesus Storybook Bible - We often read random Bible stories from random storybook Bibles, but we're trying to read this one through from beginning to end.  It's tricky because the little boys don't really like any type of storybook Bible, and the big boys already know all the stories, so they feel it's beneath them. I do like how all the stories point to Jesus.
• When Families Pray - Lucas reads a devotional from this book every Sunday for our family church time.
• I've Lost my Hippopotamus - I usually like to have a poetry book that we slowly work through at the end of our evening family reading time.  We're definitely fans of Shel Silverstein, but this one by Jack Prelutsky has been good so far.
• On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness - For our audiobook, we're slowly working through this first book in the Wingfeather Saga series.  I've heard so many raving reviews, but we've really struggled through it.  I tried to read it to the older boys last year, but it was difficult to read aloud with all the crazy names and footnotes.  This time around, we're doing the audiobook narrated by the author, but we're still having a hard time getting into it.  We've got about 3 hours left, and I couldn't even tell you much of what's happened in the first 5 hours.  I'm hoping it redeems itself by the end.

First Week of Homeschooling (Year 3)

    The Thomas Family School of Wonder is officially back in session for Year 3!  We've had somewhat of a rolling start to the school year.  The older boys have started working through their math and language arts workbooks, and we had started our Ancient Egypt unit while in Indiana.  But as far as officially getting back to our schedule with morning time, independent time, and outside time, that began the day after Labor Day.  I was planning on starting on Labor Day itself, but Lucas had a horrible toothache, and I spent lots of time trying to find a new dentist that accepted our insurance (and, of course, all of them were closed for Labor Day)... and I wasn't as prepared as I wanted to be... and I had an out-of-control outburst of anger toward one of my sons and was feeling all sorts of remorse and off-on-the-wrong-foot.  So, we started Tuesday. Ah, the beauty of homeschooling flexibility...

    Here is what our table often looks like after Morning Time (this was two separate days):

 

And here's the day the Pokemon came to school:

Here's the "morning song" I've been playing around 8:00 to give everyone a reminder to brush their teeth and head to the table!

 I'll rotate it out to other songs eventually (some of our favorites have been the "Good Morning" song by Phil Joel, "Mind Set on Jesus" with Tamesha Pruett, and "Good Morning" by Mandisa).

Schedule

     Our "typical" schedule that we aim for is:

• 8:00 - 9:30 - Morning Time (Cooper and Colson coming in and out as they want)
• 9:30 - 10:30 - Independent Work Time (me focusing on Cooper and Colson)
• 10:30 - 12:30 - Snack, Outside Time
• 12:30 - 1:00 - Lunch
• 1:00 - 2:30 - Self Time (big boys read and play by themselves, Cooper plays by himself, Colson usually takes a nap)
• 2:30 - Snack, back outside or other activities
• 4:30 - Dinner Prep (boys take turns helping)
• 5:00 - Dinner
• 6:30 - Family Reading Time
• 7:00 - Little boys bedtime, big boys have one-on-one or one-on-two time with Mom-Mom and Daddy (till about 8:00, depending on the activity)
• Big boys go to bed when they're tired (Calvin usually around 8:30/9:00; Carter around 9:45)

I say "typical," but we only kept this schedule this week on Tuesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, we went to the library and a park during outside time.  On Friday, we did a shortened morning time and independent time (since they were mostly finished by then) to be able to get to our dentist appointments and a play date at the Children's Garden.

Morning Time

    So, we start around 8:00 for Morning Time. I have the big boys bring their Bibles and hymnals, and I have the pencils and other supplies.  I have some overarching plans and ideas for this year, and I decided to break them down into monthly and weekly plans.  And then from the weekly plans, I check things off as we do them that week. It worked pretty well for our first week.

    And just so it's clear that these are not nice-and-neat, perfectly-laid-out plans, here's what my notebook page looks like:

• Bible - We did Lesson 1 from Lessons from the Land (Appian Media), spreading it out over four days. We watched a video clip about what Bible-time synagogues look like and then read and discussed verses related to Jesus reading from the scroll in Luke 4 (also Isaiah 61 and then others about being brave to be who you are)
• Scripture Memory - We started Week 1 of SMF's 14:6 The Way.  Our verses this week were Genesis 1:1 (all four boys), Genesis 1:27 (Carter and Calvin), and Hebrews 11:3 (Carter). I don't know if we'll all be able to go to Scripture Memory Camp in Louisiana next summer, but I wanted to prepare for the possibility.  The boys will be reciting their verses to their grandmas every week.
• Hymn - The Solid Rock. This was my "class hymn" at Asbury, so it has a special place in my heart. This week, we focused on just getting familiar with it, so we sang all four verses every day.
• Prayer -.We used the Not Consumed J.O.Y. cards and also focused on praying for tribal peoples.
• Poetry Memorization - We're going to work through IEW's Poetry Memorization (Level One) program together.  Our first poem was "Ooey Gooey," which all 4 boys loved.  We also started working on the next poem "Celery."
• Root Word - Our red hot root word of the week is "sub."  We ended up only doing this one day, so I'd like to make sure we're doing a quick review or activity for it every day.
• Japanese - Since we had kind of taken a break from Japanese over the summer, we reviewed the words and phrases that we had already learned. We also watched some Japanese song videos that the boys love.  We usually do this during lunch time instead of morning time, if we're eating at the table at home.
• Discussions - I introduced the 40 book challenge that they'll be doing for reading this year.  I also worked with them individually to get their reading logs and genre requirement graphs up to date. Next week, we'll take some notes together on key aspects of the different genres.
• Wordle - This was a big hit! My boys LOVE playing different Wordle games with my mom when we're in Indiana. Instead of being on the phone, we played offline, whether doing individual words on small white boards or doing one together on the big board.  Our words this week were water, super, and plant.
• History - We finished our unit on Ancient Egypt by discussing papyrus, tombs, mummies, and King Tut. We also finished the book we had been reading Who Was King Tut?  We started the new unit on Mesopotamia by talking about some of the empires in that area and listening to a few chapters from The Story of Mankind.
• Read Alouds - Here's a list of the chapter books we're in the middle of these days.  We don't read all of them every day, but I'll grab time here and there when the little boys are occupied (like when we're all outside or when we're all playing with something at the table or after their bedtime).  Sometimes, during morning time, I'll read picture books to everyone at the couch (we also usually do this every night before bed).  And when we're driving longer distances in the van, we have an audiobook.
• Current Events - Every Friday for the past six years (back when I was teaching 4th and 5th grades), I've watched KET's NewsQuiz show.  It's excellent and focuses on kid-friendly news events from Kentucky and around the world.  Interspersed through the news stories are ten simple quiz questions.  It's about 15 minutes, and all four of my boys are super engaged as we watch together.
• Specials
• Music - We ended up not doing any music this week. My goal is to do some music appreciation related to our history unit and then have the boys work on a song every week on the piano. Hopefully, we'll start this next week!
• P.E. - We're focusing on a sport every month (not necessarily to become proficient but to know the gist of how to play and how to watch the game), and this month we're doing football.  We started with a few kid-friendly introductory videos on YouTube.
• Art - We're focusing on the elements of art every month, so this month we kicked off our study of "line."  I had them draw vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines in their notebooks, and then we did some collage using those types of lines.

Family Math - I purchased three used Family Math books (younger children, elementary, and middle school, since I've got all three!) and plan to do one activity a week as a large group or with individuals.  This week with all of them, I measured a piece of yarn to match their heights (and we also measured them against the wall) and then put them in separate clear bags to see if they could guess which string was whose.  I had Carter and Calvin play a game (that Carter didn't care for), and I processed through with Carter a problem-solving situation involving a buy one, get one free deal.  And technically, Monopoly wasn't in the Family Math book, but I played a to-the-death round with the big boys that lasted over two hours, and it incorporated lots of math! Can you tell who won? Look at all that money I had, compared to theirs!

Independent Time

I gave the boys a checklist similar to previous years with tasks for them to complete over the course of the week.  These included:

• math and language arts workbook lessons to correct from the previous week (and/or follow up with me one-on-one about) and to complete this week
• geography practice on the Seterra website (the goal being to identify all the African countries on the map by the end of the week)
• math and language arts practice on the IXL website. We have a subscription for both of them that tracks their progress in various specific skills
• reading to themselves 30 minutes every day from a 40 book challenge book
• reading the Bible every day (Carter has challenged himself to read through the whole Bible this calendar year, so he's working through that. Calvin is almost finished with the Action Bible)
• writing a letter to me about what they're reading. I'll read these over the weekend and write out a response to them. I did this with my 4th and 5th graders, and it was a great way to connect and discuss reading!

Of course, they were drawn to the online activities and did those first.  By Thursday, they still hadn't started on their workbooks and had a lot of catching up to do!  I'm not sure whether to let them continue to control their own pace or if I should space out the workbook lessons a bit more (and assigning certain ones to certain days).

Little Boys

One of the main things I tried with the little boys this week was an activity in the Family Math book about labeling an egg carton with numbers and having them count out the correct number of beans for each slot.  They both did really well with this! I also wanted to try a recipe this week with them to make bread dough, but we ended up not having time for that.

 

Outside Time

We were outside every day this week -- sometimes after morning time and independent time and sometimes earlier in the morning.  On Thursday, we took our morning time outside and did our art lesson and workbook time at the table in our front yard.

Fieldtrips

We stayed home on Tuesday and Thursday but took a few fieldtrips on Wednesday and Friday.

• library! This may not seem like a big deal, but this was the first time I had taken all 4 boys to the library since the pandemic began 2.5 years ago! We go to the library every week but always to pick up our hold items. I had taken Carter inside once, Calvin inside twice, and Cooper once (last week), but with the boys all vaccinated, we went in all together this time.  They picked out books and played!

• Harrods Hill Park - this is the park closest to our favorite library, so we spent some time there after picking up our books. Here's Cooper taking a break as we walked around the track together (everyone had to do a lap before they could play on the playground). Cooper also started a pine cone collection, which I thought was a great idea until the stubborn sap would not come off our hands even after rubbing them with hand sanitizer over and over.

• dentist - It had been awhile since the boys had been to the dentist, so I scheduled them all at the same time at a new dentist on our insurance plan. The boys all enjoyed themselves (the kid shows in the lobby and during dental work were a hit, of course!).

• Children's Garden - our homeschool social group was meeting up at the Children's Garden, so we joined them after the dentist appointments. The boys loved exploring the trains, plants, dirt, and pond and playing with the other kids.  Calvin especially loves the social interactions. Carter liked catching some minnows in the pond. Colson always gravitates toward the trains, and Cooper liked playing by the old cabin.

There were some things we didn't have time for (which will always be the case!), but overall, I'm pleased with our first full week of homeschooling for Year 3! Now we have 3 weeks to settle into this new routine before our baby comes and changes everything!

Homeschooling Phase 4.0 - E.P. Year 2 (January 2022 - May 2022)

After finishing our Easy Peasy year in December, it was time to start working on their "regular" grade levels (which is so subjective!). We had a more robust morning time with Bible, history, and science. For independent time, Carter did 6th grade math and 5th grade language arts and reading while Calvin did 3rd grade math and 2nd grade language arts and reading (all through the Easy Peasy online curriculum).

Typical Schedule:

• 6:00 - 7:00ish - read and play quietly with whoever wakes up that early
• 7:00 - breakfast. We started following a framework for our breakfasts to give us some variety but also to remove the decision-making every day.
• Monday - muffins
• Tuesday - toast
• Wednesday - waffles/pancakes
• Thursday, Friday, Saturday - cereal/make your own
• Sunday - cinnamon (usually cinnamon rolls or cinnamon bread)
• 7:30ish - wake up Carter 
• 8:00ish - morning time. This includes Bible/Scripture memory time, our hymn of the month, history, science, and sometimes specials (MWF - music, art, PE/health).  The little boys are welcome to join us at the table, but they have to be quiet. If they can't/don't want to be quiet, they can play together in the living room.
• 9:30ish - independent time. Carter goes to his bedroom to work on the laptop, while Calvin goes to my bedroom to work on the desktop.  Their online work is for reading, language arts, math, and any specials/history/science that they need to finish from morning time. This is when I play and read with Cooper and Colson.
• 11:00ish - go outside. We try to go outside every day before noon, but it doesn't always happen. 
• 12:30 - lunch. I used to have them fend for themselves every day, but it really goes better if I make the food for them and keep it all the same.
• 1:00 - Colson takes a nap; Cooper has "Cooper time" in the play room.  The older boys usually have a chore and read-to-self time (Carter - 30 minutes, Calvin -25 minutes).
• 3:00 - snack, more outside time or free play time.

Here's a detailed peek into our first week of homeschooling using this more structured schedule.

Curriculum:

In order to finish up a year's worth of Easy Peasy online curriculum in a semester, we doubled up on the lessons.  I made a checklist in their notebooks to outline the tasks for the week.  We did History and Science together and then they worked on reading, math, and language arts independently.

• Reading - I liked that Calvin had the option to listen to the audio since he loves doing that. One of the main things he listened to were the Tales of Peter Rabbit.  Carter read some pretty challenging books (like Little Men and Pollyanna).  Easy Peasy, since it's free online, incorporates books from the public domain.  I like the boys reading these classics, but I don't know how much they inspired them to love reading.
• Math - Math went well overall, but I didn't do a great job holding the boys accountable to their online lessons.  Many times, I would assume they understood the material, but I didn't check (and often, the activities were online and didn't show any work on paper), and weeks later, I would realize that there was a gap in their understanding.  This led me to re-structure the program to use the offline workbooks more often the next year.
• Language Arts - This went pretty well. Again, I didn't always check their work. They liked the easy grammar pages more than the writing pages.  I really want them to enjoy and excel at writing as adults, so I need to figure out a way to encourage them in their writing.  
• History - We did Modern History this semester (post-Civil War U.S. history).  I enjoyed learning alongside them about George Washington Carver, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Helen Keller (we listened to her autobiography, which was great!).  We also spent time on the Great Depression, World War I, and World War II.  We read several picture books and chapter books that aligned with our history studies.  After World War II, we kind of dropped off on the curriculum and just covered some of the highlights leading to the present day.
• Science - We focused on Zoology, which was a lot of fun! I didn't learn much when I was in school about, for example, the differences between mammals and birds.  Through videos and picture books and the E.P. curriculum, we learned about all types of animals.  We spent more time on some than others.  This unit of study incorporated a ton of lapbooks, which the boys got a little tired of after doing several. 

Bible: For Bible time, we'd start with a hymn of the month and end with taking turns praying the Voice of the Martyrs calendar and the J.O.Y. prayer cards from Not Consumed. For our Scripture memory work, we learned the book of Jonah (more on that here), so that became our Bible reading and discussion on most days.

Co-op/CHILL

    We were more involved with our co-op this semester and even made had some play dates outside of the co-op time.  We were planning on joining them for a fieldtrip at Carter Caves, and I had taken Carter and Calvin there a day early to camp (in the chilly 39 degree April weather!), but they canceled because of the rain (after we were already there).  Carter and Calvin also joined a book club from the co-op that met weekly on Zoom.  We read Black Star of Kingston, Winged Watchman, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Ember Falls.  

    In April, we joined a homeschool social group with all kinds of events to attend and a quarterly attendance requirement.  We jumped right in, often attending two events a week, such as park play dates, the Bluegrass Sheepdog trials, and Field Day at the leader's farm.  It was so wonderful for me to connect with other homeschooling mamas and for the boys to play with other kids.  

Weekly Outside Schedule:

Just like automating our breakfasts helped so that there were fewer decisions on my part (and fewer complaints on their part), I assigned certain days of the week to different outside activities so that we wouldn't always be stuck doing the same thing. For the most part, this worked out really well:

• Monday - front yard (scooters and trikes on the sidewalk, reading together, doing activities at the table or on a blanket)
• Tuesday - backyard (swing set, obstacle courses, re-configuring of the many slides and tires and pallets)
• Wednesday - walk (sometimes in our neighborhood, sometimes at a park where the focusing was walking the trails, not playing on the playground)
• Thursday - forest (sometimes doing school work or nature journaling back there and sometimes just exploring or blazing trails)
• Friday - fieldtrip (usually a park with a playground or the orchard, once it opened in May)

Outside Time

    After spending 1061 hours outside in 2021, we (mostly I!) decided to participate in the challenge again.  This meant we were outside almost every day, regardless of the weather.  

As the weather started getting warmer, it became harder and harder to focus on schoolwork.  This was prime outside time -- not too hot or too cold and the public school kids were still in school!  We ended up finishing up the essentials and calling it done!  We purchased memberships to Evans Orchard and the Kentucky Children's Garden, so those were two options of places to go.  We also began geocaching again and found several in the prime winter/spring months before the hiding areas were overgrown.

Photo Highlights

Colson reading Daddy's magazine

Family geocaching at the beginning of the year

Picnic lunch on the tank at Veterans Park

St. Patrick's Day treasure hunt in the forest

Group sharing time during a book club park gathering

Trail blazing!

Creek-stomping!

(and Calvin washing his brothers' feet afterwards)

Excavating to find farm animals

Mom-Mom and big boys overnight trip to Carter Caves

Fort building

Visiting a different zoo (this was Indianapolis)

Visiting Mimi and Pa around Easter time

Playing on a playground during our Indiana days

Making a pot of "stew" at the Children's Garden

Tower building (we often have something like this to do at the table while we're listening to read alouds or audiobooks)

Playing on the turf at one of our favorite parks -- Legacy Grove aka "the grassy hill park"

Calvin reading his book during forest time

Carter working on his nature journal

Playing! (this is what preschool homeschool looks like!)

A brother chess match

Our first backyard camping night of the year

Cooper on the purple team at Field Day

My little creek boys!

Calvin likes to read in all sorts of positions!

Learning the Book of Jonah together

For our 2022 spring semester, we memorized the book of Jonah together.  The previous year, we learned verses from the SwordGrip program from Scripture Memory Fellowship to earn a scholarship to Scripture Memory camp. Since we were unable to attend camp the summer of 2022, I selected Jonah for several reasons:

• it was a whole book of the Bible!
• it was do-able in about 5 months (48 verses, averaging 1-2 per week)
• it was a familiar story but with less-than-familiar parts (like how the book ends with Jonah being angry when the people repent)
• I prefer memorizing whole passages/chapters/books instead of topical verses out of context

As with all our memory work, we incorporated songs. I adapted what I could find, but there aren't a lot of Scripture songs for the book of Jonah.  I also created some of my own tunes and used some existing tunes, such as Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Over time, the boys got a little tired of reviewing all the verses we had learned so far.  And actually, we haven't reviewed much since we did our live recitation on YouTube in May.  Learning new verses is so much more fun (in my opinion) than reviewing old ones! Hopefully, I can come up with a system or schedule for reviewing so that we don't lose what we've learned.

I was surprised and pleased that even though I focused on my oldest two boys (10 and 8) learning Jonah, the younger two (4 and 3) picked up a lot just from being around us while we sang.  Here's almost-3-year-old Colson reciting Jonah 1:

And here's the YouTube playlist of our recitation and the songs for each chapter.

Homeschooling Phase 3.0 - E.P. Year 1 (May 2021 - Dec 2021)

    I mentioned that at the end of our "unschooling" season of homeschooling, we were ready for a bit more structure.  I didn't hate the curriculum we had been using for pod schooling, but I wasn't crazy about it, either.  At the beginning of our homeschooling journey, I had considered a free(!) online curriculum called Easy Peasy All-In-One Homeschool.  It includes all the core subjects as well as special subjects such as art, P.E., and music.  What I didn't like about it at the time was that I didn't want the boys on the computer so much, and I wanted more control over planning the lessons.  Well, by April 2021, I figured this would be better than the hodge-podge things we were doing.  

    In May, I headed out for a 5 night solitude retreat and decided to have the boys start the program while I was gone.  In hindsight, this probably wasn't the best strategy, but I had sat down with both of them to walk them through the program.  They caught on pretty quick, and I was pleased that they had made progress while I was gone.

    Since we started in May, we continued through the summer.  I wasn't very structured with how many lessons in each subject they needed to complete, so it was definitely lop-sided with speeding through their favorite subjects and avoiding their least favorite subjects (usually language arts).

    In the fall, I started combining them for history (world geography) and science (earth science) because it made more sense to work on the subjects together than me explaining it to them separately.  We also started a co-op in the fall one afternoon a week.  Carter's enrichment classes were oceanography, Lego STEM, and arts and crafts.  Calvin's age group had gym, Spanish, and children's literature.  Calvin, who is very social, enjoyed this time much more than Carter did.  Carter didn't like the encroachment on his daily afternoon "self time" while the little boys took a nap.  We also ended up taking a break partway through the semester when Covid numbers were precariously high again.

    I used a grid notebook to keep better track of what the boys were working on. Each week, I would make a schedule for them of what they needed to accomplish on their own in math, reading, language arts, and specials.  They'd also usually work on IXL skills on the computer in math and language arts.  After our Bible time and history/science time, they'd have some individual work time on the computer -- Calvin on the desktop computer and Carter on the laptop in his bedroom.  By December, we doubled up in many subjects to try to finish the "year" in each of their subjects -- Carter doing 5th grade math and 4th grade language arts/reading and Calvin doing 2nd grade math and 1st grade language arts/reading.

    Overall, I liked the E.P. program much more than I thought I would. It gave us a structure but also gave us lots of free time, and we were usually able to go to a park or other fieldtrip on Fridays.

First day of co-op!

A Labor Day weekend camping trip along the Cumberland River

Lots of outside time and potty-training for both little boys (just not at the same time!)

They always love fall time at the apple orchard!

Our creek was completely leaf-covered!

Carter wanted to visit all the states surrounding Kentucky before he turned ten, so we took a quick family trip to his last state -- West Virginia (or, as Colson says, "Wessa Bajoinia"

Part of my co-op responsibility was to help some weeks in Carter's class, which was fun to see him in his element.

Christmas craft day at co-op!