IT’S GOOD TO BE BACK!
It’s been roughly 4 months since my last post. We went on vacation again as a family and just like last year, we became too busy living life and I had no time to write. We just got back a few days ago and our little princess is now officially in Grade 1. Yey! Our little prince is 2 years old and is excited to homeschool too! 🙂
NEW CURRICULUM!
Our family decided to take on a new adventure this year. We are now officially enrolled in the Prince of Peace and we’re using a mix of Lifepac books and Philippine local books. We have a teacher-coordinator in the Philippines to help with the academic guide and to with the exams but this time, we’re going to depend largely on God’s leading and grace regarding the curriculum and how to go about each day. All for God’s glory!
Bible-based learning: We are going to embark on a family mission to study the bible together this year. This means regular memory verses, writing weekly devotionals, and making prayer and bible reading a priority. We are going to dive in to Phil Vischer’s “What’s in the Bible” more deeply as we study the Old and New Testament one book at a time. This is going to be fun!!!
Grade 1 in a Year: We started school unofficially while on summer vacation, with Allyra enrolled in tutoring classes for Filipino, Sibika, Mother Tongue and MAPE for a month. She also took up swimming lessons and finished Basic Swimming Level 1 after 12 days. Now that we’re back, we’re looking at speeding things up for about five months (June – October 2014) and homeschooling maybe even up to 6 days a week in preparation for our grand family reunion by the end of October or early November. By reunion, I mean being united as a family as we welcome our 3rd blessing from the Lord. Yey!!! We’ll then most likely slow down significantly for a month or so, then we’ll see how we’re going to adjust our pacing as we settle down with a new baby in the house. 🙂 Hopefully, we’ll be done by February 2015 in time for us to go on summer vacation again. We’re still kid-centered and will move along according to their own pace — while taking advantage of that sponge-like brain while we can!
Weekly Lesson Plans: Since I’m highly disorganized, it is an extreme challenge to plot out our year but I will try my best to update our weekly planner as best as I could. Most likely, I’ll be writing it down as we go along. My plan is to make a weekly lesson guide in diagram form and to just put in what we accomplish each week — no sense in making a daily schedule we can’t keep!
Mind-mapping: Speaking of diagrams, we’re also going to try using mind-mapping to make our lessons and note-taking become a creative activity. Early on, I knew my daughter is a good reader, but she wasn’t very enthusiastic about about writing long sentences. Now, that only means we have to be much more creative in expressing what’s inside our brains. She likes to make her own books and little cards for any occasion, and we’re going to tap into all that creativity and make note-taking a fun thing to do.
Toddler School: Our little boy wants to be involved in everything we do! It’s become a lot more challenging with no more videos to do the teaching and with a toddler trying to join in our discussions, so we’ll have to come up with ways to keep him busy too! This should be another fun adventure for us. 🙂 This means more play-based learning even for our little lady. And crafts. And singing and dancing. And fun. 🙂
HOPE YOU HAVE A FUN YEAR WITH US!
That’s all for now. Will start posting our daily adventure’s soon! God bless you!
