An Atmosphere, A Discipline, A Life

Here's what we're going to be learning this year:

After much research, angst, and a fair amount of confusion, I read Susan Wise Bauer's The Well Trained Mind and was struck with the idea of a classical education. Based on an education model called the Trivium, the twelve years of schooling before college are divided into three distinct stages, called the Grammar stage, the Logic stage, and the Rhetoric stage. Bauer does a much better job explaining the classical education philosophy than I ever could here. As Greg and I considered the triumphs and tribulations of our own academic experiences coupled with the way we've observed our children learn thus far, the classical model just made sense.

We decided on Veritas Press for no other reason than we liked it the best. Every curriculum we looked at was great, but we just seemed to click with Veritas and decided to stop hemming and hawing and just go with it. If it's awful, we'll pick something else next year :-).

We're going to be using their Phonics Museum program for language arts and I can not wait to crack open those readers with Chloe and snuggle up on the reading couch we've made in our classroom. We're going to be doing Handwriting Without Tears, Math U See, Bible, and Art Appreciation, with a little poetry and a lot of classical music, creative play, and crafting thrown in. The boys and I will be doing Before Five in a Row, and they will also be going to a traditional preschool a few days a week. I'm not sure what an average day will look like yet, but I'm optimistic that it's going to be fun!

"Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life."

                                   -Charlotte Mason