This year has been healing AND chaotic all in one.
The healing has happened through a more intimate relationship with my Creator, really solid counseling, and Ketamine treatments. I am not the same person anymore. Usually, this time of year, I’m really depressed! I have had some situational anxiety, but I have not experienced depression. This is literally the first time in about 14-15 years. This is HUGE.
But. There has been a lot of chaos as well. The spring was ROUGH (with my job at the time, one of my kids inpatient twice, etc). Summer was hard in different ways. And. This semester has also been one full of chaos. Between issues with trying to put the boys in school and going back to homeschooling (long story), then the process of seeking camp jobs elsewhere (including MANY interviews and traveling for site visits– and not really being able to talk about it much!), holidays, staff retreat here at camp (K and I had Covid during this, so we weren’t able to be involved anyway), and now preparing to move, we have NOT had as much school as necessary. We have also had no routine and consistency in our days.
I’m SO ready to have some routine and consistency in our lives. I am going to “process through” some things by writing about them here. It’s how my brain works!
Some things I will be discussing in this post: Umbrella school, Curriculum, and Nutrition.
Colorado Homeschool Requirements
Because of site visits, holidays, and now moving, the boys and I will be doing school into the summer. Now that we are moving to Colorado, they have specific requirements for attendance and things. I’m actually very excited about the umbrella school! It allows us to bypass required testing, but will allow the kids to have official transcripts and diplomas when they graduate! You can homeschool with-out an umbrella school, but then we would be required to do testing every odd year and there wouldn’t be anything official. There’s a fee to use an umbrella school, but it’s SO worth it to me. It takes a lot of pressure off to wonder if I’m doing enough, doing the right thing, etc. It’s also not very expensive. It has a yearly fee of $65 for the family plus $22 for each kid that they are managing a transcript for. That’s it! The lady that I have been talking with through the whole process of enrollment has been amazing.
The umbrella school that we are using is called Poudre River School. I learned about it from a friend who uses them!
Here’s some info about what they provide:
Homeschool Curriculum Plan
The boys and I have been using IEW grammar, Brave Writer, Math U See, and have slowly been studying ancient history. We have done some basic/general science and Bible. I’m going to be expanding on these things a lot now that we will be more settled.
Side note: We did use free The Good and the Beautiful curriculum downloads for a bit to fill in gaps, but we are back to the stuff that we started the year with now.
The first picture shows the novels that Karis will be studying. We will be using a couple of resources for this… Brave Writer literature guides and Learning Language Arts Through Literature (I got this for $6 on ThriftBooks, and it’s a great resource). We will also be studying poetry through LLATL, Norton English Literature: The Major Authors, and a free download of Norton English Literature 8th Edition. The poets that we will focus on will be: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves T.S. Eliot, and 3 poets of Karis’s choice.
The boys and I will be studying the novels (plus To Kill a Mockingbird– I haven’t received it yet) in the second picture using Brave Writer. There’s also a novel that goes with the biology curriculum that we will study using Brave Writer. I love BW if you can’t tell! Haha!
We will be using IEW for writing and grammar for the boys. We have been attempting to do other writing, but they need more structure. Karis will be using some of the writing assignments from the British Lit curriculum, but I will also have her writing a research paper and argumentative essay. She will knock all of this out of the park. She’s a great writer.
The boys will finally begin biology with Guest Hollow. I have had it for a long time, but things have been too crazy to really dig in. I love it because it’s literature based and multi-sensory. Lots of kinesthetic (hands-on), auditory, and visual ways of learning. Karis will be doing their anatomy and physiology; I’m still waiting on the books to go with it. She has been doing A&P in school this semester, so we will just focus on what she hasn’t learned in school yet.
She will be doing Notgrass Economics and Math U See pre-calculus. The boys and I will use a combo of Gather ‘Round Homeschool history units with Story of the World. Gather ‘Round says middle school, but their middle school is through age 15 (which is where Ethan is). I love the format of Story of the World, but it’s really meant for younger kids, so I am adding to it. We have already been doing some ancient history this past semester.
A lot of this will be continued into next year (for the boys). Well. We are basically just going to do year round school and take breaks as we want/need to!
The boys are finishing Math U See pre-algebra and will be starting Algebra 1. I had to do a lot of filling in gaps for them, but they are doing well now.
We use He Reads Truth and She Reads Truth for their Bible.
And I also got Karis a book about architecture written by an architecture professor as an intro. It’s called Architecture for Teens. It looks awesome and fun!
I’m trying to get everything organized and planned so we can get started when we move! I’m SO excited to be homeschooling all of my kids this semester.
Karis will be able to handle quite a bit independently, but I will do some things with her. She asked me to, and I am going to love spending that time with her. Robert is going to teach her math. Ethan is wanting to do more independently, so I’m going to have him do that more. I need to figure out a schedule/routine to make this all work.
I will be doing some things using Google products (forms, slides, and classroom), and some things will be printed and used that way. There will be a variety of things happening! Lots of literature and hands-on activities.
Nutrition
Part of the “homesteading movement” includes eating “real food” which usually involves a lot of animal products including a lot of animal fat (butter, tallow, lard) and coconut oil. I thought I was doing the right thing by going that route because that’s what’s “preached” in that world. Basically, if it was homemade, it was fair game in my mind.
Something else that has been hard is that I have put WAY too much stock in what my nutritionist has said, and she calls a lot of foods “poison” (that I think are healthy) and focuses way too much on things that don’t matter. She’s also very much into “real food” and organic everything.
I had blood-work done recently and despite not eating as much processed food, my cholesterol has gotten worse. The highest it has ever been.
I’m going back to science/evidence-based nutrition. I know how to eat well. Lean meat, unsaturated fat, fruits and veggies, etc, and a balanced plate with protein, healthy fat, healthy carbs, and veggies. Eating that way is how I felt my best over the years, and it’s actually much more simple. It is also the best way to fuel my body for workouts and for increasing muscle mass. I will continue eating some sourdough and chips and things cause yum. And balance and all that.
I’m excited about having a lot more space at our new home! I will have several spaces to put my home gym. I’m excited to get that figured out and to finally get consistent. I will also be looking for a used treadmill when we get there since running and even walking outdoors will be harder in the mountains during the winter. There are so many good ones for sale for not super expensive!
I have a pretty solid gym built up at this point! A bar, bumper plates, rack, dumb bells, kettle bells, air bike, box, etc. I can’t wait to set it up in a new space!
I’m not expecting everything to go smoothly, but I’m handling the imperfections with a lot more peace and grace these days.
My next post: True Simple Living and Priorities
simplycourtney.org 