My homeschooling journey begins as my son is 3 years old. We begin exploring the world around us, coloring, playing with stuff, listening to music. I am not creating a formal curriculum, but when he expresses curiosity about a thing, I put together some materials for us to study it.

Like all of my experiments, I am keeping notes. Here are the notes.

Amazing Energy Summer School

-Types of Energy

Apples

-Go apple picking, visit a cider mill
Prune the apple tree

Birds

-Little man has said that this year he wants his summer study to be birds. Let the research commence!

Book Of Centuries

-This is an experiment, not fleshed out enough for public consumption. Nothing to see here.

Copywork

-You may wonder why copywork is important. My husband feels copywork is completely unimportant. He believes that in this age of computers, handwriting is just frosting. I disagree. As a witch I know that words have meaning and words put to paper by a hand have much more power than those laid down by technology. Handwriting may be but a little thing, but it's a thing that can mean all the difference. It is a hand-written thank you note after a job interview, it is a handwritten love poem attached to a bouquet of flowers, it is a beautifully-penned letter of inquiry. It is a first impression and the difference between unique and ordinary, between being remembered and being tossed in a file.

Herbs Summer School

-We are using Herb Fairies, Walking the World in Wonder by Ellen Evert Hopman and Steven Foster, A Kid's Herb Book by Lesley Tierra

Homeschooling Resources

-I have a list of my own favorites in The Reading Room.

Kitchen Science Summer School

-I am designing this program for my kindergartener's summer homeschool program. It should take 3 months to complete. We are doing a unit on Herbs at the same time, based on the Herb Fairies program, so we have quite a bit of overlap.

The Nutcracker

-This unit study is designed to lead up to a viewing of a live performance of the Nutcracker with a dance company and an orchestra. (My husband the musician insists there is no point in going if there is not a live orchestra.) As the Nutcracker should be an annual tradition, we can begin with a basic introduction and add more complex concepts later.