I have a son who, when he started school a few years ago, was very diligent in completing his work.  Regretfully, somewhere along the way those good habits have been replaced by bad habits.    He has a very negative outlook on his schoolwork.  If he’s told he needs to complete the days work that day he’ll say, "Well I’ll be here till 11 o’clock.  What should take him about 4 1/2 hours to complete will take him 10.  No, I’m not kidding here.  Just last night he was up till 11 p.m.  I’ve seen him spend 6 hours on one math lesson.  He has no complaints on any of the books…

Harmony Art Mom has written a post on some fun nature activities our children can do.  One of the ideas is a treasure hunt which is here.   Yesterday we did the treasure hunt.  When the kids found the item listed they would draw it in their sketchbooks. They had a good time doing it and I was thankful for the suggestion since I have a hard time thinking of new ideas for our Nature Study.    Thanks Harmony Art Mom.    Your mission is to find seven out of ten things listed below. As you find each item, draw it on your paper. Use your magnifying glass if you need…

Schedules always look so good on paper. I don’t feel I’m being unrealistic in what I expect of my children in a day. I’m following Ambleside Online’s plans for all my children. But somehow, at least when it involves our homeschool, my plans go awry. Many times my husband will have the children work with him doing construction type jobs. Excellent learning experience. But, how do I balance this with the schoolwork needing to be done? We started this years school the last week in July. I did this because of past experiences of running behind schedule. Even with starting early, I have some of my children still finishing their…

On Monday of last week, for our Nature Study we learned about antelope. I thought this would be fitting since my son, WE, would be going antelope hunting that Friday. I read some information to the children that I got off the Internet and then we played a game that I had about on tiredmom’s blog. I may have tweaked it some from the original idea but here is how we did it. We stood around in a circle outside. We had a baseball that we would throw to the person next to us and as the person received the baseball they had to state a fact  they had just…

I have been working on putting together a Memory System Recitation Box that has you daily reviewing old and new memory work.    I explained in an earlier post that I preivously had used a 3-ring binder to keep all their work in.  Each child had an assigned day that they would recite ALL of their memory work memorized thus far.  As you can imagine this became tedious.   I asked for ideas and a few people directed me to Simply Charlotte Mason and Preschoolers and Peace.   So that I don't have to type all the instructions on how to put together the memory box, I'll paste the directions from Simply Charlotte Mason below.   Step…