Our first day of school

We finally got our school year started here in the Horsman Family Schoolhouse! After Nathan returned from his week long hunting trip (with a quarter of a moose by the way) I was able to get a bit of planning time locked by myself in the bedroom so we could start on Tuesday. Here are our school pictures for our 2009-2010 school year.

Jayna is wearing her new dress for her Grandma Liv. Grandma blesses us so much by sending the fruits of her sewing labor our way and Jayna just loves everything she sends and her gifts from Grandma are always her first choice for what to wear for the day.
Quaid decided he wanted to be a pirate on picture day. The gun was whittled by Nathan while he was up hunting and sitting for hours in a tree watching for moose that had been chased off by wolves. :D

Roanen Tytus excited for "school". He has his own notebook and school book that he gets to scribble in while the other children are doing their lessons.

Avelyn Faith in her Grandma Liv made dress. She has quite the face, but she will NOT stand still for a picture, so Nathan held her into place and when I said ok he let her go and I had to try to snap the picture as quickly as possible before she ran over to me.

And just to redeeem her cute little face, here's a better pic.

I'm so excited to be started up finally! We start our day with The Pledge, prayer request time, then The Lord's Prayer, followed by prayer for anything that was requested earlier. We then recite our school Bible verse for the year which this year is Ephesians 5:15--"Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise." We explained to the children that our goal for them in schooling them and teaching them is not to make them smart, our goal is to help them to be wise in the ways of the Lord. If we raise smart children who can go to their choice of Ivy league schools, but they have missed the message of Christ then we have failed them. If they end up with a fancy house and car and lots of money, but they don't share the love of Christ and seek His wisdom, then we have failed them, that is why most of our curriculum is very faith based and we are striving to show the children how God is in everything we do and learn. That was a lot of rambling and I'm not even sure it makes sense. :D

We then do the subjects that are seperate for the children. Jayna does copywork while Quaid does math for instance since they don't have the same math curriculum. Their history, science and poetry reading time we do all together.

Our curriculum this year is a mixture of a few different things. We are using some of the reading lists from www.amblesideonline.com for science and poetry. We are using math-u-see for our math program, which the children LOVE, it's a lot of fun for them, especially Quaid. Our history reading list comes from Truthquest, which I love. It gives you some questions to ask your children to help them start to look for how God used different people and situations in areas where it's not normally questioned. This year we are doing early american history, very fun! We are also using two other study courses for the chilren. Jayna and I are studying Biblical womanhood from Polished Cornerstones and Quaid and Nathan are studying Biblical manhood from Plants Grown Up both from www.doorposts.com. These books are incredible and give lessons for young children on up to grown children so we will be able to use these for the next 10 years if we wanted to, studying the same lessons, but digging deeper each year. I honestly think this is the one subject that I'm most excited about.

My little herd of Horsmans.