A Bit of This and a Bit of That ~ Blend Together for Eclectic Homeschooling

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This week’s Blog Cruise should be an interesting one for reading other Crewmates posts.

The question?

What is your homeschooling style, and how did you choose for your family? (Please be sure to explain the style that you use, i.e. Charlotte Mason, Classical, textbook based, lit. based, unit studies, etc.)

Yeah….as to our family’s style…. well, I guess eclectic is about the best description for it.

When we used primarily Catholic Heritage Curricula’s lesson plans and materials to guide our studies, you might say that it leaned towards a Charlotte Mason view of schooling. Lessons were short and plenty of delight learning was given the opportunity to happen.

Yet, we’ve constantly evolved.  A few substitutions here and there and before you knew it the whole plan was different.

Maybe I’m just the kind of person who craves variety in life and it is spilling over into what I do with the boys for homeschool. Hence, an eclectic mother leads to eclectic homeschooling.

And, in case you aren’t sure what an eclectic homeschooler looks like….I view it as someone who takes a little from a different styles and blends it into their own unique blend.

Math is primarily a textbook approach: Math U See for the younger boys and Teaching Textbooks for P. ALEKS and Mathletics are being used to reinforce learning and sometime take the place of the primary material.

Language Arts has a combination of ‘book’ work (e.g. Analytical Grammar), teacher led lessons (All About Spelling), and literature based learning (Teaching the Classics for our primary method of studying real books.)

Social Studies is a mixture as well…living books for the younger boys, Story of the World (which is written more like a living book than most textbooks) for the older boys with the use of their activity book and tests, plus a mixture of textbook and other resources for geography studies.

Science is planned to be more of a delight this year utilizing Supercharged Science (kit and eScience.) But, I do have some textbooks that we will use for reading on topics as well.

Along the way, we also throw in some unit studies and lapbooking (In the Hands of a Child’s project packs are basically written like unit studies with a lapbook as the finished product.)   Given so many opportunities to enjoy nature just outside our house, Charlotte Mason like nature studies happen on a regular basis.

So, there you have it… the O Family’s eclectic style that we call homeschooling. At least that’s the way it is. Come high school the look might change entirely.

Come Tuesday morning, you can find a list of all the other TOS Crewmate posts for this blog cruise by clicking here.