looking forward

I'm looking forward to school starting in a couple of weeks.  I thought about starting a new blog at homeschoolblogger.com specifically for school related posts, but I'm still kind of a rookie at this whole blog world so I thought I should keep it simple and just do it all in one place.  Besides, our homeschool life is really intertwined with our regular daily life since school and home occur together for us.

After posting the other day about needing to get our school room unpacked and organized, I got to work.  I finally ordered the curriculum we'll be using this year from My Father's World.  A friend told me about it a few years ago, but I was already using Heart of Wisdom at the time.  I loved Heart of Wisdom for me.. it was great for Bible study and I learned a lot, but since it is designed to be used with older grades, I found I was having to adapt a lot of the lessons and come up with my own hands-on projects to keep my kids' interest.  So for now, I've decided to switch gears and go with something that already has a lot of fun activities planned out, as well as good, sound teaching.  We'll be doing the unit on Exploring Countries and Cultures, which I'm super excited about, because I have a heart for missions and love geography.  I think we'll have a lot of fun with it and when you're passionate about something, it makes it that much easier to teach.

Speaking of passion and teaching, we've set up an art room in the house too, and Joe is sharing his love of art with the kids.  Judah and I have been sick for the past couple of days, so we stayed home while Joe took the other three kids to church and then to an art store in Minneapolis to get some supplies.  They've all three started painting canvases.  I'll post pictures soon.  We've decided not to get cable here because we all tended to watch too much tv before and we'd rather spend our time more purposefully.  I really wish we had at least a few basic channels right now so we could watch the olympics, but overall I'm thankful we opted not to get it.  So far we're all reading more and the kids are drawing and playing outside a lot.  Once we finish getting everything set up, we'll be doing more art projects and crafts, and I'm really wanting to sew some things.  Stay tuned for updates and pictures of our creations!