Reflections on 2024-2025


Thanks for stopping by to my corner of the web with this breakdown of our homeschool year! I blog these updates mostly for my own records. I love looking back to see what we've accomplished and I hope that my children will enjoy the saga when they are older!

Around this time last year I was posting our plans for the 2024-2025 school year. It's amazing how fast time flies! Several times in the past two semesters I have enjoyed reflecting on that post to see what worked (or didn't work.) Reviewing that post helped me spot my weaknesses as the facilitator of their education.

This year was a bit different from past years as I navigate "Form IV" (Here is a resource on high school with Charlotte Mason.) In many ways our planning and implementation of the curriculum was the same - we had our subjects in Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, and Knowledge of the Universe. And we did a lot of family read alouds for these subjects like we have done every year. The way it was different was in the expectation and inspection of a lot more independent work.

Narration

We have always implemented narration into our school curriculum as it is a foundational principle of a Charlotte Mason education. I require written narrations from Christian and Eva Mae either in their narration notebooks (simple spiral bound compositional books) or as a typed narration. Once they send me their typed narration I print it and put it in their school folder. This has worked so well for us this year and I really enjoy reading the development of their own "voices" through their written word. We've also been using the Karen Glass Art of Composition book this year - jumping around a bit since I've implemented ideas from her book Know and Tell over the past several years. One of the big changes we've done in their writing is focusing on writing introductions and conclusions to longer narrations and allowing some personal opinion to form the narration into an essay on some topics. I taught an essay class before the school year in order to help Christian and some of his friends organize their thoughts and ideas into essay papers. (Check out my guide that uses the books The Lively Art of Writing and Know and Tell.)

Clubs

This has been the highlight of our school year. We have three clubs - Book Club, Nature Club, and Science Club. Our book clubs are featured on my Kind + Cultivated blog where I have pictures and ideas for you to host your own parties to celebrate literature! I really enjoyed each month of reading and activities as part of our literature curriculum this year.

Nature club is a passion of mine and since my kids are teens now I approach this group in a way that caters to older students.....with food! I feel that it is important to learn and identify the plants that grow around us - foraging is a way to do that in a really fun environment yet still teach scientific information about the plants. 

Science club focused on physics this year through a once a month lab gathering in addition to our weekly reading and narration schedule. Christian also participated in the American Rocketry Challenge with a local rocket club led by one of our homeschool friends! It was the perfect activity to go with our "physics lab" this year and the boys learned a LOT!

High School

At the beginning of this year I sat down with Christian to discuss college plans. Right now we don't have any certain plans or specific path, but he does have interest in computers. In order to make college more affordable there are ways to get credit in high school to transfer to one of our local colleges. We decided to take the first step into this realm by studying and taking the CLEP exam in American history. This allowed for the "high school credit" that is required by our state AND it gave him 3 college credits to transfer to a college after he graduates high school! I was so proud of him and wrote a detailed summary of our experience that you can download here!

I also blogged halfway through the year on how things were going with his high school level books and assignments. You can read about that here!

Final week of school

Our final week of school ended when books were finished, papers were written, and reflections were made on our last week tradition of an exam table!

I will be posting our 2025-2026 school year plans on the blog in the next few weeks! What a blessing it has been to homeschool my children all through the years. Thank you Lord! If you have questions about homeschooling with living books or want to learn more about the Charlotte Mason philosophy of education feel free to reach out!


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