PrincipledMom™

I'm not sure what to say here, because if you read this blog at all you know exactly how I educate my kids. But I'll try to sum it up in a nutshell. For more details, poke around in my archives.

As my name indicates (and my tag line too), I use the Biblical Principle Approach. That means I view things governmentally, that is, who or what is in control. We see that all subjects originate from God and how we fit into HisStory. How does this work day to day?

Our lessons use a natural 4-R process of learning: research, reason, relate, record. We use a Christian classical method, I guess you would say. The lessons spring from Biblical principles and we expand them as the children are able to reason more deeply. Our focus is not on topics, or even subjects, but on the principles and rudiments of each subject. Once a child understands the basic principles and rudiments he has the tools to master the subject as an independent learner.

I absolutely adore BPA and will never use anything else (and believe me, I've tried!). Once I learned how to teach mychild using Biblical principles it's hard to do anything else, even with the hard work it requires of me.

 I have a wide gap between my kids (4th grade, 1st grade and 3yo), so I have to rely on the principles during our lessons. I expand them to fit the ability of each of them. My 3yo loves to sit with us and "do school too," so he sits in his own chair and I give him work to do (coloring, file folder games, etc) because if he's not in the room with us something will go wrong! We have some school, take a break, have a little more, and then after lunch we do foreign language and enrichment. I try to break up the day into small bites so we don't get burned out with a big chunk of time. It works for us.

We try to do a variety of things--writing, activities, reading aloud, whatever will spice up the lesson without being busy work. I try to keep lessons simple and not get carried away with activities. I find I tend to focus on the next thing and not the point of the lesson, so we keep things simple.

We also educate year-round, so we take off the month of December to focus on Christ's birth. We take off many days throughout the year and it is working well for us. I like not having big chunks of time off to goof around. I plan my lessons all along, according to a basic plan I create in August each year. I can tweak it as necessary throughout the year. 

We are heading into our fifth year of home education and in a lot of ways I still feel like a newbie. But that's part of the joy for me. There's always new ground to cover, new joys to discover and new challenges to overcome. And there's nothing more satisfying than seeing my child "get it", when their eyes light up at the satisfaction of learning. I wouldn't trade that for anything.

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