Goss Homeschool Academy

The season of advent is one of my favorite homeschool traditions. In fact, my teenagers yesterday were so excited to see that I moved our regular school books up to the bonus room to prepare for our Christmas decorations and Christmas School - they look forward to it as much as I do! We take a month off of our regular scheduled curriculum and jump into learning that is centered on celebrating the Christmas holiday. In years past we have done something different each December. My first time creating our own December Term was a hodgepodge of different music, literature, and art. We had several years of studying Christmas in other countries through beautiful literature , and last year we focused just on the country of Germany while also adding the literature of Dickens and the science lectures of the Royal Institute . (Follow each hyperlink to see these plans!) I have created a guide this year that stays true to the celebration of the season while also providing a rich literary feast fo...

 I just realized I never added my 2023 Christmas School plans to my blog! Last year was a lot of fun as we enjoyed the month of December as a break from our regular schedule and focused on everything Christmas! I will link all the activities below and you can also download this Middle School Christmas guide for free in my Gumroad store! Science The Royal Institution has a 100+ year tradition of giving science lectures to students at Christmas time. They are called the Christmas Lectures and are perfect for middle school students! Although there was a lot of evolution theory in the series we watched, it was still very informative and entertaining! A perfect example of "Edutainment!" See a list of all the Christmas Lectures here Literature We loved reading the Christmas in Germany book this season and basing all of our food and crafts on the traditions and cultures of Germany! Here is the book we read from: For extra resources like crafts and videos I made a free download here:...

  This month we have been focused on electricity and magnetism in our homeschool. Christian is 9th grade and Eva Mae is 7th grade and this year we have been studying physics in a "one room schoolhouse" type of way. I created a schedule that allows for a 4-5 hour a week assignment for my 9th grader. This includes scheduled reading pages, video lessons, written narrations, and lab homework with completed lab notebook assignments. For Eva Mae, her assignments are less rigorous as a 7th grader and include less reading than Christian, but still written narrations and lab assignments. Read all about my schedule here and download the physics plans for free! As I was preparing our lab activities I thought I would share a lesson plan for your 6-12 grade students that focuses on the difference between volts and current. I found the concept fascinating as we are using coin cell batteries for several projects. If we were using mostly AA batteries we would need to have an electrical resis...

Our monthly hymns and folk songs for 1st semester ( Download lyric sheet here ) August  For the Beauty of the Earth - version 1 / version 2  / acoustic version The Log Driver's Waltz - video / version with orchestra / acoustic version September Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken - video with lyrics  / acoustic version The Water is Wide - James Taylor - Eva Cassidy October How Great Thou Art - story behind the song / Lauren Daigle / Shane and Shane Now is the Hour - acoustic version / Bing Crosby  / history video (Most of the popular songs that grew out of World War II came from the European side of the battle. One of the very few that reach us from the Pacific was “Now is the Hour“, a song of the maori’s of New Zealand, originally known as “Maori Farewell Song“. It was given English lyrics and its English title, and Gracie Fields, the great British musical entertainer, popularised it during the last stages of the war. This was a period when the conflict in Eur...

The journey continues! I'm so blessed to have another year to plan and home educate two amazing people! We have a wonderful community as well that I'll share a little about in this planning post. For reference, if you are interested in any past planning posts you can visit them here: 2023-2024 , 2022-2023 , 2021-2022 , 2020-2021 , 2019-2020 , 2018-2019 , 2017-2018 , 2016-2017 This is the first year I will have a high schooler!!! I can't believe Christian is 9th grade! For that reason, I'm keeping our normal records of books, activities, etc. but also formatting them into transcript form for Christian. I have a long post here all about high school credits. If you're interested in learning more feel free to download the free handout I created for our community. Now, as is typical of my planning posts, I will go through each subject under the Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, and Knowledge of the Universe to share a few things about our school plans! Links to books ...

In the 2023-2024 school year I planned several of our Riches subjects into a Monday morning schedule called " Magnanimous Academy ." I plan to continue this schedule in the 2024-2025 year with a few additions and new ways of approaching the subjects. For this blog post I'll detail each subject and what we plan to study through the year!  Ourselves This was one of my favorite subjects the past year. We read a little less than half of book 1 this past school year. (2023-2024 we read Part I and Part II of Book 1. This year we will read Part III chapters 1-7 in the fall semester, and chapters 8-15 in the spring semester. You can see all the chapters at this post. ) We keep a narration notebook and I have Christian and Eva Mae write down some of the key phrases in each section but the most important part of this subject is the conversations we have during the reading. It ends up becoming a beautiful devotional time as everything we read points back to a life lived by character...