After being inspired by ladies from my yoga class, I decided to set New Year goals. Categories include: personal, family, home-school, work, and financial. I figure this should cover most areas of my life that I need to focus on in 2018.
In effort for some accountability, I wanted to post goals.
Personal:
- Read 60 books
- Eat Whole30 for January
- Daily 1 hour exercise
- Loose holiday weight
Family:
- Ski/snowboard
- Baseball season
- Crafting
- Texas trip
- Bear hunts
- Camp/scout
- Archery shoots
- Elk hunts
Homeschool:
- Morning basket daily
- Arrow units most months
- Weekly play games
- Poetry teas each month
Work:
- Lead 5 classes per week at local studio
- Set up Etsy shop
- Launch 10%Outdoors blog
- Blog weekly on home-school life
Financial:
- Pay off truck
- Save enough cash to cover Christmas next year
FableHaven, by Brandon Mull, is the series we are just over half-way through reading and can NOT get enough. While our read aloud time happens in our Morning Basket time, I wanted to give it a flair of its own, so I chose to use the audible version. The character voices and performance of the reading draws us in each time. We simply can't listen to only one chapter at a time. Truth be told each day we listen to 2 or 3 chapters still wanting more. The chapters average about 30 minutes each so this is a lot of read aloud time.
Shared stories like these have been the heart of our home-school from the beginning and remain so to this day and hopefully in the future. Embarking on the Bravewriter lifestyle, my desire was to incorporate copy-work, grammar, and reverse dictation center on our current read aloud. This is much like the Arrow Guides found on the Bravewriter website. With a little bit of help from the from the free Arrow Guide (James and the Giant Peach) for layout ideas and Pinterest for short grammar definitions and anchor charts, I was able to create a 4 week guide with an ending writing project.
Lesson learned:
Don't be afraid to love what you love and create what you need around it.
After sharing our Morning Basket, I felt compelled to share how we include rich, meaningful activities into our weekly routine. I try to be flexible when inspiration hits us, so she keeps visiting, but this is how I frame our week.
Monday: At the request of my kids, I added an additional free write first thing Monday mornings. Math games are slotted for Mondays because I love alliteration. This currently includes Munchkin, Sorry, Trouble, and Animal Card-line. The list goes on and on.
Tuesday: Poetry Teatime complete with snacks, hot tea, and lots of poetry books. Currently, I added May B. by Caroline Starr Rose. This is a novel written in prose. I read from this book while they eat the yummy treat. Then each chooses poems to share aloud.
Wednesday: Again with the alliteration, we do word games on Wednesday. This includes Scrabble, Banana-grams, Hangman, Charades, and Express Yourself. These are the most fun and get the most loud. This is also the day we include work on writing projects.
Thursday: Because I have budding entrepreneurs, we listen to the Jr. Money Maker's podcast on Thursdays. This works nicely since our home-school group meets at the park in the afternoon so we listen on our drive. I also like to include nature studies on Thursdays but sometimes it happens on Friday or even the weekend.
Friday: Friday free writes happen each Friday with donuts and a favorite drink. It is amazing how sugar gets the words flowing. It is also the day we conduct messy experiments from our Big Book of Massive Epic Engineering Disasters.
