Last week we finished up Term One of our 2024-2025 Charlotte Mason homeschool year, and it was a really good term! Mr. Ten is in Form 2B and Mr. Seven is in Form 1A, and I feel like this was the first term since Mr. Seven started formal lessons in which everything ran smoothly and I was able to balance the full load of two students.
TERM ONE REFLECTIONS IN OUR CHARLOTTE MASON HOMESCHOOL
WHAT WENT REALLY WELL DURING TERM ONE
After struggling through Term 3 last year, I was a bit nervous going into this school year. I wanted to makes sure I was completely prepared, though, so this summer I spent hours and hours prepping for the school year and trying to mitigate any challenges I could foresee. The planning paid off, and Term One went really smoothly!
Our Timetable. I worked really hard to design a timetable that I thought would be successful – and it was! After several years of homeschooling, I’m finally figuring out when I need to schedule certain subjects to make sure they don’t fall off the timetable or get skipped. I still need to make a few adjustments, but overall, we stuck to our timetable more consistently than ever before, which feels like a huge win!
Mr. Ten’s Independent Subjects. This year with Mr. Ten in Form 2, I’ve been really diligent to begin having him do a few subjects independently. Because of his dyslexia, reading is still a bit of challenge (he can read really well, but he gets very fatigued), so we began utilizing audiobooks this year and that has gone really well. He listens to Our Island Story and Stories from the History of Rome on audiobook, and after he listens to his assigned chapters, comes and narrates what he heard. His narrations have been excellent, so I know that’s working well. There’s no audiobook for his science book, Find the Constellations by H.A. Rey, but the readings are pretty short, so I have had him read those on his own and narrate. Again, it has thankfully gone really well!
By having Mr. Ten do a few of his subjects independently, that has freed me up to work with Mr. Seven on subjects that he can’t do on his own, such as reading and spelling. I think that has also contributed to our timetable’s success, because I don’t feel like I have to be present for everyone all of the time.
Physical Geography. This year, we’ve been utilizing the Physical Geography help that ADE offers, and it has been a game changer! I’ve owned the Outdoor Geography book for a few years now, but I’ve been so overwhelmed by how to implement it that it just sat on my shelf. This year, we’ve been working through the projects, like making a giant sundial, and we’ve enjoyed it so much!
Folk Dancing. This was another subject that we often failed to do consistently, but ADE also just added a Folk Dancing resource – complete with video instructions. That has also been a game changer for us, and we successfully learned our first folk dance!
WHAT WE STRUGGLED WITH DURING TERM ONE
Attitudes & Whining. Mr. Seven has really lapsed into a habit of whining, and it’s certainly something we’re going to have to address as we start Term Two. Some days, he comes to the table happily and cheerfully does everything I ask. Other days, he’s so resistant to lessons that he becomes a puddle on the floor and whines and complains. It takes a lot of effort to get him back on track on those days, and it wastes precious time.
Math. I love math and I love teaching math, but it has become a pretty big struggle for Mr. Ten. I suspect that there’s a bit of dyscalculia going on, so I’m working to implement some tools to set him up for success in math; however, I know he’s getting really discouraged by how hard math is to him and I don’t want that to impact his overall attitude about math.
CHANGES & ADJUSTMENTS I MADE DURING THE TERM
I have yet to get through an entire term in which I didn’t make at least some changes and adjustments. It’s a good practice for me to continuously evaluate how things are going and be flexible enough to make changes where needed. This term, I ended up making some changes to Spanish. If you’ve followed our homeschooling journey at all, you know that Spanish has been a constant source of frustration for me. We’ve struggled to find a program that’s a good fit for us, and we’ve gone through several!
This term, we started out with The ULAT, which I love, but I think it’s really just too far over my kids’ heads. We weren’t making any real progress, so I took a step back to problem-solve. At just the right time, a bilingual friend of mine suggested we just read stories in Spanish. We had tried that before, but using a very structured program with a lot of components. That didn’t work for us. But her suggestion was to get the Spanish version of a book that we already love in English and just read it daily.
We ended up choosing La Oruga Muy Hambrienta (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), because there’s a board book AND an audiobook available. We simply listened to the audiobook every single day and flipped through the book to point at the pictures as the narrator read it. That was a huge success, and I feel like we learned more vocabulary last term than we have in several years of our terrible attempts at Spanish!
LOOKING AHEAD TO TERM TWO
We’re on our two-week term break now, which gives me time to prep for Term Two. While I purchase and prep most of our materials and supplies during the summer, I usually save some of the term subjects and purchase those throughout the year. For example, we study a different artist each term, so I buy the picture study aids throughout the school year to spread out the purchases a bit.
We’ll be studying Emily Carr as our artist, Wendell Berry as our poet, and Scott Joplin as our composer. We’ll also be switching our Astronomy for Physics in science, and we’ll start paper modeling for handicrafts.
I’m excited and very encouraged after such a great start to the year!
Those are my term one reflections! How has the beginning of your homeschool year been?
