Slow Fall Homeschool Days | Nature Study | History Timelines

Although the weather hasn't exactly turned colder, it's definitely fall here. I've been pulling out the pumpkins, just saving the last of our zinnias and marigolds, and we've been settling into our homeschool routine. We've been doing some more nature study. I want to take you along and show you some of the history review that we've been doing of as well as the Christian biographies we've been reading. Come along with me for another day in the life. These rainy days we've been having have been a great chance for us to just come inside and settle a little bit more into our homeschool routine. Now, if you are listening to my voice, I'm going to apologize right off the bat. I have a miserable cold, and although I don't sound very good today, I feel a lot better than I did a couple days ago. Sometimes your voice kind of goes after the fact, so that's why it sounds a little bit of like it has a crack in it, but I am going to just push through and share with you about our life this week. If you're new here, my name is Sheri. I'm a Christian homeschooling mom to 10 kids, married to my high school sweetheart. This is our 15th year of homeschooling. We have one graduate, seven in school, and a three-year-old and a 20-month-old. I love showing up here every week encouraging other moms in the great work that you're doing in your homes. I also write over on the blog ourlifehomeschooling.com where you can find a ton of resources, a book list, large family life, homeschooling basics, life skills. There's just a wealth of information over there. My husband was home for breakfast this morning, which was really nice. He works a random schedule, so he is in and out. Because of that, we took our time a little bit more this morning, had a nice pancake breakfast, and just sat around and talked a little bit, which was just a nice break. One thing you'll see throughout this video is that my kids were playing all day with these colored square tiles that I've had for years. They were making dominoes with them, making pictures with them, and you've probably seen it. I think that every week there is just some different toy, different attraction that my kids are into, and everybody plays with it non-stop for a whole week, and then after that, they're on to the next thing. These colored tiles were the big deal this week. Now, my daughter Julia is working on copy work here, but another thing that she's been doing recently is I've been reading 50 famous stories to her, and then she's been narrating it back. This is something we've been doing for a little while. We were actually doing it a little bit last year, and I'm still reading these famous stories from history. This is a great book. It's an Ambleside Online book. They're very short stories, so maybe a page, a page and a half. Stories like Bruce and the Spider, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, Dick Whittington and his cat, the Inch Cape Rock, just famous stories of history, world history. The interesting thing is that Julia is our seventh child, so I have read this book to all my kids. This is the first time I read it to her, but she has heard me read these stories, and the other kids have heard me read these stories so many times that they are so familiar to them. These are classic tales, stories about history that really every child should know. The thing that I think is so interesting is the trickle-down effect that this has. By the time I sit down and do this book with her, she's heard a lot of these stories before. Another thing that happens is that my oldest son, for example, he's our second son, who is sitting there reading something else, he's hearing me read these historical stories again, which he's heard a couple times, and it refreshes it for him. This is, I think, the beauty of teaching multi-ages is that they may be doing something else, but they are also hearing things, and over time, it's just this repeated pattern, these repeated stories that are just foundational to their education. And then you multiply it just like you do a regular problem. 3 times 9 is 27. 2 times 9 is 18 plus 2. 3 times 5, 15. I put your place sign here. 2 times 3, 2 times 5. When I first taught math with our oldest son, it increasingly became overwhelming and intimidating to me, but Afton is our fifth, and so this is the fifth time I'm going through things with her, and it gets easier every time. Okay, so go ahead and finish those. So what does this say? Look. There are blank more monkeys. There are blank monkeys. There are blank monkeys. Little bear shuts his eyes and says one. Last year at this time, William was just starting Bob books, just beginning to read, and now he's finished all that. He's moved on to the little bear stories. These are a little bit longer. I found that when kids move on to these harder stories, it helps if I read a page every now and then. So he'll read, and then I can just kind of tell when he's getting frustrated, and I'll offer, hey, I'll read a page, and then you can read the next page. And that just seems to help them get to the end of the book. My daughter Jenna here is working on a project for her sketching class at her high school co-op. Now after my budding reader finishes the book they're working on, I pick out a sentence from the story, something that's just one sentence long, and I'll write it out in their copy book, and they have to copy underneath each line. This takes probably five minutes of their day, and this copy work accomplishes so much. When you just look at the improvement in a child's handwriting in their fluency from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, just simply doing copy work, it's really amazing. Mrs. Millie tells us, don't be silly, Mrs. Millie, you mean the pumpkin patch. We'll pick pumpkins for our harvest party, and we'll bring them yak to school. No, back to school. No, we shout, you mean back to school. It's cold today, Mrs. Millie says, don't forget your jackals. Don't you mean our jackets? We ask, giggling. Those are their jackals. My daughter Holland just loves these Mrs. Millie books. If you've ever read them, she says everything wrong, and her students correct her, and it's really funny, kind of like For her age, it's just perfect. On this day, after we finished our morning work and lunch, we went out with our co-op for a nature hike. See if you can find a nut. Any kind of nut. Can you find a nut? See if you can find one. It's a caterpillar, but it's a venomous. It has spikes on it. That's why I don't want anybody to touch it. Venomous means poisonous. You are correct. On our nature hike, we learned to identify the tulip poplar leaves. We found a male box turtle, black walnuts, hickory pig nuts. We saw a poison monkey slug caterpillar. We learned about grass, or basket grass, which is an invasive weed. This is an American chestnut that I also found. The next morning, just as we were starting school, we woke up and saw that there were three dead baby skunks in our pool. You can imagine this was quite a distraction for our kids. I'm sure this has happened to some of you out there, where you wake up and you have an idea of what you want to do for the day, and then your morning gets totally sideswiped by something like that. We did end up having a good morning anyway. The kids got a lot of work done. They moved through their independent work pretty well. I did want to tell you a little bit about our history timeline that we work on. For history, my kids in the elementary years do Veritas Press. It's an online self-paced history program. I love it. Each year, it's like a five-year cycle program. The first year is Old Testament and Ancient Egypt. The second year is New Testament, Greece, and Rome. The third is Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. The fourth year is Explorers, up to the year 1815. Then the last year is Modern Times, so 1815 up to the current age. The thing I love the most about this program is the history songs that they learn every year. For each of the five years, there's a song where they memorize people or events in order. At the end of the five years, they have just an outline of history from creation to modern times that gives them a basic understanding. Then, when they read about anything or anything that we're reading about just in our read aloud time, any books that they pick for themselves, when they read about a person, a place, an event, anything, they can kind of look back through their years of history that they've learned through these songs that we've been singing over and over again. They have a place to hang it on. What I've been doing in morning time that's been kind of fun is I've been writing out each of the five years just kind of as a visual reference for them. Then, I've been talking about different things that we've been reading. This morning, I read a biography of Charles Spurgeon. It was just a short story from trial and triumph. It took me, it was like two and a half pages. At the end, I asked them, okay, where does he fall on the timeline? We're also reading about Benjamin West, the famous American painter. I asked them, where does he fall on the timeline? He fell in Explorers to 1815 around the year of like the 1750s or 1780s during the time of the American Revolution. Anytime they read about someone new or learn about something, they know where it falls in history. I think it's so good for them to just have that timeline in their head. On this day, this was the day that I started not feeling well. I've made a chicken corn soup. I had this bread that I happened to make the night before. I was so glad. I always have a helper in the kitchen. I love how, and I don't have this formally planned at all. It just seems that a different person wants to help me every day. If it's a repeated person, it's kind of nice because then that person just has an interest in it. They helped me put the meal together. They really learned how to make a lot of dishes just by being there with me. We finished out the day doing our read aloud, but the nice thing about having older kids is that since I wasn't feeling well, one of them read the story. So Jenna read for us today, and it was great to be able to sit there, just drink my hot cup of tea, and just listen. I want to encourage you, if you are a homeschool mom that is struggling, maybe you're overwhelmed with keeping up with the house or with taking care of little ones while you're homeschooling, maybe just not even knowing how to manage your day, I want to encourage you to go to God's word for wisdom. He said in James 1 5, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. I'm reading in my Bible currently about Solomon, King Solomon, and when he acquired the throne after his great father David, he asked God for one thing. He asked him to give him wisdom and understanding to know how to govern so great a kingdom, and the Bible says, God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, and God will do the same for you. He will help you know how to manage your home, how to take care of your children. Ask him for wisdom. If you enjoyed this video, thanks for watching. I encourage you to watch the video I did last week, Why Moms Give Up So Easily and How to Avoid Being One of Them. Thanks for watching. I do one video a week on homeschooling encouragement for everyday moms.