Mom School

I just wanted to write a little blip about mom school (or whatever you may want to call it) to all the home school mom's that check out my blog. Mom school is a key ingredient from Oliver and Rachele DeMille's "Core and Love of Learning." Mom school is our favorite time of the day. My kids sit at my feet and beg me to read more and more everyday. I love the opportunity to read out of numerous books and share what's mine, the things I'm passionate about and the things I want them to learn. They also enjoy picking out the books that we read a loud together.

We start out mom school with our prayer and pledge. We then do theology. This year we are using Preach My Gospel that is put out by the LDS church. I suspect we will keep using it over and over. It has a great outline to follow. Why reinvent the wheel? We follow that up with some scripture history and some various articles about character. I get these from magazines or fairy tale books or both.

After that it's free game. I usually go over 3-7 topics. I start my days with personal prayer and find out what I should cover in mom school. I find that we like having variety every day instead of always being regimented to doing specific things everyday-like science. We will end up doing it a couple of times a week though and we seem to like that. We do always read a living book biography from history. This year we are talking about American History and are going through it chronologically. I am seeing my children springing up into little patriots right in front of me. They love America and they have loved learning about the great men and women of America's history. Other subjects we've covered are Family History biographies (a big hit), memorization of various things, Geography, Science, Spanish, random bio's of famous people, abridged Shakespeare plays (Lamb's Tales), cultural arts, language arts, poetry, and classic literature to name a few ideas. (You can see my Good Reads lists to see our specific books we are using this year).

I find we usually go for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. It depends on the day and how much time we have. I think that if we could and my voice could hold out we would go all day. The kids will bring things to do quietly on the floor while I read or they just snuggle up next to me. This has been an amazing bonding time for us. We have great discussions and I feel I'm closer to my children than I've ever been.

I also want to say when I first starting reading out loud to my kids I could barely squeak out 15 minutes before I had to stop because my throat hurt. Over time my throats gotten tougher.

Anyway kudos to Mom School!