2021-2022 Year End Review
This time last year I remember sitting at my computer typing out all my plans for the upcoming school year curriculum. It is such a blessing to sit here at the completion and see all the rich experiences we were able to have throughout the year! This will probably be a long post! I like to be thorough that way I can come back at a later date and see what events I might have forgotten. I will still organize the subjects in the three main topics: The knowledge of God, the knowledge of man, and the knowledge of the universe. If you want to go back to the post last year and see how I organized everything in the planning click here!
The Knowledge of God
Bible Reading - I feel that this year was not as consistent at following along through an entire book of the Bible. We did have many wonderful lessons in scripture through Sunday worship together, (almost) daily personal devotion time, and scripture memorization. Since I can look back and see that more attention is needed to the consistent reading through a book of the Bible I have adjusted our plans for next year! I'll post all the details in the next blog post about our 2022-2023 year.
Catechism was something that came up in conversation many times throughout the year! We had wonderful discussions about "How and why did God create us?" and "What is sin?" and "Why do we need the law?" Having a quick answer with scripture to explain theology is an important part of our knowledge of God and apologetics. Our focus was questions 1-30 this year and they did a great job studying and remembering.
Heroes of the Faith - We finished reading and narrating about Justin and Origen this school year. I am using the book Peril and Peace (along with the rest of the series by Brandon Withrow.) The writing is so well done for upper elementary through high school! I also have paired the stories with Torchlighter videos. I am not positive which lives the kids have watched this year, but highly recommend this animated series. I know for sure they did St. Patrick and John Bunyan this year on my request. They've watched others along with videos by Superbook, the Creators, What's in the Bible, Owlegories, and Ryan Defrates. If your church has a RightNow Media account you can check out all these great programs!
Hymn - we recite and sing the hymns for our school year. Each co-op meeting we have is a time to learn the story behind the hymn writer and discuss the meaning of the words in the hymn. The Holy Spirit has ministered so many times to me as we drive in the car singing these beautiful praises to God. I'm so thankful for this rich addition to our feast! My favorite hymn this year was We Praise Thee O Lord. "Revive us again" has been the prayer of my heart this year. Here's a clip of our co-op singing Like a River Glorious!
Knowledge of Man
Music - I'm going to go ahead and get this big subject out of the way since we do so much! Piano lessons are going well for both Christian and Eva Mae but I could be more consistent with lessons for them. We've adopted more of a "recital crunch" and I end up teaching them musical tricks instead of working through methodically. I am going to work on that this year! Christian added trumpet and baritone to his music study and has done an incredible job practicing each week and progressing through his skills! We love Overture Music Academy and can't wait to start up again this fall!
Choir on Monday mornings has been a wonderful blessing to our week! I love starting the week off with disciplined work in rehearsals! Harmony Homeschool Choir is a gem for homeschoolers in the area! I'm so glad we can participate! Sarah and Amanda teach solfege and a little theory along with the repertoire of the music we perform at the end of each semester!
Composer parties were a hit for the second year in a row! When I wrote Composer Study Companion I had a vision of being able to celebrate music history and appreciation with others and I'm so thankful for this slice of joy that comes with our feast! We met three times this year to celebrate Verdi, Schubert, and Grieg! At our Verdi party we had fun hammering away with "The Anvil Chorus," at the Schubert party we learned about chords and played Boomwhackers to "The Trout,", and at the Grieg party we learned a fun body percussion rhythm pattern to perform with "In the Hall of the Mountain King!" Each party also had some fun music theory games and folk dances. We're looking forward to next year!
Folk songs and solfa were fun to implement into our co-op! I think the Crabfish was our favorite folk song of this year!
Artist Study
Our artist study with our co-op has been such a blessing! We work at home discussing the artist of the term and then gather once per term to have Shannon give us a lesson in an art technique and information about the artist's life!
Geography was a combination of mapwork with Trick Geography, Halliburton's Book of Marvels, and Madeline Brandeis books. I'm really impressed with Christian and Eva Mae's grasp on the countries of Europe, especially northern, central, and western countries. They still need some work on eastern European countries so we will be working on that during the first semester of school next year. We also have about 8 chapters left in Book of Marvels. These chapters are also placed in eastern European countries so it will work well to begin here in August. We finished Mitz and Fritz of Germany and enjoyed following along with these two German children and their adventures all over the country with their toy maker father. We added drone videos of several of the cities along with videos by Rick Steves during the readings in both Halliburton and Brandeis. I also did this quiz with them several times through the year. In February we had a fun little Geography tea and celebrated Denmark with a huge Kringle, stories about Hans Christian Andersen, and Legos! I hope to do a few of these again next year for some fun!
History included a lot of books dealing with American historical events from 1900-today. We learned about the Titanic, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, Civil Rights, and more! A lot of these topics were main themes within our No Frills Book Club selections.
Eva Mae also studied Tennessee history this year with several friends.
We went through the books Long March to Tennessee and Work for Freedom this school year. Our studies finished with a trip to the capitol building and Tennessee State Museum where a docent took us through the World War II and Civil Rights displays. Click here to read all about Eva Mae's class!
Our ancient history was a little hit or miss. We did enjoy the audio book of Our Island Story on Monday mornings. I still want to complete this series with the kids but it will be on the back burner as we jump into ancient Greek history next year.
We did finish the American History podcasts that I blogged about last year and enjoyed the combination of music and history each month! The kids also watched the entire Learn Our History DVDs and led to some great discussions about the Cold War and politics!
I did not follow through with Christian reading RJ Unstead like I planned. I assigned some reading to him early in the school year and he lost the book! LOL! (We found it when I cleaned out the bookcases last week!) We also didn't enter dates into our history timeline like I had intentions to. I'm still figuring out how to work on this part of our feast. We do great with nature journaling but I always forget about the history binder.
A lot of people don't like that in a Charlotte Mason education you have multiple streams of history, but I LOVE it! So far I haven't seen any confusion from Christian or Eva Mae. Our focus was mostly on events in the US during 1900-today and they had great narrations and discussions over many of the hot topics of this century. I also really liked the Joy Hakim books to keep us streamlined on the chronology of events. Cornerstones of Freedom were also great additions to learning about the Titanic, Iwo Jima, D-Day, and USS Arizona.
Grammar/Language Arts continues to be great with the Gentle Feast language arts packets. Eva Mae needs more spelling and handwriting work so we will focus on that next year. Having lessons in Latin and Chinese is also really helpful with English grammar! We also did a lot more with our written narrations which helped a lot with grammar! One of my favorite aspects of written narration was gathering once a month with our science class and hearing how each child developed their own style of writing. It was really neat to hear different narrations both orally and written! I can't wait to continue on in this tradition next year! (Picture of Eva Mae reading her written narration to the class)
Poetry/Literature was another favorite subject! We had poetry recitation parties and they loved getting up to share their favorite poem! I love the Bulfinch copies I have but we were not as consistent as I would have liked with the readings. I plan to continue to reference the book and assign reading as needed when topics of the stories come up - especially in the Age of Chivalry book. I considered our book club each month as part of our literature component of the feast.
Plutarch/Latin continued for Christian and his friends this year! They did an amazing job translating the Latin sentences into English for our Storybook Latin book! It was so much fun to see the lightbulbs go off in their eyes as they figured out how the vocabulary changed for each part of speech. Here's an example: "Graculus ad pavones ambulat." This shows that graculus is singular - "the jackdaw," pavones is plural "peacocks," ambulat is verb that means "walk," and ad is a word that means "to." See if you can translate!
Christian and Eva Mae also continued Chinese lessons with Meili this year. She graduated high school and is going off to college! We will miss her so much and will look into something new this year to continue our studies.
Handicrafts were spread out at different times through the year. We learned how to crochet and made crochet pumpkins, Christian and Eva Mae made handcraft gifts for our co-op (Eva Mae made some tin magnet busy boxes and Christian made some playing cards), we had our spring handicraft fair where Eva Mae made two kinds of bracelets and Christian made some Harry Potter wands, and Eva Mae's history class also included sewing lessons!
PE included HIIT exercises but not as consistently as I would like. I'm wanting to figure out a better routine for us for us next year. We did enjoy doing a routine together at our monthly science gathering! I even had my trainer come out one month and do a health and wellness talk with them!
Knowledge of the Universe
Science was a fun subject this year because we gathered together once a month to discuss what we learned! Our topics were human anatomy and physics. In human anatomy we read a section from All About the Human Body and then shared our written narrations in class. We worked as groups to put together the Squishy Human Body and carry on discussions about the different body parts.
In physics we did the same by reading assignments, writing narrations, and then practicing the physics demonstrations through building the Thames and Cosmos simple machine set.
These gatherings once a month are what we called "Screen Free Science" at my friend Stacy Jagger's farm. She wrote a book called The 30 Day Blackout and is a proponent for limiting screen use in families. I love coming to her peaceful farm and watching the children interact with each other! This group was one of the highlights of our year!
We also added a component of cooking each month. We followed a Hello Fresh recipe together at the farmhouse and then students went home and cooked it again for their families!
As part of our monthly science class, students were encouraged to think of a science fair project and work toward creating a presentation board for our first Wild + Free science fair! It was an amazing hit with the community! We had some great presentations from everyone and they all had such a fun time!
Scouting is another subject that I feel like is part of science. This year with our scouting group we learned about orienteering, 
visited a bike shop and learned about the physics and anatomy involved in cycling,
learned more about the spine by visiting a chiropractor,
Service projects are also part of our scouting assignments and we were able to put together 30 homeless bags for a ministry in Lebonan, TN. We gathered for a Friendsgiving to put together the bags and pray for the people we would be able to help.
Nature is also a big part of science and we continued studying the herbs through Herb Fairies. We finished the books in February and started them again with a new nature group! We will be continuing them again until March of next year but we will also continue to add in our Nature Adventure classes. Topics we journaled this school year were: Elderberry, Marshmallow, Burdock, Pine, Rose, Cinnamon, Dandelion, Moss, Chickweed, Mayflies, Violet, Mulberry, Plantain, Lemon balm. (See all our Nature Adventure posts here!) We will continue to have a topic of study for the month next year and continue to add to our nature journals each month. I'm thinking that I need to habit stack nature journaling with history timeline journaling for next year!
Math is always what Eva Mae says is her favorite subject and I think it's because I fail at having us sit down and do math every single day. I like to do "car math" where I give them problems to solve in their head and drill them on their multiplication tables! LOL! Christian and Eva Mae both did really well when we did sit down and work through problems. Christian is on "grade level" with all the fraction, decimal, division, and geometry work for 6th grade but Eva Mae needs to work more on basic addition and subtraction with 3 and 4 numbers. We haven't been able to really get to long division yet either. I love homeschooling for the main reason that we can work at mastery and pay attention to the whole person. Understanding weaknesses and working to improve them and also encouraging the gifts and talents of each individual child is the best part of a home education!
As I went through our calendar from the 2021-2022 I have some honorable mention trips! They work well as a "planning from behind" concept because even though I didn't plan them in our curriculum for the year, they still became wonderful learning experiences for our family!
Dunbar Cave
Garden classes
We started out the year with a "Taste and See" class where we walked all around the garden to learn what had been planted and why! We had a lettuce class, pumpkin class, and sweet potato class in the fall semester!
Soundwaves
We found out that Soundwaves gives educational field trips! Yes, please!!! The educational part of it was just a safety talk - the fun was spending all day in the water park!
Bernheim Forest
We went to this magical park twice in 2021. The Forest Giants are amazing and their outdoor nature playground is massive! I highly recommend a trip for your family!
Louisiana
Country Music Hall of Fame
Part of the history stream of 1900-today was learning a little about the history of country music! Visiting Dunbar Cave was a great kick off to the early years of "hillbilly" music! At the Country Music Hall of Fame we learned more about the history of listening devices and the people that make up Country music!
Earth experience
Cannonsburgh Village
Another fun field trip in our backyard! This historic village is a must visit! The living history guides do a wonderful job giving information about how early Tennessee life was like! Structures from the 1800s are on the property and the park was built with a bicentennial grant from the federal government.
Civil War Battles
Speaking of the 1800s, a friend from Michigan came down for a battle reenactment of the Stones River Battle this year! We studied the Civil War last year so this was a wonderful review of some of the battles. We toured the grounds where the reenactors camped and enjoyed watching a cavalry battle on the field!
Another field trip was having Margie Thessin give us a walking tour of downtown Franklin as we discussed the Battle of Franklin and her book "Lizzie's War."
We had so many fun experiences this year - I didn't even include some of the concerts and shows we went to (Eva Mae did amazing in Aladdin), hikes that we took with our W+F friends, and other homeschool and life learning events. I feel so blessed to have this rich feast and look back on all the amazing learning Christian and Eva Mae had in 2021-2022!
Thank you for reading this massive post and please reach out to me if you would like to sit down and discuss how you can customize your child's feast! I offer consultations at my home so you can look through a lot of different books and I can listen to what your needs are to help you gather ideas of what would work well for your homeschool!
Reach out to me anytime!
Comments
Post a Comment