Wrapping Up Our Homeschool Year | Year Round Vs Traditional School

[Music] is 10 if 7 + 3 is 10 then 7 - $3 is $4.70 what does it mean s it's another busy week for us as we begin to wrap up our school year join me for another day in the life [Music] with all the beautiful spring days we've been having things are starting to wind down in our home school and we are wrapping things up I'm going to be talking in this video a little bit about year round homeschooling versus the traditional school year and why we've chosen to do things the way we do my kids have been having so much fun with these chicks they are uh maybe 6 weeks old we got them back at the end of March and they are still in the Breer but they're we're going to be moving them out to the grass for good in the next day or two and so the kids have been bringing them out every day and just putting them on grass getting them used to being outside and having so much fun with them if this is your first time on my Channel I want to introduce myself my name is Sherry I'm a homeschooling mom to 10 kids ages 19 down to 15 months I love blogging over at rlif homeschooling docomomo and also book lists that you can refer to just tons of great stuff over there and I love coming on here as well encouraging you each week in homeschooling back in the kitchen this is a brand new day and I'm getting breakfast ready for my kiddos I'm making some potatoes with eggs normally I make these in a 9x13 and put butter over them pop them in the oven but my friend recently told me how she makes hers in her cast iron skillet so I just thought I'd try something a little different today it's just me and Benjamin this morning he's been getting up at around 7:00 which is nice that he's not getting up super early but my other kids aren't down yet our school year is beginning to wind down we follow the traditional calendar for our school year but I want to talk a little bit about that on paper so we live in Pennsylvania and we have to turn in a couple of things one of them is to show record that we had 180 days of school so on paper we homeschool from August through May um and that is when we do the majority of our book work but I hold a day really Loosely so when I was a newer homeschool mom I was really careful about this sometimes I might look at a day where we had done a little bit of school but just thought I don't know if this is enough if I can count it as a whole day and so maybe I wouldn't but I hold it so much more Loosely now because I realized that our lifestyle is such that if I were to follow my kids around and just personally log what each of them does all day every day 365 days a year most of the days of the year we could actually count as a school day so while on paper it looks like we are doing school from August through May and that is when we do a lot of our book work in reality once we close the books and turn in everything to the state we're just pivoting and we're doing a different type of learning no we may not be doing math from our textbooks but our kids go shopping with us they do online shopping we're working in the garden we're measuring things just all kinds of things cooking that involve math we may not be doing our writing curriculum but we are writing letters and I would say they probably do different assignments whether writing in a journal or whatever at least 3 or 4 days a week if not every day some of them every day and we're reading every day we read the Bible as part of our breakfast and again in the evening for dinner um I read a chapter book to the kids usually at least once in the day I'll read to them so this is just a part of our lifestyle now I'm making some sourdough bread here and this doesn't look as fancy as maybe some of the sourdough bread you see elsewhere because I like to use the whole grain I just want to put a cavy out out there that um you don't have to make sourdough to be a good homeschooler this is something I do for my health I like to have bread that's been made from scratch that's long fermented I like to use the whole grain to get all of that nutrition but I am a firm believer that there should be no stereotypes in homeschooling any parent can hom School their kids it doesn't have to look a certain way be a certain way and I think there's just some that need to hear that every family is unique and that's what makes it beautiful I want to talk a little bit about our morning time notebook we do morning time right after breakfast and um we're finishing this up so you can get my simple morning time Notebook on the blog we've done mostly everything in it for the year the last thing we're wrapping up is we're doing our stories from Shakespeare I have we're reading King Lear I'll talk a little bit more about that later and finishing up our Bible memory other than that we've pretty much done everything we finished our hymns for the year we did our two composers our two artists Mane and George Sarat we did the presidents it's just really nice to have something visible that you could just look [Music] atain the 16th [Music] hisp I read two Shakespeare stories a year and I do them in a progression first I read the play from beautiful Tales from Shakespeare and this is just a little bit easier version it's not the actual Play It's the story it gives the plot and then secondly I read in the book I have right here Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary lamb and this is a little bit harder but once they already know the story why and I read this second time from this harder book it just kind of fills in a little bit more details now when my kids were younger I really had to take this a lot slowly more slowly and um some of them they just just had to be older but I have a lot of older kids and so I feel like the older your older kids are you're able to do more of this than you could when they were all little professions and they solemly told her not to prescribe to them for they knew their d CH says like [Music] chin a says name Beach top was Green in our family is it you r or n r o u r we were also singing our veritos press history song we've done all five years two times so uh the kids know all these and it kind of trickles down to the younger ones which is nice Benjamin found this boot and it entertained him for like a half an hour putting this boot on and walking around with it it was really funny back to Veritas we took a break this year from Veritas um and we just have been reviewing the songs that we've always done and instead I've been reading something else for history but we plan to pick back up with self-paced history lessons from Veritas next year it's been something that's always been really nice to Outsource and I also just feel like they do such a great job my kids really love it another thing that's kept us really busy this week is that my kids all finished their last day of Co-op this year so our family goes to a co-op and then our high school kids go to a second Co-op which is a drop off Co-op and both of these ended this week and there were just a lot of things that were due so James had a toothbr toothpick bridge he was finishing as well as a Lego diarama for his project on Daniel Boon um my older kids Jenna and Luke they were working on a graphic design poster Aton did a poster on George Mueller from a biography she did um Brinley she was pretty much done she took a sewing class at Co-op and her stuff was already done but we were just wrapping up a lot of these things and then my older kids for their High School co-op had some final tests that they had to study for and just some final things to turn in so um that was something that kind of took up a lot of our time this week A friend of mine and I were talking about one thing that we just love about homeschooling and being part of a co-op is that our kids have opportunities to be involved in our spring program in making different projects like this and having these kinds of things available to them but we love that it's only once a year because it's so much work to help them get all these projects done so I love that they have this and it's fun for them to have that part of their education but it's nice that it's just not all the time I'm making chicken quesadillas today for my kids this is something we kind of have a lot um we like to make them pretty meaty lots of cheese lots of chicken and we just have veggies and it's it's a really fast meal so I like that I want to take a break in this video to tell you about the ecourse how to take the stress out of homeschooling if you're a homeschool mom you probably question yourself am I doing enough have I picked the right curriculum are my kids going to turn out okay what about college what about high school all this is a weight that we feel as one homeschool writer put it she felt like school was the one place she could send her kids where everything that went wrong wasn't her fault maybe you can relate there is an easier way that takes the burden off of you as The Homeschool mom and also is such an effective way of teaching kids and you'll learn all about that in the course how to take the stress out of homeschooling this course was created by Kelly Crawford from generation Cedar she's a mom of 11 with 23 years of homeschooling experience she's been blogging at generation Cedar since 2007 taking this course with Kelly is like sitting down beside an experienced homeschool mom who can just lay out for you what you should focus on what to avoid what really matters if you're a new homeschool Mom this is going to be like putting you five years ahead of your time if you're a veteran homeschool mom I took this course I've been homeschooling for 14 years I still learned new things and I also more importantly was just encouraged because sometimes when you're in the daytoday when you're in the thick of things you can sometimes forget the things that you already know you just need to be reminded of them so do yourself a favor and check out the course I'm going to leave the link below [Music] back to the change that happens this time of the year when we close our textbooks put them aside and pivot to a different type of learning we uh are pretty busy in the summer with our garden with putting up food with the kids are in camps a lot of different things um oh let me tell you quickly this is a praying mantis um the girls found these on a branch it's their egg sack and I just feel like you always have stuff like this around your house when you are homeschooling because the kids find things they put them in these jars and they're watching for them to hatch but our learning this time of year as we change Seasons just becomes a lot more Hands-On our strawberries are done in May so we're all out there picking those bringing them in we make strawberry jam for our whole family and then then next we are planting we grow beans beets tomatoes cucumbers potatoes corn and all of these things we Harvest and preserve and the kids are part of all of it so that's a lot of Hands-On learning that's happening and I also just feel like when they have free time they do things like pursuing a business idea or our son started a treehouse last year he wants to finish that this year so um we're back inside I'm reading to the kids you can see this room looks messy but it's messy with projects that are kids are all working on this is James's diarama for his Daniel Boon project he's trying to put together um in our Windows our plants that we planted these are our seedlings that will go in our garden they're coming along nicely hopefully they'll be ready in a couple weeks I'm just reading to the kids our history lesson and then the chapter book we're working being on here's a puzzle William put together he just surprised me so much he's only 5 years old and this puzzle is a 500 piece puzzle he worked at it for 10 days and I wasn't even really paying attention to him I just saw him over at the home school table working on it and finally one night I was putting him to bed and he said I only have a couple more pieces I want to finish my puzzle and I went over and I was so amazed that he had finished this 500 piece puzzle so I feel like when you encourage an atmosphere of learning in your home you may be ending your book workk but the free time that your kids get when their uh free time opens up they just get all the more inspired and creative and they want to try different things and learn new things and I I really also just like the seasonal changes of homeschooling about this time of year I am ready to stop with our regular routine and just do something different and I welcome the summer I love that the kids are going to camps we get to swim more um but also once it gets around August and we're getting to where a lot of our Harvest is getting in by that time I'm getting ready for routine as well so I like the changes our kids were able to finish all their projects for the spring program and I love that our Co-op does this every year it's a great way to display the kidss work there you can see this is the sewing class that I helped teach this year these are some of the projects they made this is a great way for the kids to have um something they can be proud of at the end of the year we had some performances my daughter did A Dance a a folk dance with some of her kids in her class and played the recorder there was a sign language performance um just lots of different things and of course they have their artwork Everywhere We are so so thankful to be part of a great community of homeschoolers thanks for following along with us this week I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms