Thursday, August 28, 2014

What's Been Going On?


 I wanted to add a little pizazz to the front of the house so after much consideration on what color best goes with a tan house, I settled on a bright aqua color. It's a little racy, but I'm really diggin' it each time I look at the house. I considered a deep eggplant, but ultimately went with something a little out of my comfort zone.


The garden is going in full gear. The tomato plants are full of green tomatoes, my green pepper plants are producing like I've never had before, we've been enjoying sweet carrots (so has a vole or gopher that has come up through my raised beds:P ), and the potato plants are dying back and loaded with huge healthy spuds.


I've also been canning and preserving the last couple of weeks. I ordered half a box of Colorado Peaches and Pears last month and I made more yummy pear sauce, and some frozen peach pie filling. My cukes are also producing like crazy so I decided to give pickle making a go and see what happens. I'm not guaranteeing that they turned out good but it was worth a shot. We'll see in another week when we can dig in.


This fall our oldest has started homeschooling, and even though we still have a one-room school house about 20 miles away, we decided that homeschooling was the best option for our family. For me, I knew that I didn't want a strict curriculum with textbooks that told us to do Lesson 1 and 2 today and move on to the next one tomorrow, regardless of whether or not my child understood what was going on. But I also didn't have the courage to just wing it and plan everything myself and pick out books.
  Let me tell you this, navigating all the options and methods out there can be a little overwhelming and time consuming. There's almost too much information out there on the old inter-web. Here's a link with a quick summary of each of the most popular styles. We finally settled on the Charlotte Mason Method. Here's just few basic reasons why:

  • She believed in using "living books," which are written by one person with a passion for that subject, making the book "come alive,"rather than a text book that was written by multiple people with knowledge in small areas within.
  • She encouraged lots of time outdoors and nature studies.
  • She strongly believed in narration of the books that were read to ensure the children understood and could recall back what they just read/heard.
  • She was an advocate of short lessons for younger children (Which in my opinion, a 6 year old doesn't need to sit in school all day long to get the most out of a lesson).
So after researching some different Charlotte Mason based curriculum, we finally settled on the Living Books Curriculum. It provides you with a teaching guide that gives you a book list and week-by-week lesson plan to follow. I enjoy that fact that if something is a little too easy, I can switch it out for some thing a little more challenging or vice versa. I don't have to stick to a text book and strict lesson plan schedule.
 


This past weekend we got a little over 2 inches of rain out here on the ranch so we're enjoying some humid days and very dewy nights. It's starting to feel like fall out here with warm days and cool nights and I'm lovin' it! What have you all been up to this summer? Enjoy your holiday weekend!

 

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