What kind of homeschoolers are we? Answer...I don't know

I've become very enamored of Charlotte Mason. I've been reading about her and her methods of teaching for YEARS, so this is not new to me, but lately, watching how my children learn, especially Zoe, I'm feeling myself lean more and more toward her philosophies. I, so far, see no real problem with combining my somewhat classical approach to WHAT I teach with Charlotte Mason's approach to HOW to teach. We already use narration almost intuitively with a lot of what we read, mostly because I was just curious about how much my kids were actually internalizing of what I read to them. We've been doing copywork since Maria was four and wanted to write letters to her grandmas. She would dictate to me, and then copy what I wrote for her. I think a lot of the "interpretation" of Charlotte Mason by other writers leans toward an almost unschooling approach and I don't think that is fair to Mason actually. She was, after all, a classical educater herself who definately believed in an orderly, disciplined learning environment with clear goals. She just felt strongly about not killing a child's natural love of learning with dry and boring drills and seatwork. I could be misunderstanding her myself though.

I don't really know if what we are doing could be call a Charlotte Mason education. However, I have a feeling if the Bluedorns or Wise-Bauers saw our homeschool in action they wouldn't exactly call it strictly Classical either.

(no subject)

I want to go to the Harry Potter book release party at Borders. Who wants to come go with me? Because Brad won't. And I don't want to go by myself. I want my book at midnight. I can't wait a single minute longer.

What should I wear? Do I have to dress all Harry Potterish? Can I just go and absorb the weirdness of the atmosphere without dressing up myself? I feel that to wear a Griffindor scarf would be dishonest. If I was at Hogwarts, I'm pretty sure I would not have been a Griffindor, even though Griffindor is the coolest by far. I'm just...not cool. So I wouldn't even know what to wear...

A schooling post

Today was the first day of homeschooling this summer that we managed to accomplish everything on the list. It wasn't easy. But it wasn't terrible either. I would like to add a few more things, but I need more organization and structure to do that and that is very much a work in progress for me.

Today we had a very slow morning and then swimming lessons. When we got home from that we ate lunch and then started school. The girls were totally into it, though Zoe did try to wander off a couple of times. We did a Rightstart Math lesson, then did an SWR (Spell to Write and Read) lesson which started with continuing to work on writing cursive letters for both girls. Mari is cruising quickly through this. Zoe is not ready for writing on paper. She is still in the large motor stage of this and using a big whiteboard for the most part, but she is getting it too. We started last week by learning specific strokes and then put them together in letters. Zoe is working on the letters A and C. Maria can do a very nice A, C, D, G, and O so far and can connect them really well. She loves writing "connected letters". I love how they teach these letters in the Cursive First book that goes along with SWR. It makes them very, very easy to learn. Then we talked about consonants and vowels and went through the consonants, marking the ones that make more than one sound or are special in some other way. It was fun, but I could tell when enough was a enough and actually stopped before I intended to. We will do the vowels another day. After SWR, we did an Art lesson from Artistic Pursuits. This was our first lesson and it was short and fun. I think I'm going to really like this curriculum for Art. It really spells things out for me and since I'm totally ignorant about visual arts, I'm already learning a lot just reading the lessons. And we had our first music appreciation/history lesson too. My goal with that is just to familiarize them with some great composers, their music, and maybe get a feel for the personality or "story" of that composer. Today we did Georg Philipe Telemann. We listened to a CD I burned last night of his works while doing other things and then when it was time for the lesson I explained that Telemann composed this music, the term "compose" had just been defined for them in the art lesson which was a cool tie-in, read them some of his bio in the coloring book, and then had them color his portrait. The "fact" I wanted them to remember about him is that he was a generally happy man with a happy life and his music reflects that. It was a lot of fun. Later this evening we will have "literature" time. That is just reading to them right now, for an hour or so with some narration. We are reading some stories from the Blue Fairy Book right now, as well as allowing the girls to each pick a picture book to read. Since we have very little "twaddle" in our book collection, I can feel good about that. However, Luci's current obsession with Dora books is...not so good. Oh well, they aren't horrible.

I would like to add a regular Spanish session with Rosetta Stone to our day and I'm thinking of doing a short version of Five in a Row with Luci to give her some one on one "school" time. We sort of did that today and she was thrilled. I would like to add recorder lessons. I don't know if I can do it all in a day or not. We'll see.

I plan to alternate history/science days and art/music days, with four days of academics and one day of make-up or field trips or special projects. I'm getting a flow going, I think. I'm not feeling quite so overwhelmed. I really did for a few days when I started getting into this two weeks ago or so. But I'm feeling better about it now. And I really can't believe how much and how quickly the girls are absorbing it all.