How homeschoolers do things: what's planned for tomorrow

Oops Update: I posted this and then remembered what was banging in the back of my brain: that Crayons is visiting Schmoo tomorrow afternoon. I knew there was some reason I had to rethink what we were doing. So picture study and board games will wait until Thursday, and Fabre will just keep until next week.

I have a daily schedule made up for October. This is what is on the list for tomorrow:

We start together with something short, like a hymn, and usually pray together before we start individual work. October's hymns are I'll Praise My Maker and Schubert's Holy Holy Holy (from his German Mass). (Those aren't the Ambleside hymns for October--we just picked our own.)

Crayons and I will go up to the kitchen and finish working on some measurement pages we didn't get done yesterday, do a bit more from the spelling book, and try and get the current Alphabetter page done in four minutes. (She was almost there today.) She will also do the day's Bible reading from her planner and read one story from Hero Tales, about the Judsons.

Ponytails will be downstairs doing her own Bible reading and either part of a Mr. Pipes chapter or some of Mere Christianity. She also has math and science (chemistry) work that Mr. Fixit assigns her, and she is reading Ordinary Genius (a biography of Einstein) by Stephanie McPherson.

Later in the morning we will get together for a chapter of Louisa May Alcott's Jack and Jill, and a Latin lesson from Our Roman Roots. It's pretty much open-the-book-and-teach; the course comes with one cassette for checking pronunciation and listening to songs like "Mica Mica Parva Stella." (Our version is, obviously, not the current one!)

After that Ponytails usually does one page from Easy Grammar Plus, and Crayons either does science or history with me. Today, Tuesday, we did a science experiment involving a glass of water and a piece of paper; but tomorrow, Wednesday, we are going to finish reading Marguerite de Angeli's The Skippack School, a short chapter book that is supplementing the Colonial-times history we're reading about in George Washington's World.

Then it's lunch break...Mr. Fixit usually comes home, and checks Ponytails' math while he's here.

After lunch, what do we have left? Crayons has a poem to read with me and a chapter from Fabre's Story Book of Science...she's going to read that one on her own while I work with Ponytails. Ponytails has some pages of Canadian history to read, and a bit of work to do on the Free Verse unit in Write with the Best Volume Two.

Then a couple of last things together: Picture study (John William Waterhouse), and a short reading from Edith Schaeffer's Hidden Art, about how we can enjoy making and listening to music, even if we're not terrifically talented or specially trained. And finally, it's Board Game Day. I don't know yet what we'll play--whatever the girls agree on. We have a whole closet full of games and, it seems, never enough time to enjoy them--so sometimes you just have to write PLAY GAMES on the schedule. This month I've written that in every Wednesday.

I don't know if it's a typical day...we have different things written in every day. Everybody has ideas for sewing projects and things like that...some days we do French...some days we go outside and jump rope in the driveway. Some days Crayons does more paper and pencil work. Some days we have fewer books.

But anyway, that's what's on the menu for Wednesday.