Faith 'n Family: November 2017

Home school has been the biggest blessing! It is wonderful and hard and beautiful and tough. As with anything worthwhile, it takes a lot of effort and work. But that is what makes it beautiful!

At the end of the day I am exhausted and happy. I feel like the Lord is blessing us every day with help beyond our own abilities. Patience, Peace, Love, the Spirit and ideas that flow of how to teach and understand. We pray that the Spirit will be with us in the day to enlighten our minds and when frustrations pop up we say "This is not about ____________(math or grammar or spelling) this is about faith. This is about character and learning to go through life with a good attitude and great work ethic. This is about learning to love learning.

We began homeschooling when River was going through chemo and had NO immunity. 0 protection against germs. This has turned out to be such a Silver Lining and MAJOR blessing. River went to the first 2 weeks of 3rd grade in 2014 before we found cancer and major surgeries and chemo. We sent her back to school for the first 2 months of 4th grade September 2015. This is River the day before Halloween 2015 trying on her costume and her fantastic wig!

Halloween afternoon landed her in the ER with a fever. I teased her that she just needed to pretend to be a nurse not actually go to the hospital and be with nurses and doctors. :)

That progressed into a nasty cough that all were monitoring closely hoping it wouldn't turn into pneumonia. She was in bed majorly scarily sick for a month. I felt inspired to homeschool and asked a dear friend what she did for homeschool and got some wonderful suggestions for Math U See and The Family School from Latterday Learning.

The one that overwhelmed me the most was Language Arts. Where to start? What to do? This all came at me so fast and I wanted to do a good job homeschooling. This fell into my lap as I was praying and contemplating:

This program really has been Good and Beautiful for our family. I have enjoyed teaching reading to our girls and have gotten so much fulfillment out of seeing it click in their minds. They have blossomed and LOVE reading. They can often be found 1st thing in the morning with books side by side reading and sharing what they are learning with each other.

Silver is sitting on the heater and Summer is in front of its heat

Reading all throughout the day and late into the night are every day tender mercies. I believe if you know how to read and have a love of learning you can learn anything.

The relationships with our girls has been wonderful. I sit down with them one on one. I LOVE the questions The Good and the Beautiful curriculum brings up and the things that we ponder as we move through the books. It speaks of God and of character - helping them truly internalize a loving Heavenly Father and his beautiful world he created for us. Loving goodness and family is another major theme.

The Good and Beautiful language arts covers:

Phonics and Reading
Spelling
Grammar and Punctuation
Literature
Art Appreciation
Writing
Geography
Handwriting

Seriously!! It's all right here!

All things Language. And Art! We have LOVED the art appreciation. One time I only had 5 minutes left of the lesson and the art appreciation was to write a story about what could be happening in the picture. I showed Silver the picture how pretty it was and then moved on going to come back to it the next day. Silver says "Wait! Aren't we going to talk about the picture???" I asked her if she liked doing that? YES! I said tomorrow we get to talk about it and write a story about it. "OH! That's even BETTER!" I love it!

I am so excited to be starting level 4. Levels K-3 are done mostly with mom and we work through it together. Levels 4+ are mostly self-directed. They do one lesson in language arts and one in art. It is full color and the projects look fantastic. I love the idea of River having a set assigned amount a day that she can see what she needs to accomplish.

We have done this for just coming up on two years now. We have done levels K, 1, 2, 3 and starting 4 the end of the month! Grammar and all of Langauage Arts is my personal biggest struggle!

Give me math! History YES! Science Absolutely!

Grammar - I'd really rather not. Spelling...overwhelming!

HOWEVER with this program it is open and go! You open to the place you left off and work through the book. It is presented in color with a lot of variety in their activities and worksheets.

We LOVE the readers! Even if you don't homeschool or are looking for a good book for them to read at their level - these are compilation of stories that are wholesome and enjoyable! The girls LOVE reading them and have fun when one reads the book and the other remembers the story they talk about it.

They posed for the 1st picture and then I came back 20 minutes later and they were all reading their readers :) THE BEST!

The first year I wanted to love The Good and the Beautiful. I wanted to see it as beautiful but I got caught up in how advanced it is and how hard teaching grammar is for me. My attitude was contagious and River didn't love it either. The second year I went searching for something as a better fit for our family. The Good and the Beautiful team emailed me back explaining why grammar is so important and why they teach it the way that they do. I found the Good and the Beautiful Community group on Facebook that answers questions I have and gives great tips on teaching and helping them understand.

I found that this is something I (unfortunately) couldn't avoid and needed to teach.

After a MAJOR attitude adjustment and learning that this is presented in a wonderful way I gave the 2nd year a go. I decided to learn right alongside them. It has been a blessing! I found that this is really my dream curriculum - this would be what I would create if I could design it myself. I decided to trust the process and mostly go for the character and goodness it inspires with language arts on the side.

I have seen vocabulary increase, reading skyrocket and spelling improvement! River really had no spelling for years in the hospital and afterwards in my overwhelmed state and developed some really bad habits when it came to spelling. She loves to write but spelling was not even attempted. The Good and the Beautiful teaches spelling with lists of words to memorize and learn but also sprinkled throughout the course is patterns of spelling that are reviewed enough to learn the pattern without being too overwhelming. I have seen a great improvement.

Check out The Good and the Beautiful at

http://www.jennyphillips.com/course/language-arts-literature/

A wonderful part about it is levels 1-5 are available as free downloads.

They are also extremely affordable to purchase too - I find that it is cheaper to order through them - I tried printing it the first year on my own and yes, much cheaper to go through them. They have done an excellent job and keeping the cost down.

One thing that is encouraged is writing thank you cards. We have MUCH to be thankful for and MANY to thank and this has been such a fun thing to show our gratitude:

Another thing I LOVE is their book list!

I want to only have my kids fill their mind with wholesome, good, character inspiring literature. With so much filth, disrespect and attitudes today I only want good going into their minds. But I don't have the time to preview books before they read them. Jenny Phillips has a book list that I know that everything in it meets my standards -

1. Avoids All Uses of Profanity and Taking God's Name in Vain

2. Avoids Violence Used for Entertainment or Shock Value or That Is Graphic

3. Does Not Weaken Family, Faith, or Christ‐Like Behavior

• Portrays strong families, motherhood, and fatherhood as desirable and noble. Portrays parents as valuable, involved, and helpful

• Promotes respect and appreciation for teachers, peers, siblings, and extended family

• Portrays faith in God as desirable and noble

• Portrays learning and education as desirable and noble

• Does not portray bad behavior or weak character traits as humorous, entertaining, normal, or acceptable (laziness, negativity, flippant attitude, disrespect, cruelty, violence, gossip, pride, vanity, self‐centeredness, revenge, greed, worldliness, unkindness, immodesty, immorality, lack of depth of character)

Here is a link to the list:

http://www.jennyphillips.com/good-beautiful-book-list/

It is usually $5 but it is being offered until November 11, 2017 for free!

We have founded "Friend School" with the girls reading out loud to Tanzi and friends and cousins

They read the "Friend" magazine and other picture books so that they practice reading out loud and the youngers can listen to the books. It has been great!

The Good and the Beautiful also offers courses in History, Science, Nature Notebooks, and Typing.

River has LOVED the typing course too. It has watercolor pictures throughout and is presented in a way that is one concept building on another that she has seen steady progress with.

After 2 years of homeschool I have finally found a great way that works well for us to organize our homeschool materials. These are 31 brand bags and I love how they don't have a top so they can throw binders in standing up and it holds everything. Pretty roomy - they have 2 good size mesh pockets on either end and 5 total pockets on the sides. We hold our reading stuff, math books, a white board, stickers and a box with pencils, dry erase markers, scissors, etc.

Then when we are outside, inside, over to the kitchen counter, the couch or the bedroom floor...or in a crib :) it comes with us and we have everything we need without getting up.