New Year, New Schedule

Good morning to all and I hope you are having a wonderful and productive day! I am, at long last, getting back around to posting on my blogs. This past year has been filled with many changes for our family and I have posted about them on my Cozy Home Cottage blog in the form of a Daybook post. Please feel free to stop by and read the post. I am resolved to press forward into the new year with a renewed Faith and focus on our schooling.

We started back to our daily lessons on January 3rd and have started things fresh with a newly revised schedule that takes a little cue from my college days. We are having regular lessons on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and I have added a Computer Lab Day on Wednesday along with an Art Apreciation Day on Friday. So far, the change has been a HUGE success. Caleb likes that he now has a day for computer learning. We use Wednesday to explore fun, educational web sites and to do writing and keyboard lessons using our MS Word program. He is doing much better in the writing department and I am trying to base his writing assignments on the material that we are learning from the rest of the week. The Friday Art Apreciation Day is wonderful!!! Each week will feature a different piece of art along with information about the corresponding artist. We look at the artwork, learn about its content and study some facts about the artist's bio. After the lesson, Caleb and I get to be creative on  a project that reflects the style or the method used by the artist to create the featured piece. We are really having a lot of fun with this and learning so much about art.

I am so glad that we are blessed to be able to learn at home. I can see my son growing in wisdom and knowlege more every week. It is a beautiful thing as a parent to witness his learning process first hand.

God Bless your week,
Charlotte

Our Kind of Day

We had the most wonderful day together yesterday. It was just one of those sweetly serene quiet days of homeschooling that brings a smile to your face at the end of the day. We had a good breakfast together and then set off to the family room sofa to do our daily lessons in reading, spelling, history and math. Caleb is truly enjoying the book we are reading together. It is a tale of a young boy and his family on a trip to visit his grandmother at her home near the beach in New England. Along the way, the boy meets an interesting man that plays the bagpipes. The book is titled, Boat Song, and I bought it a little over a year ago at our local library during a book sale. I paid all of 50 cents for it, almost broke the bank~LOL. I LOVE library book sales, dont you? After we finished with our lessons, Caleb and I challenged his dad to a game of Monopoly. My husband is a true and lifelong fan of the game and plays for keeps. Caleb watched him carefully to learn his strategies. It is a wonderful game and teaches skills such as money management, life skills and strategy. We had a fun time together and played for about an hour, but decided to leave the board as it was and finish our game today. I LOVE days like this!

A Poem from the Past

As I was searching through some things that my beautiful MIL had passed down to me from her teaching days, I came across this poem about a one room school and I wanted to share it:


One,two,three,four
Walls, some windows and a door,
Some battered desks, a dunces stool
Add up to the one-room school.


An iron stove that made us doze–
While one side baked, the other side froze.
A teacher’s desk, a hickory switch
That sometimes made our britches itch.


The teacher we all loved so well,
Who taught us how to add and spell.
From first grade on through graduation,
She nurtured our young education.


Though few there were in any grade,
We learned to be quite unafraid
Of what a higher grade might bring,
For each year we heard everything.


And if we could not spell a word
We should have learned while still in third
We could regain what we were missing
By knowing, later, when to listen.


We loved the little one-room school,
A citadel for sage and fool.
We learned of life, we learned endeavor,
But most, we learned to live together.


~Martin T. Bergsjo


I thought that was just GREAT! It does sound like our sweet home classrooms and co-ops. We learn well how to live and learn together!!! Hope you are having LOADS of summer fun.


Stay Cool and Cozy!!!
Charlotte

Our Mission

This is a poem that I had written this past year and have decided that it is our homeschooling "Mission Statement" and I wanted to share it with you:


Our Home sweet Home school


We live what the world calls
an “old fashioned” life
Our home is filled
with books to read
To guide the direction and
the dreams that we dream
All for a boy that will travel, someday
To a destination known only to God.
He will leave us, in time
This boy of ours
To journey along this life
That is his….
Sure footed as he follows
His path.
Secure in the knowledge
That God is with him.
Largely due to the time we have spent
Guiding his dreams
Reading those books
Defining the will of God for his days
In this little house
With our “old fashioned” ways. ©


~Charlotte spears
  March 17, 2010


I hope that you are having a wonderful day, wherever you are and that your homeschool paths are taking a Godly direction, also. This is a serious mission that we are on, as well as one that is fun and challenging. Our children are worth the effort as they are our inheretance from the Lord. Take time to teach them well so they will be prepared for their journey ahead.


Until Next Time~Stay Cozy,
Charlotte

New Beginnings

A great big HELLO to my blog friends, new and old. In the interest of becoming more uniform in my blogging, I am moving all three of my blogs of interest to Blogger for hosting. This has not been an easy decision for me and it might take a while to get everything organized to my satisfaction, but I truly feel that this is best for me. Hopefully, this will inspire me to post more often and result in my posts becoming more cohesive. I might re-post some items from my former blog once in a while, but my goal is to simply create a whole new blog from "soup to nuts". Hang on, this could be a bumpy ride until all of the kinks are worked out~LOL!!!


Hugs to all, keep it cozy,
Charlotte
(head mistress and lead instructor of the Cozy Home Academy: Est. Aug. 2006)