Images and Notes on Our Homeschool Days

Here is a random sampling of some real-to-life images of our typical homeschool days in this season. 

Note: I didn't rearrange anything to make these pictures prettier. I wanted to capture images of what our days actually look like right now. 

And I did not manage to capture images of every single part of our curriculum, but here is sampling taken as I moved through the house this week. 

In this picture, my 10th grader is reading a portion of "Classical Music for Dummies" for a short paper on a composer while she's eating her lunch. She and I had both been working on various other things at different chairs at the table, so you can see that it gets quite messy. We clean up in time for dinner. 

Since the girls are old enough to work independently and make their own lunches, we don't always eat lunch together. But when we do, we usually listen to a podcast or an audio book. We started listening to Adorning the Dark by Andrew Peterson the other day.

The girls are in a few art classes through Delightful Art Co., and I find that adding so much art to their lives is breathing life and meaning into all the more academic work they do. So they are constantly making new art, and naturally, it usually always applies directly or indirectly to something they are learning in another subject. I've put these floating shelves in the classroom. They serve a dual purpose- their art has a place to rest and dry, but it can also be displayed and enjoyed for a few days at a time. 

The oldest is watching a Devotional Biology video in this pic. She's actually working through two biology texts this year- Apologia with labs and Devotional Biology- reading the text and watching the lectures. 

The youngest is reading The Secret Garden and eating her lunch of choice. She'll end of practicing rhetoric with the content in this book and writing an essay using The Lost Tools of Writing. 

Here she is drawing a map step by step with the help of "How to Draw -" by Kristin Draeger on the iPad. She's learning to draw all the countries of the world by memory. 

One of the my oldest daughter's art classes is "Paint Your Way Through Biology," so this is a beautiful painting of an animal cell and its parts sitting up to dry. 

The girls practice piano and/or guitar daily. They are helping on worship teams at church, so that often means they have a lot of practice to get prepared. Music is another thing I am very consciously letting them make the time for. Interestingly, they always manage to get the more academic work done, too, eventually, no matter how long they practice music. 

More painting, following a live teacher on the laptop. Here's that painting of autumn leaves finished and on display. The mosaic is my younger daughter's art project in her online art class for this week- a mosaic of an autumn scene, too. 

 More reading

These images certainly don't represent everything they do. 

There aren't any pictures of the girls doing their Latin, Math, Logic, Writing...  but that happens almost daily, too. 

I hope these images demonstrate that school doesn't have to look anything like traditional school. 

And learning can be done anywhere for its own sake and as a way of life. 

Arcus, our sun conure, supervises all from one perch or another throughout the house. He likes to add elements of chaos to keep the girls from getting too bored, too focused, or too comfortable at any given time.