Our Homeschooling Plan

Well, we spent the first day of school getting organized because I just couldn't manage to get it done before that! I don't know if I should publicly announce that or not, seeing as how I lead workshops on organizing your life, but it just goes to show you that I don't always have my act together.

Anyhow, I managed to put some thoughts together about our next topic of study and actually organize a schedule for the next couple of months. I'm trying something a bit different this time around. I split some of our subjects into different groups to be covered only on certain days. For example, our unit study will be done on Tues and Wed, while more independent studies will be done on Mon. and Thurs. Friday is usually our catch-up and errand day.

I'm mainly trying this because our morning mass schedule varies from day to day and I never seem to have enough time to do all of the group things that I'd like to do. Since we go to mass in the evening on Tuesday and early on Wednesday (thus opening up more time) I'm setting aside a good portion of those two days to do our "together" subjects. I know it goes against my "Never have more than one schedule" rule, but I decided I had to try it. We'll see how it goes.

As for our topic of study, we seem to be coming across a lot of information lately about becoming a bit more self-sufficient. That magazine I was reading last week had a lot of articles about moving in that direction. I thought it would be interesting to learn about what it would take to keep our family afloat if food or other items became harder to get. Can we take advantage of things we find in nature? What are the basic nutrients we need to stay alive and healthy? What are some things we can do right here, right now?

First, we are going to start out learning the basics about our bodies. In order to know what we need to survive, we need to know about how our body works. After we have some background there, I'd like to move on to learning about herbs and "weeds" - how to look around our area and find out what is edible and what is not. We'll also look into gardening (again!) and possibly animals we might be able to raise.

As usual, I'm not sure of the exact path we'll take. I like to leave some room in my plan for God to direct us where He wants us to go. I find it is more fun that way. At least I finally have an idea of where to start! If anyone has some good ideas or book recommendations, I'd love to hear about them! I hope you're school term is off to a good start, too.

God Bless!