Home Education Week: Future Goals

Today is the last day of Home Education Week! Dana at Principled Discovery has done a wonderful job setting up writing topics and activities for the week. I am so happy that I participated. The writing topic for today is "Looking Forward ."

 

Looking Forward: Saturday, April 5
What are your goals for home education? What do you hope to instill in your children? Are you planning any changes to how you educate your children?

Our goals for home education are for our children to love and serve Jesus Christ in whatever God calls them to do and to have a passion for furthering the Kingdom of God. We believe that the values that come with hearts of service to Christ will also cause them to want to love and serve others. We also hope to instill a lifelong love of learning in them.

Academics

We are planning to continue with Tapestry of Grace (TOG) for the majority of our children's academic subjects, tweaking it as necessary to fit each child and our family. My sons really don't like to do writing assignments based on their TOG readings. I am going to try to give them a little more leeway in their writing, although I have tried this in the past and it hasn't worked well. However, I've learned a lot from their comments on yesterday's Homeschool Education Week assignment, so I'm hoping to be able to revise their writing assignments with better results this time around. Cardamom Publishers has an inspiring article entitled Teaching Your Children to Write that I am going to leave out as a reminder to myself to use simple ideas to stay focused on writing. Click on the title to go to a free download page if you're interested in reading the article.

I would also like to integrate some extra Bible reading more with TOG's schedule. Year 1 of TOG is mostly from the Bible, but the curriculum also includes a lot of Scripture verses in the teacher's notes each week to help older students make investigate God's hand in history. My plan is to write out the verses for each week of each unit and turn them into a Bible study of sorts, adding verses and probably entire books of the Bible to our study.

I would like to focus more on TOG's hands-on projects, perhaps even cutting back on some of the reading, especially for Jordan. Since science and history intertwine so much, I think I will encourage him to pursue science projects that relate to our current history studies. Of course, anything with battles and weapons would be fine too. :-)

I will also continue to supplement our history studies with This Far By Faith, by A Blessed Heritage. This is going well, and it is important to us that we include "educational resources to foster understanding of the spiritual and racial heritage of children of color" (quote from A Blessed Heritage website - they say it better than I can).

I recently switched to Teaching Textbooks for math for Nathan and Jordan (8th and 7th grades respectively), and it is working well. I plan to continue that through high school unless something changes. I will continue to use a mix of Math Mammoth, living math, and whatever used textbooks I have on hand for Allyson and Kathryn, switching to Teaching Textbooks in sixth or seventh grade (whenever they're ready).

I also want to be more intentional about having planned nature study time and enjoying God's creation together. I recently began participating in the HarmonyArtMom's Green Hour Challenges, which have been so helpful in achieving this. If you are interested in nature study and want a simple way to begin, I highly recommend these weekly challenges.

Living our Faith

We will continue to make mistakes and need forgiveness, as well as read the Bible and pray together as a family. We will also continue to try to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit and be available to serve where He leads, whether it is saving runaway dogs (our daughters' specialty), shoveling a neighbor's driveway (our sons' specialty), making a meal for someone in need, praying for others together, serving at our church, participating in missions trips, or someone unknown future adventure.

I can't begin to tell you how much I have learned by participating in Principled Discovery's Home Education Week. Writing and reading others' posts about the topics "assigned" for the week have really helped me to do some evaluation and put some things into perspective. Thank you so much for hosting this, Dana.

HomeschoolBlogger Comments
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Apr. 5, 2008 - Untitled Comment

Posted by AussieinAmerica

Lots of worthy goals here!

Stacy

Apr. 5, 2008 - Those are some

Posted by SuperAngel

great goals. I can see you are truly blessed by what Mrs. Hanely did! :)

Thank you for your thoughts! I really enjoyed reading them and am glad you liked my article so much!

Prayers and Blessings,
Miss Amanda
http://superangelsblog.com

Apr. 6, 2008 - Untitled Comment

Posted by Anonymous

Lots of great goals!!
Thanks for sharing!!

Heidi
www.jhcckkm.wordpress.com