Christmas Program 2011

The Homeschool Christmas Program is the highlight of our children's year. They always look forward to their moment in the lime light on stage....all except our youngest, that is. She still suffers from stage fright (and truthfully, I'm one who can totally relate). However our older ones are very eager to recite their winter poems or Bible verse, or sing a song. Other children in the group also play instruments and all of them join together to sing Christmas carols. 

Afterward, it's time to sample the Holiday desserts and drinks. In the past, we've had the program at the Grange Hall, but this year we gathered in the new fellowship hall at the little church in Plymouth.

Heather was asked this year to read the birth of Jesus story out of Luke...

 

The sound quality is abysmal. 

But it does give a feel for being there....sort of! : D

Free Printable Chore Cards

Here's another great freebie from Mandy @ Biblical Homemaking. The chore cards can be laminated and put on a ring for easy flip-thru and carrying. She has all the instructions here. We'll be putting these to use...my daughter was just asking for this very thing yesterday on cleaning day. Ask and you shall receive! : D

Click here for free download

Free Printable Alphabet Tracing Papers

These adorable Alphabet Tracing cards I found on Lauren's blog: Lawteedah
She has lots of other fun homeschool stuff you'll LOVE!

Click Here for Download

The set consists of all 26 Letters of the alphabet. Uppercase and Lowercase are on the same sheet.

I will be making the numbers version soon as well as some pre-writing practice and shapes.

I plan to laminate mine and use our dry erase crayons on them with my boys. So that we can use them more then once!

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Free Downloadable Homeschool Planner

I’m so excited because, after many requests from you all, Joy from FiveJs.com put together some free downloadable homeschool planners. You can use these to plan and track your homeschooling lessons and activities.
This free download includes the following homeschool planners, each of which is customizable on your computer:

• Attendance record
• Six 6-week planners (to plan an entire year for an individual subject)
• 1-week planner (to plan one week of all subjects)

How to use the homeschool planning pages

1. Download the homeschool planning pages pack (8 pages, 217K).
2. You may also want to download the directions for how to use the different planners. (2 pages, 1.8M)
3. Open the file in a PDF reader such as Adobe Reader.
4. Use your TAB key to tab through the customizable fields of each form. Each form has numerous fields in which you can enter your own information.
5. Click on the section(s) you’d like to fill in and type in your text.
6. Print out the document when you’re done typing in your text.
7. Save your document if you’d like to save your changes. You’ll be able to open the document again to add different text at any time.
8. If desired, you can save the document several times under different names to use with different subjects.

 I can't wait to try these out!! : D
This post found @ Money Saving Mom.com

I'm Back

Well, I've re-done my homeschool site. Hope you like it! And I plan on posting much more regularly now. We've had quite a tumultuous year in that all Spring and Summer and into the Fall of 2010 we were living in a camper on our 40 acres of land...and I was mostly 'unplugged' from internet-everything for those months....all but a blackberry. Ha! Then winter hit and I was doing alot of studying myself to pass an Insurance Certification exam. Needless to say, blogging has been put on the back burner.

So what's new on the homeschool front? This year I decided to enroll my school age kiddos into a NAPS program...a Non-Approved Private School. I really like the set-up and the administrator is very cool....and organized and all those things I'm generally not. We joined the Bangor Public Library earlier this Spring...or late winter....and I love this Library! The children's section is extensive...and they seem to carry more current books in many more categories.

I also switched over to Math-U-See and the kiddos are absolutely thriving with this approach. I borrowed the manipulative blocks, videos, and teacher guides from my friend, Denise G. I took math all the way through Trig, but all of higher math was a real struggle for me (except Geometry, which was a cakewalk). It feels good, though, to know that I have some sort of math program in place...especially since I feel weak in that area.

We're doing lots of reading and copywork...mostly from poem books. Their handwriting and spelling has greatly improved with this routine. Poetry is such great literary training....there's a 'feel' to it that only comes from lots of exposure, it seems. So stay tuned....I'm excited to share more and would love to hear from you, too!

Recent Reading

We visited the newly renovated Portland Public Library this past Fri. Was that ever an improvement! The new lobby is beautiful and the children's section is laid out very nicely. The heart of the library is still downstairs in the basement and sadly enough, I wasn't much impressed there. No new upgrades or additions to the book selection (I'm talkin' the most recent books are like from the 1990's...not great) and still the same old orange carpet and bad lighting. Oh well, I guess the upstairs sort of made up for the downstairs...sort of. 

Of course we did manage to still carry away a pile of books. No issues there! I found 2 nice books on Henry David Thoreau that we've been enjoying. One is called Henry David Thoreau: A Man for our Time. The other one is called Into the Deep Forest and is about one of Thoreau's excursions into the Maine wilderness and his climb up Mt. Katahdin. The illustrations by Vermont artist, Kate Kiesler, are lovely, too.

I've been reading aloud This Country of Ours...a wonderful book that the grandparents gifted us with for Christmas. It's on the Ambleside Online book list...and it's fantastic! We're all greatly enjoying this one...and it still seems so relevant to our times today. Very relevant. The punctuation and some of the spelling is an absolute disaster in this particular edition, however. I must point that out to anyone wanting to have it for older children to read individually. In some places, it's taken me some real deciphering to figure out what in the world is the point. It's too bad...don't know who was responsible for the editing. But the storytelling itself is superb...and totally, TOTALLY worth the reading. It's a wonderful book on the history of our nation...far from boring or drab. The children beg me to read it every night!

Welcome to The Beautiful Homeschool

Welcome to The Romantic Mom Homeschool blog! I'm referring to this blog as The Beautiful Homeschool for a variety of reasons. Not because I own the exclusive rights to beauty here...no more than to a 'romantic life'...but it typifies the essence of what we're striving for in our daily life with our children. This life just happens to include educating them along the way. No minor detail, I realize, yet we treat it as simply another aspect of our family life...lived wholeheartedly with as much adventure, beauty, creativity and curiosity as we can toss into the mix. I invite you to join in on our journey and peruse to your heart's content!