homeschool at our house, wednesday edition. (day 1, write31days)

Welcome to day one of my 31 days writing challenge!  My topic this month is "31 days of (not so perfect) real life in our homeschool family."  If you want to read the whole series, click here.   

So I guess a good place to start on our first day is to tell you a little bit about our homeschool and our family in general.  This is our family's seventeenth year of homeschooling, although since none of our individual kids have actually been at it for that long, maybe I should really say it's *my* seventeenth year. ;)  Our oldest two kids are college students in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we used to live until we moved out here to Arizona seven years ago.

During Bible time today

So that leaves us with three at home doing school with me.  For arithmetic and language, we use A Beka, which all three have used straight through, from kindergarten on up.  For everything else, we use Ambleside Online, which I highly recommend, a free curriculum based on the Charlotte Mason style of education.  I love this curriculum because it is heavily literature-based and it's such a great way to learn stuff. I was second in my high school graduating class, and I'm not joking when I tell you that I have learned *so* much that I never heard of in my years as a student.  (My husband is jealous of what we get to learn while he's at work.)

Naomi during poetry time

There is actually a reason why I put the parentheses up there that said "not so perfect".  That's because there are many days like today when we don't get started on our "together" stuff until after 10:00.  Bleh. 

Joshua with his math book & Jesse drawing in the living room.  (And those are my knees, in case you wondered.)

With Ambleside, I take the week's assignments and decide which days to read which books.  Somewhere along the way, Wednesday became Shakespeare, poetry and Plutarch day in our house.  Most days, the boys work together on their Ambleside readings and Naomi and I do hers together.  But Shakespeare, poetry & Plutarch we do together.  It's been a lot of fun getting through three Shakespeare plays per school year together.  Right now, we're doing Romeo & Juliet.  Such a classic.  And in Plutarch, we're reading about Marcus Crassus, a Roman leader who wasn't exactly such a great guy.

I'm not entirely sure exactly where these next 31 days will take us, but I'll call this post good for a start.  (Which I guess isn't bad, since my last blog post was in July.)