I have really wanted to use gardening as part of our homeschool for as long as we have been homeschooling. Both my kids are outside and helping around the farm just about every day, so why shouldn’t our gardening time also be life skills and biology. My biggest problem has been finding a way to structure it so it’s not just me hollering “Okay kids, were going out to the garden again to pick things, weed, and water,” or another lesson in seed saving from tomatoes while we are saucing them. Has anyone else ever felt this way? Most days the kids are bored, frustrated, and/or overly energetic – aka they don’t learn anything, because I don’t have any kind of plan.
Enter The School Garden Curriculum by Kaci Rae Christopher. (This book is amazing by the way! It gives full 8-9 week plans of gardening lessons for Kindergarten through 8th grade for fall, winter, and spring, complete with several downloadable worksheets per trimester. Each year focusses on a different topic – things like seeds, soil, etc.) The problem was that it is designed for classroom use at a school where all grades are working in a community garden on different projects that all work together. Each year builds so my next question was “where do I start?” In addition, they were growing some things that we don’t typically grow. (Since we have a home garden instead of a community garden, we only grow what we eat.) Here I was with a lot of great plans (which I really needed) but some confusion over how to adjust them to fit my needs.
I read through the book again with unit studies in mind and found a lot of things that either I have really wanted to start as projects around here or things that I thought the kids would really have fun with. My conclusion was to try to just pick a unit for each season and be fine if we jumped all over the book. I reached out to the author and asked her for her advice on how to augment her book for our homeschool. She had a similar idea.
I handed the book to my kids and asked them to each pick a fall unit, a winter unit, and a spring unit. They both picked the same fall unit (win!) and on their own compromised on the other two (double win!!). This year, we are doing the 3rd Grade fall unit, which is all about the garden as an ecosystem, and the 1st Grade winter and spring units, which are mostly about seeds. The spring unit just happened to fit perfectly with our main science program this year, so yay!
I worked up a lesson plan for these 3 units and printed the corresponding worksheets. We are going to try to do 1 lesson each week from late September until we finish., probably on Fridays, which are usually our more relaxed day each week. Some lessons may need to get moved around depending on how different things in the garden are progressing – for example, I don’t know when my sunflowers will be ready to harvest seeds on and that is the second fall lesson.
I will try to post about our adventure regularly. Time to dig in and get our hands dirty! 🙂
The kids and I covered more than I would have ever thought possible – and they remember a lot of it! I had 3 main goals when we started – get them both reading well, and writing well, and teach them math. I knew that if I could teach them to read phonetically and write legibly then things would get so much easier on me, and I wanted to encourage them to understand the language of math right from the start. (Yes I love math!) Once they were reading on their own, they could start to work more independently. There were days when I just had to remind myself of that. DH heard me on more than one occasion telling myself things like “Just get them reading.” or “Reading, writing, and math, that’s all.”
DS was starting to read phonetically when we started Kindergarten last fall. DD was still in preschool but wanted to do real school like her big brother. For a week or two, I tried some of the ideas that I read on various blogs for keeping younger ones occupied (special school time activities, etc.), but she insisted on doing more. So she just did what we did. I started teaching her basic phonics, and she was starting to read in about 3 months. (For more info, click here to see my post on teaching her to read.)
I actually feel like I can keep doing this. Yes, it is still overwhelming at times, but I feel like I can do it.
There were hard days, and I am sure that there will be plenty more in the future. What is working now, may not work in a week, a month, or tomorrow, but I am learning how to adjust. I am also learning that if it’s working now, keep doing it until it stops.
Let’s Talk About Schedules
I spent a lot of time this past year tweaking our schedule. I would read about this method or that routine and feel like a “Bad Mama” for not incorporating it. Finally, about 2 months ago, I realized that my family and our life are vastly different than anyone else’s, and I should just do what works for us. Living on a farm gives the kids so many learning opportunities, but it also means that we have a lot of work to do on top of everything else. I have had to figure out what will work for us in this season of our lives. Extra activities like morning time (which is a great idea and I would love to incorporate it) just are not an option when you have a farm full of animals to take care of, a large garden to tend, and 7 acres to keep mowed.
We have sort of worked our way into a year-round schedule. We work for about 4-5 week terms then take a week off. That “break” week helps me get caught up around the house, around the farm, plan for the next school term, batch cook, and rest a bit. I like this because the kids don’t have the backward slides of longer breaks. We do take off from Thanksgiving week through Christmas week and just enjoy the season of Christ’s birth without having to stress over getting school done too. I also plan on 2 weeks off and a lighter schedule in late April/early May so I can get the garden in and keep up with the rapidly growing spring grass (and weeds). This gives us about 38 weeks of scheduled school, so we have a couple of extra weeks just in case. (You know, someone gets sick, or we have a major fam or house project that just can’t wait, or we’re all just having an off week and need a change of pace.)
As far as the nitty-gritty getting thing done schedules, this is what I do. During our break week, I type up a list of what we need to get done for school each week during the coming term. At the end of the list several fun activities that we can do throughout the week if we are making decent progress. I only print off 1 week at a time, because life happens. Some weeks, the kids are really into history or science and we read 6, 8, or 10 extra pages or the entire book. One of them might have a sudden desire to research something, and we go down a rabbit hole. We might have an animal who needs extra care. The weather might suddenly decide to be really nice (or horrible), and we have to adjust a bit.
A sample list might look like this: (I don’t have Bible on here because we read a Bible Story and devotion in the morning at breakfast.)
DS
Math lessons 95, 96, 97, & 98
LA (Language Arts) – Week 10
Read daily
Practice Spelling x4
DD
Math lessons 101, 102, 103, 104
LA – Week 10
Read daily
Read Alouds
Science text pages 106, 108, 110. 110. & 112
History text pages – 20, 22, 24, 26, 28, & 30
Current Chapter Book x4
German book #1
German book #2
German book #3
Some form of poetry (Dr. Suess, Mother Goose, other kids poetry)
Fun Activities
Kiwi Crate
Cooking Class – lesson 5
Learning Games – Ticket to Ride Jr and Scrabble Jr
Add timeline figures to the timeline book
Do workbooks 4 times – yes my kids love workbooks!
Monday to Thursday, I try to do LA, Spelling, Math, Workbooks, and about 30-45 min of reading aloud. My kids like to start with LA and Spelling, then move into Math. They alternate on these 2 subjects and on who goes first each day. This works out well, because it gives them each a chance to have a couple of breaks throughout the morning. We usually get through these by lunch, then do the others in the afternoon. This usually takes us about 4-5 hours (including breaks for snacks, lunch, and moving around to get the wiggles out) depending on how focused we all are and how many interruptions happen. We usually get through most of the top 3 sections by Thursday afternoon along with 3 or 4 workbook sessions and have mostly fun activities left on Friday. If we are having a really good day (or sometimes a not so good day and need a change of pace), I might throw in a fun activity on a normal day too.
Resources
So these are the things that we used this past year. Although I am sure that this list will not include every book we read because we read a WHOLE lot this year.
For Science, we primarily used Sonlight‘s Science A program. We went down a few rabbit holes when my kids’ interests were peaked. (We studied volcanoes for a month.) I mainly got this because I wanted to get the feel of a Sonlight program without having to buy the entire curriculum. The more I used it, the more I loved it; and we will be gradually moving into using the entire program over the next few years.
For History, we read a lot of the DK Findout! History books. These are amazing, and we found that we could 4-6 pages during every read-aloud session without getting information overload. The books are about 60 pages long, so we usually got about a month of study out of each. We read about the Stone Age, Castles, Pirates, Vikings, Ancient Egypt, Rome, and the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs.
For math, we started using Saxon K. About 3 months in, DS was bored to tears, and I bumped him up to Saxon 1 while DD continued in K. I love Saxon math! I used it myself in high school. I love the way to presents new concepts in small bites and keeps repeating them, so the basics are mastered. My kids are math lovers like their Mama so we spend a lot of time making up math problems around the table and just as part of life. (See my post on Eggy Math.) DS still found Math 1 easy. There were some things he had not yet mastered, so I didn’t want to bump him up to 2. We ended up doing 2 lessons most days and powering through almost the entire text in about 6 months.
For phonics, I took my lead from Sonlight’s language arts program and started using the1st grade I Can Read Itseries with DS who was already reading fairly well phonetically. After about 6 lessons, he started to have some issues with consistency, so I stepped him back to the later kindergarten books calledFun Tales. He worked through those fairly quickly, proceeded to the other series, and was reading anything he could get his hands on by the end of March. DD is following in her brother’s footsteps.
For spelling, I just sat down and made a series of lists of simple words to practice spelling. For example, Week 1 was all the 2-3 letter “at” words that I could think of. I made about 45 lists of words with similar sounds in them. This also helped DS understand rhyming since he had a little trouble remembering that rhyming words have the same ending sound not the same beginning sound.
For workbooks, We started with the Brain Quest PreK and K workbooks but those lasted about a month before the kids finished them. After that, DS used the 180 Days Kindergarten series of books. Here is a link to the math book, but there are 10 different books including problem-solving, social studies, science, language, high-frequency words, spelling, writing, geography, and reading. I really liked that we could just do 1 page in each book every day and get through them. I already plan on using this series again in the coming school year. DD worked though at least 30 different PreK workbooks over the course of the year. My kids love workbooks, so I would catch them doing them during free time a lot too.
Sonlight had a big sale in March and I ordered a bunch of materials for the coming year. This included their LA 1, 2, and 3 programs, because I had no idea where to start my kids. I figured that whatever DS didn’t use, DD would. Well, let me tell you, these language arts programs are intense and impressive. I ended up ordering K for DD and starting DS in 1. We added LA to our weekly program in April, and they have already improved so much.
For handwriting, we started using Handwriting Without Tears about halfway through the year. I had gotten this program earlier but looked at the teacher’s manual and disliked it so much that I tossed it in the resale pile. DS started having a lot of issues with writing legibly and consistently, and I grabbed the student workbook out of desperation. He loved it and, like magic, his handwriting has gotten better in leaps and bounds. Sonlight’s LA program suggests using Handwriting Without Tears as a companion product and now both kiddos are using it.
For literature, we read a ton of books – poetry, Mother Goose, Dr. Suess, Richard Scarry, Winnie the Pooh, Beatrix Potter, Curious George, and more picture books than I can count. We started out on some easy chapter books too. We read the first four Magic Tree House books, then the My Father’s Dragon trilogy (these 3 books are amazing and a great starter chapter book series for little ones), then we moved into the Little House on the Prairie series. I wasn’t sure how my kids would do with these, because they are longer and progress a bit slower than the other books we had read. At bedtime, we had enjoyed most of the Little House Picture Book series, which they loved. I figured that we would try one, and if it wasn’t holding their attention, I could always switch to something else and come back in a year or so. I was amazed at how they became enamored with the series. We finished Little House in the Big Woods, and they cried for the next “Laura and Mary” book. At the end of everyone, I have asked if they want to read something else and the answer is always the same, “we want more Laura and Mary!” We usually read about four chapters each week, unless the kids are in a really big “snuggle and listen” mood and ask for more. I usually let their attention spans dictate how long we read. Sometimes, if they are really bouncy, I will break read-aloud time up with snack or lunch, or even read while they are eating.
For geography, they have two huge interactive maps. One is the world and the other is the United States. These tell them about capitals, facts, climate, etc. They have really enjoyed these. I like that I can set a timer for 15 or 20 min while they learn, and I can get something else done.
Electives are sort of hard to account for. I was raised speaking both English and German, so I speak German to the kids a lot. We also read German storybooks quite a bit. We live on a farm and they help, so they get a lot of agricultural study time as well. For teaching them computer skills, we got the Osmo Genius and Coding Awbie sets for them for their tablets. These are well worth the investment They really help develop skills in coding, spatial reasoning, math, and spelling. We also have used Kiwi Crate subscriptions – Kiwi, Koala, and Atlas as hands-on activities for additional STEAM development. We do art in various little kid-friendly forms (paints, playdough, beading, coloring, etc.). Often when doing another activity together, we will listen to classical music and discuss the different instruments we hear and what the music makes us think of. We also worked through a cooking class this year that was amazing – Kids Cook Real Food.
That’s all that I can think of at the moment. But keep checking back. I may add more or another post about what we are doing in the 20-21 school year.
DS started kindergarten last fall. DD was still in preschool but wanted to do real school like her big brother. For a week or two, I tried some of the ideas that I read on various blogs and homeschooling sites for keeping younger ones occupied (special school time activities, etc.), but she insisted on doing more. So she just did what we did. (For more on what we did click here.)
I decided that the best place to start was to teach her phonics. DS had started reading phonetically on his own at about 4. We always played alphabet games in the car – “What does the letter P say?” “Who can come up with a word that starts with that sound?” We also read a lot together. This was enough for DS to start reading simple words on his own. DD is the more energetic of the two and needed a little more one-on-one attention just to keep her mind focused. (She also tended to rely on her big brother to tell her what everything was, which didn’t help her actually learn phonics. She was just copying him.)
I started by taking 26 unlined 3×5 cards and putting the letters of the alphabet on them. I put the lower case letter on one side and the uppercase on the other. I made the consonants blue and the vowels pink. For about 10 minutes every school day, we would use the letter cards in one way or another. Sometimes we just snuggled on the couch and named the letters and said their sounds (only the short vowel sounds). Other times, we would play a game that I made up. I would lay the cards out in a random order with the uppercase letter up and say a letter sound (or name). She would have to find that letter and tell me its name (or sound). If she got it right, we would flip it over to the other side. If she had trouble, we would come back to it after a couple of other letters. Once they were all flipped we would play again with the lower case letters.
These simple pink and blue letter cards worked out better than I could have ever imagined!
There were a few letters that she had more consistent issues with, and I had to make up little visuals to help her remember. For the short U sound, I would slowly raise my hand like I was holding an umbrella trying to float away in the wind. For the short I sound, I would act like I was itching myself. For S, I would put my hands together and pretend my arms were a snake.
After about 6-8 weeks, I was able to start putting 2-3 cards together to make simple words for her. Within a month she was reading simple words like at,cat, bat,it, hit, bit, etc. and recognizing them in books. Once we go to this point, I used the same simple readers that I used for DS, a series of 26 books called Fun Tales. She would read 2 books each day. The first would be a review of the previous day’s book and the second would be the next in line. If she struggled at all, we would just repeat the same books the next day.
There were a few times when she just got stuck on a word. DD tends to shut down when she can’t figure something out right away, so I would usually have to take her away from the book completely to get her focused again. We would go back to the letter cards and then build the word, sounding out each letter. Usually, she would get it after a minute or so then go back to the book with no problems. On occasion, we would have to stop at simply sounding out the word and come back to it later in the day or the next day.
We read through the Fun Tales series twice just to be sure she was solidly reading these simple books. We then moved into the I Can Read It series. By the end of the school year, she had worked through the first book once and was going through it a second time (by her own request) to be sure she could read well enough to move into the second book.
These days, she is reading anything shorter than chapter books on her own! I expect those aren’t too far in the future either.
DS & DD have both been stuck in the house with ear infections for almost a month. With cold damp air outside, they have not been coming out to do much of the farm chores with me. To help them still feel like they are part of things, I invented a fun game every afternoon when I come in from doing the afternoon farm chores. I started asking the kids a math problem to figure out how many eggs the chickens laid that day. They are competitive with one another so it is usually a race to see who can solve my Eggy Math problem first.
Both DS and DD can do simple addition so that is the type of problem that I give them. The chickens lay both brown and green eggs so my questions are usually something like “I collected 6 brown eggs and 8 green eggs. How many eggs did I collect?” Sometimes I will also ask something like “I have 1 dozen eggs in this carton. Remember that 1 dozen is 12 eggs. I have 4 more in my hand. How many eggs did I get today?”
As the kids’ math competence grows, I can expand this to subtraction. (DS can do basic subtraction in his head but DD still has a little trouble with it. I want to keep our Eggy Math game fair.) “I got 15 eggs yesterday and only 11 today. How many more did I get yesterday?” I can also expand it to fractions. “I collected 14 eggs today and 7 were green. What fraction of the eggs was green?” or “I collected 15 eggs today and we have 22 hens. What fraction of the chickens did not lay an egg today?”
I love math, and so do the kids. Eggy Math teaches them to solve word problems and mental math at the same time!
We are adding to our list of “H’s” around here. To homesteading and horses we are also adding homeschooling. DS will be starting kindergarten next year and, after much prayer and deliberation, we have decided on homeschooling the kiddos.
I homeschooled while I was going through heavy chemotherapy as a third and fourth grader and again in high school to accommodate a very intense horse showing schedule. For my elementary schooling, my parents just used the program that my normal school was using. In high school, I attended a cottage school 2 days each week and they supplied the curriculum. Now, as I have started looking around for curriculum ideas for my kids, I have been overwhelmed by the number of options. There is sooooo much out there!! It is crazy!
There is also the issue of fitting “everything” in. Our state requires a specific number of total hours of school per year. Within those hours, you must cover mathematics, science, reading, writing, grammar, spelling, history, and civics. At first, I started panicking – how on earth was I going to cover all of that and do all of the farm and house work and not go crazy.
I prayed and researched and prayed and compared and prayed and talked to current homeschooling families and (in case I forgot to mention it) prayed. 🙂 Somewhere in there, I got REALLY overwhelmed! Then I read a tiny book, The Unhurried Homeschooler, by Durenda Wilson. It changed my thinking. I would highly recommend it to any parent and especially to those homeschooling or considering it!! The basic premise of the book is that by slowing down and reassessing what homeschooling really means, we can give our kids a better and more enriching homeschooling experience and a well-rounded education.
After that, I started thinking about what my kids like to do now. They both love workbooks, like beg to do them, and would happily do them everyday. They also love to sit and listen to me read books.
So that’s what we are doing next year. I ordered a bunch of workbooks covering math, spelling, writing, geography, science, etc. for DS and preschool basics for DD and collected a bunch of books for reading aloud together. 4 days each week, after all the morning farm and house chores are done, we are going to spend about an hour doing workbooks with breaks according to their attention spans, followed by one-on-one time to work on hands on math and phonics. (I have to split them up for phonics because DD memorizes things very easily. If I let them do phonics together, she would memorize everything that DS read and then I would have to find new readers for her in a year or so.) So one gets a snack, while the other works with me, then we switch. That should give us about 45 minutes before lunch for music, art, science experiments, or catch up. After lunch, we will snuggle on the couch for 45 minutes to an hour of reading time. Then, free time for the rest of the afternoon! The other week day is open for field trips, group activities, extracurriculars, etc.
Have you ever noticed how, when kids get tired, they go in a downward spiral from bad to worse. This can be especially true if they refuse to nap or have had a very long busy day (like lots of errands, appointments, activities). It’s not just true of preschoolers, either. School age kids and teenagers suffer from this problem too. Even grownups suffer when we don’t get to rest.
Have you ever noticed that, when you don’t take a break, EVERYTHING seems harder? Our work load seems bigger and more overwhelming when we are tired. We get less done because we are stressed. The less we get done, the more stressed we get. It keeps snowballing until we have this avalanche of being completely overwhelmed and overloaded. Chores pile up. We yell at our family, are melancholy with our friends, and get so worn out that all we want to do is cry.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
Why? Because we are trying to be superwomen. We try to do everything and be everything for everyone all the time. We don’t stop. We don’t rest
But rest isn’t just important because we need a physical recharge. God actually commands that we rest. The 3rd commandment says, “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.” Now God thinks that this is so important that He put it right after the 2 commandments stating that He is to be our only God and nothing should come before Him.
Hebrews 4 talks about how the Israelites were disobedient in the wilderness and God said that they would never enter His rest. The Israelites could have had 40 more years of enjoying the Promised Land but instead they wandered around in the desert for 40 years. 40 years! All those who had been disobedient died. Their children received the promised inheritance.
We have got to stop resisting and give in to the need for rest. We all need to give ourselves a Sabbath. For our sakes. For our kids. For our spouses. We don’t want to fall under a curse like the Israelites and wander around in a wilderness of stress, grumpiness, and being completely overwhelmed and stress paralyzed for 40 years. We need to teach our kids the importance of rest. With today’s world of go, go, go and packed schedules, it’s so easy to get caught in the flow of doing all the time.
I challenge us all to stop and take a day, or a couple hours, every week to focus on our Creator and cherish our families. I also challenge us all to take at least 30 minutes every day to stop and rest and recharge. Drink a cup of tea or coffee (while it’s still hot!) and eat a snack (I don’t know about you, but I forget to eat most days then get really hangry around 4 PM.) Listen to a praise CD and worship the Creator and thank Him for knowing that we need rest. I know it can be hard, with kids, schedules, work, life, etc. You may have to be creative and find a way to work it in. If you are stuck, pray. Ask God to show you how to find a time of rest in your day and in your week. He will show you where. He blesses those who walk in His ways. He may ask you give up something, but it will be worth it. Things always are when we are walking in obedience.
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