PrincipledMom™

This week we are back to our lessons. (I am trying to get out of the habit of calling it "school".) Princess G held two thumbs up and said, "All right! School is the best!" WOW! That surprised me. I guess we are doing better than I even thought!

This week we will cover (she is 7.5 years old):
Bible: the Tower of Babel--unified rebellion
English: Writing & Spelling Road to Reading and Thinking, McGuffey reader (I'm pondering Raquel's post on English), Daily Grams
History: this week we are studying along with Bible the ancient culture of Hammurabi and the Tower of Babel
Geography: Earthquakes as part of Earth's crust
Math: continue in Ray's Arithmetic--multiplication
Literature: Continuing the study of the solar system
Art: beginning our study of books as art

Princess S is 4 and will be along with us from time to time and she will work on her phonics as well.

At the end of the week I'll discuss in more detail about what principles we discussed in all these subjects and how I approached and reinforced it.

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All Principle Approach teachers must create a notebook of their own. This is what we teach from, along with reference materials and original documents. I thought I'd share about mine in hopes that others will do the same.

My oldest is 7 1/2 and we are in our third year of home educating.
Here is what my notebook contains (in order):

At the front: my home educating constitution
my week-at-a-glance calendar listing all the subjects on one page
dividers for all subjects
In each divider I have my lesson plan pages (done a week on one page), 4-R work, notes and printouts, maps and other resources from my studies.

I keep all this in one 2.5 in. binder.

I have many notebooks already--two for literature, two for history and one for each of the others. I pull from those to put in my Teacher's Notebook so I can have all the material I need quickly accessible. As we continue our studies I will eventually have lots of notebooks for each subject because I will have many years of study on each subject. As my body of knowledge grows, so will my notes (and my "wall of notebooks!").

Eventually we will have a whole library of references, notes and materials we can draw from as we study together. I know kids who came home from college to get their notebooks on certain subjects because they were so thorough. I think that's amazing and I look forward to that kind of work together as a family.

Because we don't just fill notebooks, we fill our hearts and minds. The notebooks simply manifest all the work done on the inside.

I try to make my notebook as neat and complete as possible, as an example to my DD. I don't compare my work to hers but I just let her see it and look through it, noting the clean pages, neat handwriting and the even margins. She can see the standard without being corrected and it helps her see what's expected in a practical way.

I would love to hear how you organize your teaching materials. I know I still have a lot to learn.

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