Goss Homeschool Academy

This is the ultimate board/card game gift recommendation post! We love playing games and enjoy playing with our family and as a party! Here are some of our favorites broken up into different categories: Educational games Wildcraft is a game that teaches how natural herbs and plants can help heal common ailments. The game is cooperative so everyone works together to finish the game play! Scrambled States of America is a book and also a cute video on Amazon Prime. The game is a lot of fun and teaches state facts like nicknames, geography, and state mottoes! The makers of Bird Bingo also have Bug Bingo ! The illustrations are beautiful! We love this game! Ticket to Ride is also a great introduction to geography! It is a game of strategy and the "First Journey" is easier to play than the traditional Ticket to Ride game! Strategy Games Like Ticket to Ride, Catan has a junior version that makes the game play easier for elementary age students. Gamewright has amazing strategy ca...

  As we gather together with family and friends for Thanksgiving in our homeschool community I was thinking about a song we could sing all together during our celebrations! We have 2 "Friendsgivings" coming up as well as our own family celebration this month. Here are four songs that you can enjoy this month! Maybe add one to your morning time each day this month! Click the link with each title to listen to the song! 1. Thanksgiving Nature Song The first song that came to mind is our Thanksgiving Song that we sing each month at our Nature Adventure ! This is a melody I wrote to go along with the Ralph Waldo Emerson poem. 2. The Doxology I will forever be thankful to my mom who taught me to sing the Doxology every time we gathered the produce from our garden each season! It will always have a place in my heart as a prayer of Thanksgiving to God for his blessings! 3. For the Beauty of the Earth As the student conductor of the childrens' chroale I worked with in college I b...

  When I finished writing Composer Study Companion in 2019 I had no idea what a blessing it would be for our own family during the pandemic. I had been doing some fun activities with composers for over 10 years in the public schools and when we started homeschooling I was blessed to continue sharing my love and passion for music. During the past 6 years of home educating I have found many parents unsure about how to implement composer study in their home. Simply playing and listening to music isn't enough in my opinion. A student needs to develop a relationship with the life of the composer. ( Read more! ) Biographies are the key to this step - enter the Thomas Tapper biographies! https://amzn.to/3AOjXzm After finding these biographies I realized the missing component for many parents was knowing WHAT music to use during the study. I have my own favorites by each composer and pulled some of those as well as the popular pieces by each composer. I compiled these listening pieces with...

Two years ago I taught a Tennessee history class to 4-6 grade boys so my son would have the experience of learning state history with friends and we could check out fun field trip locations to make that history come alive! I blogged about my resources here and have an outline of a curriculum you could use with your family! Now that my daughter is 4th grade, I wanted to give her the same experience but format it in a way that she and her friends would enjoy a kind of "living history" by learning crafts that illustrate the time period of history. Add in American girls and the historical fiction stories and we have a winner of a class! I hope this post is inspirational to you and you can find that you have a schedule that works well for you! For our family, we scheduled 5 weeks of lessons in the spring and 5 weeks of lessons in the fall. You could easily spread out these lessons to last many more weeks! I do send parents recommended links and videos to watch at home in order to...

I am reflecting on the providence of God through the past 6+ years of homeschooling my children and feeling so thankful for the consistency of my friends that meet with me each month to discuss Charlotte Mason's writings. I know I've written in a few places about the full cycle of homeschooling in my life, but I thought I would make one post that has links to each volume that we studied and my own journey on this road. In 1985, my mom was still a new Christian. She and my dad found the Lord not long after they settled down together in Flint, MI in 1980. They were discipled and loved on by an amazing church and had the zeal and love for God that sought His will for their lives. In 1985 my mom had me (age 5) my brother (age 2) and was expecting my youngest brother that would be born in January 1986. The schools around us were not the best and my parents didn't have the money for private schools. My mom told me that the moments leading up to my kindergarten year made her nervo...

Grades 4 and 6! I can't even believe it! Our homeschool journey seems richer and richer each year but I also feel like it takes longer to plan and have a guideline for our curriculum. As with many of my previous year posts, using the Delectable Education curriculum templates helps me streamline my subjects and topics for each year. Both Christian and Eva Mae are Form 2 this year. That means more written narrations, independent reading, and additional subjects like real Shakespeare readings, Plutarch, and Latin will come into the mix for both of them! Instead of a scheduled spreadsheet for each week, I am moving to a notebook system for myself and for the kids. I read this post several years ago - with all of our classes that are happening through the week, I feel that scheduling as we go is going to be the most efficient and consistent for us this year. In this post I will list our resources and links for each subject along with some timeframes that I expect us to complete. For ...

  For the 2021-2022 school year we will be following the Ambleside Online schedule for artists, and the Composer Study Companion Volume 3 for the composers! Term 1 - Van Eyck / Verdi Term 2 - Boticelli / Schubert Term 3 - Fredrich / Grieg For the resources we will be using, visit A Humble Place Blog to download the artist prints and read more about artist study! Visit Composer Study Companion to see how we use the biography books and the companion book to study the music!