It Always Comes Back to Charlotte Mason

This coming school year will be our sixth year of homeschooling. Most of the five years we have used the Charlotte Mason methods to accomplish our daily learning adventures. The one website of information that I have always used and always gone back to is www.simplycharlottemason.com. This past year we did stray a little bit in the history and science department. Grace was just causing too much grief about writing narrations. We switched to some unit studies and hands on approach for science since January and The Story of the World for history with the test booklet. She has done well with these changes. I will continue to do unit studies, hands on, and lap books for science because I do not feel she is ready as of yet for the Apologia books for higher science, maybe in 8th grade. Also we have strayed away from nature study, picture study, and composer study. All of that will change for the beginning of her 7th grade year. We are going back to our original plan of using the curriculum guide at Simply Charlotte Mason. I still feel that this will provide the best well rounded education possible for Grace in a very gentle way. Writing has gotten easier for her and I think we will get better with the written narrations, just need to keep plugging away. So I think below will be our final choices for the new school year:

• Math - Teaching Textbooks


• Language arts - Spelling Through Copywork, Poetry, Vocabulary, Easy Grammar


• Personal Development - Beautiful Girlhood with companion book


• Foreign Language - Continue work with Greek but also taking a conversational Spanish class


• History/Bible - Genesis Through Deut./Ancient Egypt


• Geography - Map Drills of Egypt and Africa


• Literature - Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit, and haven't decided on the fourth book yet


• Picture Study - John James Audubon, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt, Carl Larson, Maxfield Parrish, and P. Buckley Moss


• Poetry - Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson


• Nature Study - Continue Outdoor Hour Nature Challenges and hopefully purchase one of the new nature study books from Queenhomeschool


• Composer Study - Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky


• Art - Nightly sketching with dad and group lessons throughout the year


• Shakespeare - Drama class will be performing Shakespeare at the beginning of the year


• Science - is the only subject that will not be so much in a CM fashion using on hand lap books, unit studies and hands on adventures

It is always so much fun looking forward to the new year.