Wow! Too busy to blog I guess!

I just logged into my my blog and realized I had not posted anything since we began our school year!  Crazy!  Well, we have been doing good.  I was nervous to start with adding a high schooler to the mix this year, but he is doing so well working on his own, its not THAT much different. My 3rd grader I noticed was getting bundled in with having do everything the 6th grader was doing when I realized after a couple of really bad weeks that it was just WAY too much to expect of him and as I am easing up on the reigns for him a bit I now am getting complaining from the 6th grader who now feels affronted that he is doing less than her.  :)  A mother can never win.  But that is okay, I am glad that I realized what was going on before my 3rd grader ended up in too much trouble with his attitude, now that I am scheduling his day more to his level, we are getting along great!  Amazing how having unrealistic expectations on a child can change them into disrespectful, unmindful, attitude(y) children. And when your expectations become realistic once more, they are like this little angel that you are so thrilled at having found once more.  We have been going through tweaking this week as you can tell and I must say I am loving the atmosphere now.  What kind of tweaking have some of you undergone already this year?

Tomorrow is the day.

Tomorrow, we begin homeschooling! YAY!  I am sooo excited, I can't wait.  We don't have all the curriculum yet, but its on its way.  In the meantime, I have some wonderful Kaplan CDs for the computer that more than fill in the gaps and reviewing is always good anyway, right?  Getting ECC going will be the main focus.  I have been working all weekend getting the schoolroom ready and its still not 100%.....or even 80%....but we will make due :)  I LOVE My Father's World and can't wait for my oldest son's Ancient History & Literature to arrive!  (The picture links to ECC by MFW if anyone who isn't familiar with it is interested in having a look)

Sorry I keep changing the look of my page on you guys, just trying to find my fav.  The previous background was nice, I got it from http://www.plumroselane.com/ I really like her stuff, it is very pretty.  But I got some complaints about the background I chose being too difficult to read on, that was my fault, since I chose that one.  I love her look and her stuff is soo beautiful, but while exploring her site, I came across a tutorial and have been making my own blog designs ever since.  Thanks for the tutorial Plumrose Lane! You can check out my other background at http://hooverirvinmartinfamily.blogspot.com/ this is my personal web-site.  On another note.......

We start school on MONDAY!! :)
I am looking forward to this school year so much.  I will post later about all of our curriculum choices and share all the links with you!

Answer to "why do I homeschool?"

I was on facebook but a moment ago and read a post by a fellow homeschooler asking "Why do YOU homeschool?"  I posted my comment and scrolled on past when I felt the Holy Spirit say to me 'its all good and fine that you should explain to fellow homeschoolers for the sake of conversation, but what about all of those who know you and won't read this person's post? What of them?'  So, in answer to that I want to first share with you my reply to her post:

because educating my children at home gives me the ability to customize their learning to the styles that best suit them. I can give them curriculum written by Christians and Biblically based. I can better socialize my children across the ages and diversities instead of in an environment where they are only exposed to children the exact same age as them. I can give them better more nurturing food for their Spirit and better train them for life outside of a classroom. I can better develop their character and train them up in the way they should go so that they can more successfully succeed in all their endeavors and be better prepared for where God leads them as adults. I HOMESCHOOL BECAUSE I LOVE AND CARE FOR MY CHILDREN.

Now I know to most people outside of the homeschooling realm, it may often seem strange that someone would take it upon themselves to school their children outside of the system that is already conveniently put in place for us to use.  But more and more I am finding it strange that someone wouldn't.  But then not everyone has been blessed with all the information that I has been available to us over the years and all the factors that were involved to lead us to be able to do this.  Homeschooling is not for everyone and I understand this and I am not telling everyone to go withdraw their children from public school, I am merely sharing my point of view to perhaps give insight to the very popular question 'Why do you homeschool?'  #1 reason we homeschool quite simply is because we felt God leading us to do so.  simple, right.  Not really :).  When God leads us to do things, we are supposed to just jump right in, right? Well, we are humans and riddled with self-doubt...Can we really do this?  Are we sure that is where God is leading us? ...Maybe we are misunderstanding his guidance....?  Am I right? I don't know about anyone else when they are stepping out on faith but I was scared to death.  This was all new territory to me and it was terrifying.  But I am glad we did.  I do not regret one minute of it.  There are more factors involved leading up to our homeschooling and more benefits from homeschooling so many that I don't have enough time to go into them all now, but maybe this will answer a few of those questions and if you have anymore, you can suggest them for future posts. :) Thanks for reading and God bless!

Hoover*Irvin*Martin Family: Excitement!

Hoover*Irvin*Martin Family: Excitement!: "I am excited about this coming year. There are lots of changes going on. Let me share them with you..... in list format, well, because th..."

Is this normal?

Okay, as you know from two posts ago, I had my curriculum all figured out.......wwweeelllll, I have decided that for language arts we are NOT going to stick with Writing Strands and First Language Lessons, even though they are very good; I just really like Queen homeschooling's Language Lessons and want to give it a shot.  I feel like I am all over the place sometimes because I change my mind on several different occasions, but why would I keep doing something when I see something else clearly displays more promise towards teaching my child in a way that will help them learn and want to learn?

Hurray! Hurray!

Our first shipment of curriculum arrived last week.  When the UPS guy delivers he just sits the package on the porch, knocks once then walks back to his truck and leaves. I was so excited when I heard that knock and looked up to see him turning away that I was out the door and on the porch thanking him before he was even 3 steps away.  I said: (about 20 notches to cheerful to be considered anything but crazy that early in the morning) "Thank you Mr. UPS-man. I hope you have a blessed day"  He must have been thinking me nuts, but smiled politely and said "Your welcome, you too."  As I bent down to pick up the package, I was surprised at how teeny tiny (exaggeration but not sarcasm) it was since it was supposed to be holding within it the entire core curriculum for my younger two children next year.  After I opened the box and started taking things out I realized that I would never again, in my lifetime, get all of those items back into that box (and shut it) again.  Excellent usage of space MFW, by the way!  Okay here let me say, "My Father's World; you are awesome, not only did I get my package within 4 days, but it was in perfect condition!"  Now, Exploring Countries & Cultures with MFW is blowing my mind with its absolute awesomeness.  (Yes, that's a word if I want it to be :P) The teacher's manual is crazy cool with everything planned out sooo well and easy to understand and the materials are all so rich and interesting and exciting, I wanna start tomorrow! Thank you ANGELA, my dear sister in Christ, sister in homeschooling and sister for realz, for showing me (on more than one occasion) the My Father's World website. I am not going to spend much more time bragging about my awesome curriculum because, well, that would just be taking up time I could be spending drooling over it! :)

Feeling The Pressure

Since my husband was out of work for the entire month of May, we have not yet been able to purchase our curriculum for the coming school year.  I am feeling a wee bit panicked but I know that I have plenty of time still and God will provide. There have been a few changes in the curriculum choices since last I posted.  We will still be using MFW Exploring Countries & Cultures for Tim and Tori.  They will still be using Apologia Astronomy next year since I didn't finish it this past year.  They will still be using Mango Languages and also LiveMocha for foreign language.  Instead of Math-U-See for math, we are switching to the Life of Fred curriculum, this is going to be very interesting. Now, my oldest son will be joining us this year.  He will begin with MFW Ancient History & Literature.  He will do Mango Languages and LiveMocha Russian, Introduction to Logic, Apologia Chemistry and Life of Fred Geometry.  I am very excited about our curriculum choices and believe it is going to be a very interesting and exciting year for us.  It will be our very first entirely P.S. -free year and I am VERY excited about all the opportunities this will open for us. Please, share your curriculum choices or things you are excited about for the coming year.

Summer

We have decided to homeschool lightly through the summer so they don't lose so much from a long break and I don't have to spend a month in review at the beginning of the next school year.  We plan on teaching 1-3 days per week throughout the summer months and only a few subjects on those days instead of a fully loaded school day.  We will be taking a week completely off in June for the Ichthus Festival that we attend annually and a week completely off in July during our family reunion time.  Do any of you homeschool through the summer? why or why not? feel free to post your comments! :) 

Field Day

We got to participate in THINK's (Teaching Homes In Northern Kentucky) field day last Friday.  There were many families there with children of all ages.  It was our very first experience interacting face to face with other homeschooling families.  Tim and Tori were a little bashful at first, but soon made several friends.  Tori left with numbers of a couple girls her age with promises of sleep overs to come.  :) I am so joyous that schooling at home as worked out as well as it has.  The Lord has truly been blessing our house even when we are facing troubling times we feel His love, comfort and protection.

I am not doing very well keeping up with my blog, apparently.  I have been looking into buying Titus2.com's Managers of Their Homes to help better with motivating me and my family and helping us to better spend our time more wisely.  If any of you have this or know someone who does, please share your thoughts on it with me before I decide to make the purchase.
Anyway, as you all know, we have been choosing next year's curriculum over the past few months and I am very excited about what we have decided to go with.  As of right now, we will be using My Father's World's Exploring Countries and Cultures Deluxe Package for our core curriculum.  For mathematics we will be using Math-U-See.  Tori will be doing Epsilon and Timothy will be doing Gamma.  For language arts we will be using First Language Lessons.  We will be using Character First's Series Two for our character trait development. Tori will also be using the Writing Strands curriculum. For their foreign language, we are going through Spanish on Mango Language which is pretty cool since our local library offers it free on a link from their site.
In our current hs curriculum, we are still doing SOS history and bible for both Tori and Tim.  Tori is using SOS for math and language arts as well.  Tim is doing math from a regular ps 2nd grade text book and language arts he is doing First Language Lessons.  They are both doing flash facts to help with memory recall of basic math.  They alternate science between Apologia's Exploring Creation with Astronomy and a Charlotte Mason style of nature journaling.  They are read to from various books of devotions, manner development and character building.  They are read living books and read living books on their own.  We planted what seems like a million flower seeds  and they are growing and growing, they are ready for their second re-potting.  We didn't do very well labeling what was what so its going to be a lovely surprise. :)

The past two days, we have started opening the day with a group prayer focusing on 1) giving thanks for anything we feel thankful for 2) asking for help in our character and behavior that we noticed fault in the previous day and 3) asking for his blessing on our school day. Also, I have been making a schedule by hour on what we will be working on and putting it on my new 4' x 4' dry erase board located behind my desk.  These 2 things have worked so well, that not only are we finally completing everything I want accomplish each day, but we are getting it done more efficiently and in less time then I even have allotted for it on the schedule; making our days 2-4 hours shorter with more work completed.  I am truly amazed at how much God continues to bless our homeschooling, faith building and character development efforts. "And whatsoever ye do, in word or in deed, `do' all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." Colossians 3:17

Refreshed

This morning I am finding myself refreshed.  I am up and ready to go, I feel like we can really get ahead.....but there are no children LOL!  They spent the night with my mother last night and have not yet arrived back home.  I find myself in search of curriculum for the 2010-2011 school year.  My husband and I have been doing A LOT of discussing about which route to take with the children and what seems to be working best for them.  I believe we are going to try a new math curriculum, Math U See was recommended by my sister and we have been looking into it and I do believe we have decided to start the children on it later this year.  Science I believe we will stick with Apologia and move to Exploring Creation with Zoology next.  History we will be learning through a more CM friendly method with living books and Geography will be map studies to go along with History.  Language Arts is still completely up in the air..... if anyone has a good recommendation, I would LOVE to hear.

God Bless you all this day and keep you safe.

First day back

Today was our first day home schooling in 2010 and it went really well.  The kids really enjoyed the Exploring Creation with Astronomy for their new science curriculum.  Tim (2nd grader) labeled 48 states from memory on the US map, again with no teaching or instruction involved, just daily blank map that he fills in from memory first, then fills in the rest using a key. For handwriting we are using two blank handwriting sheets, which I then put lines for him to copy, I just use proper sentences from the material we are working on.  Today was a list of the 4 middle colonies "New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware."  and text from science "The study of the universe is called astronomy."  The teaching across the grades is still a success.  Of course, we have to keep skill based subjects individual (math, language arts, etc) but everything is working out better than I expected.  Tori (5th grader) is really excelling with the new structure of learning.  Using Charlotte Mason's narration technique is helping her tremendously.  Tomorrow we begin a new character trait in our character development study, we will be focusing on consistency.