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Oh my gracious, it has taken me so long to finish this post! I promise that, once second grade launches and our spring sale is underway, I’ll get back into our regular schedule for these “homeschool journal” posts. I really love writing them and sharing them with you!
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As a homeschooling parent, what you choose to expose yourself to matters. The words you read, the voices you listen to, the videos you watch–they all become a little Greek chorus in your head on the days when you’re nailing it and on the days when you’re losing it. We must be careful to choose words and voices and videos that empower us and remind us that we’re not in this alone. I treated myself to Julie Bogart’s A Gracious Space, Fall Edition at the beginning of this school year and there have been so many times I’ve been glad I did.
In my last post, I showed you how I plan the majority of our homeschool year with a “do the next thing” system. (Click here to read that post.) However, for some subjects we choose not to use a structured curriculum or resource.
In our homeschool, our morning and evening baskets are a way to introduce a variety of content–in both fiction and non-fiction format–in a very relaxed and cozy setting. On any given day, both baskets are filled with everything from Roald Dahl and Beatrix Potter to Life of Fred and Robert Frost poems. Atlases, maps, and history encyclopedias wait eagerly beside ABC books, Eric Carle stories, and a book of famous women explorers. Harry Potter rests against a tiny chemistry book and the Burgess animals share space with a guide to Rocky Mountain insects.
While our kindergarten curriculum includes a very gentle approach to first lessons in history and geography, mostly focusing on the life events of the child and their family, I felt like I should start to incorporate some additional unit studies into our learning. There are so many historical figures worth studying, worth investigating, even when our children are very young, and many of the lessons we learn from their experiences shape future ideas for our children as they begin to connect the dots of world events and people.