It is that time again. A time to take a homeschooling year review and see what worked well for us and what didn’t work so well. I must say that I am so pleased to finally be ending the bulk of our learning (we school year round now) and I can say that I am sad to see it end. I haven’t always been able to say that about each year. But this year has been incredibly fun and memorable. From the very beginning this year has been very different for us. This was the first year where the bulk of our learning revolved around our unit studies and for our family, this has been the biggest blessing. We engage the whole family and most of our day is engrossed in learning and focused on our unit. By the end of our unit I truly feel that my children have a wonderful grasp of the subject or the time period that we have been studying.
One thing that I absolutely love about homeschooling is watching each of my children learn at the different stages of life. While some are working to master multiplication, others are learning to read, and still another is learning to talk and stack blocks (or canisters of playdough). This is such an amazing blessing and opportunity that I do not take lightly. It is so enjoyable and I am so blessed to be able to say that I do love it and it is a dream come true for me to spend this time with my children.
Another aspect of our homeschooling that I can see sticking around for the foreseeable future is lapbooking. My children all love it and so do I. It allows their creativity to shine and gives them a place to really share their knowledge and understanding of the material covered. We have tried notebooking too and thoroughly enjoy that as well. These student-led, delight-directed learning avenues have really helped us to redefine our homeschool style and to find something that we can all love.
Like I have mentioned in my teaching without texbooks post on language arts we did not use actual language arts books this year. We have used more writing and corrective training this year to grow our children’s knowledge of the written and spoken word. This has worked well for the time being and is what I plan on doing again next year. I will obviously expand our expectations for the older children and will continue to fine tune this approach with the little ones. But, I can see such a joy and love of writing coming out of this method that I really want to continue with it. 
- Spinning yarn during a Prairie Day celebration at the end of our Pioneer study.
So, overall we have had a great year. I am looking to change up our math a little bit next year. We didn’t use books for that subject either and did more of a learning without textbooks approach for math too. And while I am pleased with it and I do feel that the children grew in their understand of math concepts and have mastered many things, I hope to be a little more structured in our math units to be able to dive much deeper into them next year. Something I plan to focus more on is fractions and decimals for the older girls and time and money for Josiah.
I am also looking for a great Bible based character program for next year if you have any recommendations. I want to be a little more diligent in adding Bible more heavily into our school routine. We do family worship at night, the children memorize Bible verses, and attend Sunday School and Bible study at church but I feel that the character part could use a little work. So send me your advice if you have fallen in love with a book please.
Like I said, we tend to be more school year round homeschoolers anymore so while the bulk of our learning is done, there is still lots of reading, exploring, math practice, and letter writing going on throughout our weeks. Most of it is student led and is based on what happens in our day. The children are winding down their soccer and archery classes and we are looking forward to a slower paced June before we begin our new year in July. In Missouri we are required to log units of study and the state dictates that each “year” begin on July 1st. With the new baby coming in August we are going to start back in July to get a good 6 weeks under our belt before Baby Girl makes her grand arrival in August. That way we can take the time off as needed and momma doesn’t have to stress about getting our “hours” all in. What about you? Do you take the summer off or school year round?
Read more year end reflections HERE at the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog.
We have used or are planning on using some of the following for character studies:
Character first, character sketches, humility study by queen homeschool, we choose virtues, apologia’s who is god series, keepers of the faith’s “write upon my heart” series, doorposts “put on chart”, and a free resource online (www.hubbardscupboard.org).