New School Room

Kindergarten is coming up, and with home school getting more serious with the "official Kindergarten curriculum", I figured the perfect change would be a new room and a makeover! Really, it was a complete house makeover, but I only did furniture moving and school room set up in the living room for George's school year. Oh my goodness, getting my house clean took everything. Literally, the whole house is clean! Since I've started the Emotion Code (see the Emotion Code page on my blog) and reading the book, I realized how our environments can have positive or negative impacts on our physical and spiritual selves. I think this was the motivator underneath it all to get my house in order finally. Even with the kids now, I'm having them put toys away immediately and cleaning their room daily. Picking up after themselves is a great life skill too. It's sort of bizzare that I'm actually finding my clean house stressful, but I'm even more stressed when I see a stray toy on the floor or dirty dishes on the sink because I know that work will snowball until I'm so overwhelmed that I won't even want to clean it! Seriously, I'm so stressed with keeping the house clean, because I know I won't want to clean it if it piles up. But alas, it is clean, and in this moment I just have to steady my breathing to calm my heart, lower my temperature, so I won't go into a panic attack over keeping my crazy 4,000 square foot house clean. Oh my gosh, breath breath breath. I can do this, I can keep it clean!

Ok, so moving on, I'm excited to blog and tell you all about our home school! Our new curriculum of My Father's World is very gentle, yet through and incorporates Charlotte Mason and Classical forms of education! It's such a breath of fresh air, because the curriculum is awesome. It's made with a Protestant view point, and Protestants are awesome. They broke away from the Catholic church thinking no one should be coming between them and God and wanted a more personal relationship with God. I give them Kudos. I love how it's unit study based too. Charlotte Mason was against unit studies because she didn't approve teachers making the connections for the children, but My Father's World let children make the connections for themselves and have subjects only blend beautifully together. For example, week 3 is about the Sun. We'll learn about the poem called "My shadow," make raisins using the power of the sun, create a sundial and use Cuisenaire Rods to form the letter S in the Alphabet book. I'm so excited with the possibility of teaching this curriculum to George in the near future. The whole formal teaching will be no more than an hour a day for kindergarten, and gradually increase as the grades progress, but no more than four hours a day in the elementary grades. High school level can take up the whole day some days, and just 4 hours or so other days from what I heard from a high schooler using My Father's World.

At the moment, since George has basically mastered the basics and it really seems a bit too easy (don't want to waste his time trying to finish a curriculum if he's already mastered it -shapes, numbers from 1-10, colors, etc.), we're just finishing up another week to formally end preschool and then have a little graduation. After, we'll have a nice summer vacation, more for myself, and start Kindergarten in August or September. During our summer vacation, I'll go over the curriculum and and figure everything out ahead of time along with a general schedule!