Last year, I completed my Master’s degree through the program Classical Conversations put together for CC moms. It was the most amazing experience of my life, a dream come true. I did the program knowing that my children were getting older (one is in college now!) And when the time came, I wanted to be ready to return to work. I didn’t want to send the last one off and think “Crap, now what do I do?!” I started working as an adjunct professor this year but that is VERY part-time. It was ok though because I was still focused on homeschooling and directing CC.
But then an unexpected job offer came my way–I was asked to take a full-time teaching position at a classical school in my area. At first I said no way, but as time moved on it became VERY clear to me that this was the right thing for me and for my family as a whole. I could write a book about all the ways the signs SCREAMED that this is what I needed to do.
My older son will continue with CC. He will be in Challenge III and works 100% independently already so he will be fine being home alone to get his schoolwork done. My younger son was the tricky one. After working through all the possible options, we decided to enroll him in the classical school. I will still be his teacher for at least one hour per day, but we think he will do very well with the structure and routine of the school. And honestly, most of the curriculum they use is what we used at home already, so we expect a very smooth transition from one classical program to another.
I struggled with this but finally realized that my allegiance was never to CC or to homeschooling. It has always been to classical education and if my youngest has the opportunity to get at least as good if not better classical education in school than I was able to give him at home, and I will be able to work with a lot more students, get an actual paycheck, and be in a place where I really feel like I can do good work… then this is the step my family needs to take.
I’m moving this blog over to a free site: theplaceswelearn.wordpress.com because I just can’t keep paying for hosting. All my posts will be over there. When my subscription here runs out (I think in June), this site will go away.
Anyway… We are off to new adventures. The plan is to work at the school for the next two years and then try to continue balancing that with beginning a PhD program in classical education. I figure two years will give me time to iron out all my lesson plans so they will be on autopilot and then I can dive back into school myself.
Are you a fan of morning baskets? We are. As my kids are getting older and spending so much time on their separate curriculum, I was really feeling that our home school was missing something. It felt disjointed and incomplete. Last year, I caught on to the idea of a morning basket, and we really loved it. For one thing, it meant family time during our school day. In the midst of all the chaos, the extracurriculars, and the Henle Latin, we found time to sit together and learn as a family. Plus, the ONE thing that I don’t like about CC’s Challenge program is that it doesn’t leave much room for the extras, the fun stuff. And it left my oldest feeling a little disconnected from her brothers. But our morning basket time means coming together for about half an hour and learning as a family. It’s been really good for us. You can read more about last year’s morning basket here.
This year, I went a little overboard. But please keep in mind, we don’t do something from EVERY book on this list daily! We use a loop schedule and do one item from each book for however much time we have set aside for that day (generally 30-45 minutes). Wherever we leave off on Monday, we pick up on Tuesday and keep going. So it doesn’t matter if it’s just TOO MUCH for one day. We do what we can from one day to the next and we are never behind because nothing is assigned to a specific day.
I recently had the chance to review some new resources from National Geographic Kids. I was super excited for the chance to check them out and I was not let down.
Some families take the whole summer off from home schooling. Some don’t. And I don’t think either one is right or wrong. We don’t and we have our reasons for it just like anyone who does take the summer off has reasons. The beauty of home schooling is that you get to do what works for your family. I love summer school because we have time to do things that we just can’t cram in during the busy school year. I also have found that if we take the summer off completely, the lack of routine destroys the peace in our home. So at the very least, we do morning school any morning we are all home.
I’ve also been noticing a lot Classical Conversations families wanting to find ways to prepare their children for the next Challenge level over the summer. Challenge is not an easy breezy academic picnic. It’s a lot of work and it can get overwhelming. Spending the summer gently preparing for the workload to come is a wise way to spend quiet moments over the summer. Just promise me, let your kids still enjoy summer. Doing a full school schedule in preparation for Challenge over the summer will suck the joy right out of the school year.
I am completely consumed by Classical Conversations Challenge B this year. I am directing it, and my oldest child is enrolled it. Many, many things are covered in Challenge B: categorical and propositional logic, the history of astronomy, creationism vs. darwinism, intro to Chemistry, Latin, current events, mock trial, math, persuasive writing, reading novels, reading short stories, and writing one of their own. But overall, what we are truly studying in Challenge B is discipline. All that school work? It is really just the tools we are using as we learn to become disciplined.
What is discipline? In a nutshell, it’s self-control. I sure have collected a lot of quotes about it to share with my class throughout this year. Here are just a few:
So I’ve been sharing these quotes on discipline and giving pep talks to these kids that if they just focus on discipline NOW, their entire lives will be easier because they will have already trained themselves to do what needs to be done, even if they don’t “feel like it.” And then I looked at my own life and said, “Oops.” I have gone way off track lately. And some of it can be excused–I was feeling really lousy for awhile there until I was able to see the correct doctor about some health issues and get my body working properly again. That took nearly six months of appointments, blood work, etc, to finally get to a point where I am a functioning human being again. Hooray! But while I felt lousy, I got lazy. And the thing about laziness is that sometimes it just becomes a habit. At first it was because I felt cruddy and couldn’t do anything. But then when I finally felt better, I looked around and realized that I was still doing NOTHING because that’s what I was used to doing. CC and especially the Challenge program is all about modeling for the kids what they should be doing. We don’t so much teach them and lecture them, we just show them what to do and hope they follow our lead (they usually do).
So here I am, halfway through Challenge B and just now deciding it’s time to be serious about developing discipline. And at first I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to go about that. I tend to get too crazy with my plans and schemes and then I can’t follow through.
I decided to go with a habit tracker. Here’s what mine is looking like at the end of January. Note: this is not color-coded. I just have a bunch of gel pens and grab whichever one is nearby.
Here’s my little habit tracker.
I’ve purposely cut off the image so you can’t see what habits I am working on–every one is different and what I am focused on will not help you develop your own self-discipline at all. We don’t need to compare ourselves. However, I do have some advice on coming up with the items on your list and some general ideas of what I have on my list.
Make your habits clear, actionable, and measurable. Do not say, “eat healthy”. Because how do you define that? One day you may decide that having dessert after dinner is ok because you ate well all day and another day you may decide that you shouldn’t have had cake and therefore you can’t check off the “eat healthy” box. Instead, break it down. Drink 1 glass of water. Drink another glass of water. Drink a third glass of water. Eat a piece of fruit. Don’t eat chips. Don’t drink soda. Make EACH of these items, whatever specific things you want to qualify as “eating healthy” a SEPARATE item on your habit tracker. For one thing, you will be able to keep a clear definition of eating healthy. For another, if you have eat a serving of fruit, eat a serving of veggies, drink water, take a vitamin, don’t eat fast food, don’t drink soda all as separate items guess what? If you mess up on ONE of those items that day, you can see clearly that you did not ruin your entire day. So you drank a soda? Well, you didn’t eat fast food, you had an apple at lunch, and you drank about a gallon of water. One bad decision does not mean you end up making five more. When they are each separate items, you can fail on one and still conquer the others. If you had just put “eat healthy” well then, you are out of luck if you make even one teeny bad decision in your day.
I also don’t say “Do the laundry”. I actually make each step a separate item–wash a load, dry a load, fold a load, put it away. I am trying to develop the follow through of doing one load of laundry a day so that I am never behind on laundry. I have had a bad habit of letting a load sit in the wash until it smells funny. So having separate lines for each step has helped me get into the habit of completing the process.
The same goes for exercise as well. I put each small thing on it’s own line so that I do each thing. I don’t just say “Workout” because that isn’t clear or measurable. I say XX minutes on the treadmill. XX pushups on the Total Gym. XX pull ups on the Total Gym. And so on. Again, this makes my goals clear and then I can follow through on them.
Another category of items on the list have to do with home schooling. We got into a really bad habit of not doing our morning time together and so I put that on my list. We have only missed one morning since I added it to my habit tracker and it was the morning the little guy kept fainting, so clearly we had other priorities that day. The cool thing about this habit tracker is that in the past, I would’ve said, oh well, we broke our streak. Let’s quit because we weren’t perfect. But with this tracker, I am able to say, you know what? I didn’t do it yesterday but I can still get it done today!
Morning school getting done!
I also have a category for blog work. Social media posts are a lot of work to remember and I’d all but given up, to be honest. But now that I put each thing on my list (post to Facebook, post to Instagram, comment on other home school posts on Instagram, pin to Pinterest, etc), I am really upping my social media game for the blog.
Don’t be afraid to have a LOT of items on your list. It may seem overwhelming at first but when you are breaking down “eat healthy” into 7 or 8 actionable steps and “do the laundry” into four steps, it’s going to seem like a lot but it’s actually just going to motivate your more because you get to check off more boxes throughout the day.
I’ve already mentioned a lot of reasons this works but I’d like to point out one more. When you get to fill in little boxes with pretty pens, you get a tiny little surge of “I did it!” and, after reading the book The Power of Habit, I know we need that little reward. That’s why I only use my special pens to fill it in. I personally buy them one at a time at the checkout at Michael’s, but you can buy a multi pack on Amazon. I’m obsessed with these pens!
My favorite pens have their own special home.
I’ve also set goals for myself. I challenged myself to get 600 “points” this month. A point is a square filled in. I didn’t start until a little later in January so I didn’t have a full 31 days to work on it. But I’m still very, very close to reaching my goal. As of publication, I have 533 points and 3.5 days to go. I think I’ll make it!
Over the month, I have discovered some things that were flawed about my list of habits. A couple of things really only need to happen once a week and shouldn’t have been on a daily list. A few things I thought were good goals have turned out to be unreasonable (the amount of water I was aiming to drink, for example, is more than my poor bladder can take!). So I have decided to not be committed to this list for an entire year, but rather, I will edit it monthly to reflect what is going on and where my focus needs to be. Next month I am adding an item called “Do something from your weekly list” and then I will work my way through the tasks I need to get in the habit of doing once a week. More discipline practice!
I have a lot of big projects I’d like to be working on. I am trying to write a super detailed and awesome Disney Vacation Planning Journal. But I was getting so bogged down with my to do list every day that I was never finding time to get around to that. And part of me doesn’t want to get around to it because it’s big and it’s scary and I am afraid of failing at it. So I would just keep adding more chores to my to do list and never “find the time” to work on it. But using this tracker has made me say, “No, I’ve done the laundry, I’ve loaded the dishwasher, I’ve done school with the kids. I have plenty of time to sit down and focus on this project.” I have freedom to work on my projects now.
Wait a minute… the theme of Challenge B is Discipline. And the theme of Challenge I (the year after B) is… wait for it… FREEDOM. Oh. I get it now. LIGHT BULB MOMENT! Discipline brings freedom. Boom. Living that out myself so I can model it for my students. CC life at it’s best!
To make your own habit tracker, you can use notebook paper, graphing paper, a spreadsheet program, or whatever you have available. I use Numbers on my Mac, personally. Anything that allows you to make a list and have a space to check it off daily will work just fine. Keep it simple and follow through! Good luck!
I had been looking for the right Latin program for my upper elementary student for awhile and then a friend recommend Latin for Children. I looked into and realized it was exactly what I wanted and what I was looking for. It is bright, colorful, and fun. It’s interactive. It has streaming options for the chants and video. And it gives an incredibly strong foundation in Latin for children who will be continuing their Latin studies in middle and high school.
I ordered it as a bundle directly from Classical Academic Press because I wanted the streaming option. You can also buy it with DVDs and CDs, and the bundle is even available on Amazon.
Out of the box, the bundle includes quite a few items.
First you have the DVDs and CDs (or a website for streaming both of these.)
Grammar lesson on the streaming option from the website.
Early Morning Magic, not to be confused with Extra Magic Hours, is a relatively new offering at the Walt Disney World Parks. It allows guests to enter the park very early in the morning and experience some of the more popular rides with virtually no wait. You also get breakfast as part of the package. The cost is not low–$79 for ages 10 and up, and $69 for ages 3-9. Children under 3, as always at Disney, are free. This early morning add-on also requires a regular park ticket which you must scan to enter in the morning.
This review of our week at Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Niagara Falls is coming at you a bit late. We’ve been home for two months now and I haven’t had much time to write since getting home due to the craziness we’ve been through with our little guy’s health. Â I’ve got some quiet time this afternoon and decided it was time to write this review, before I forget everything about our experience!
First, a little back story. We have previously stayed at Jellystone in Fremont, IN. This particular campground wins awards year after year and sets the bar incredibly high for what a family campground should be. Last February, we tried to book a return trip for a week in a cabin for July. They were already fully booked FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH. And so, we had to come up with a Plan B. That ended up being our trip to Niagara Falls. We decided to give the Jellystone Campground at Niagara Falls a try, since that had been part of our Plan A.
Obviously, it wasn’t as good as the campground in Fremont–if it were, it would win all the awards. But it was a nice little campground with a lot going for it and a few things that could use some improvement.
Lodging
We stayed in a Ranger Smith Cabin. Yes, my boys are all in Boy Scouts and my kids know how to do real camping. But that’s not a vacation in my eyes. GIVE ME ALL THE AIR CONDITIONING.
The cabins were cute and had just about everything we could possibly need. The kitchen was fully stocked with pots and pans and dishes. It had a full bathroom, and two bedrooms–one with a queen sized bed, and one with two sets of bunk beds. There was also a pull out sofa bed. So all in all, the cabin could sleep eight. The air conditioning worked extremely well. So did the smoke detectors–they went off every time I opened the oven, haha! The front porch was great for reading and chatting with our “neighbors” (my aunt and uncle and some of their kids came along on the trip).
Double Bunk Bed Room in Ranger Smith’s Cabin at Jellystone Niagara.
It’s been quiet around here. I’m sorry for that. I had fully intended to spend my summer building this blog and was looking forward to having time to really focus on it. But plans? They don’t always work out, do they?
Fun at the white water rapids of Niagara.
We returned home from our Niagara Falls adventure on Saturday, July 14. On Monday, a friend invited us to go on an adventure to the nearest “big city” that has a LEGO Store and Disney store, which we don’t have here at home. We thought it sounded fun so we all jumped in the car with her and off we went! However, my youngest was super cranky that morning. He had a bad cough and I had actually taken him to the walk in clinic when it opened at 7am to get a chest x-ray to make sure he didn’t have fluid in his lungs from swimming. His chest was clear so I figured we were fine to head off on adventure.
Two years ago, my husband made me go on a Disney cruise without my children. Guys, I was MAD at him. I honest and truly got on that airplane and said, “Do NOT even talk to me until we land. I can’t even LOOK at you right now.” I had never been on a cruise before and I had never left the country, either. To do both of those things while the kids were back home completely freaked me out. Plus, we weren’t just going on any cruise. We were going on a DISNEY cruise. Without our kids? It just felt so… wrong. I was certain it would be miserable, that the ship would be overrun with children, and we’d have a terrible time.
