We liked the break. I think maybe it was too long, By about 2 weeks. It not super fun for Morg to review things she knows she used to have in her memory. She has already agreed to doing year-round school because of it! Do you do that? More breaks throughout the year and a much shorter summer? Even just an hour a few times a week would make all the difference. We did LOVE the board games tho! Our chess board is permanently out now.

They are!

I've been thinking about that -- I only recently switched to apple stuff -- last year for the videos. I was hoping not to bring an iPad with us at all for travel. Maybe doing Morgan's French class on zoom with my iPhone? I've tried off and on to use electronics for note taking but keep mentally needing to be able to FLIP pages manually when I want to reference something quickly. I think it's a mental change I need to make. As an X-Gener, I'm usually pretty good with either old school styles or high tech but this is a real hold out for me!

Thanks, I thought I would do a mini series since I took the summer off

I guess I wasn't really planning to be live but the premier feature helps people see what is coming so that is why I did it with this week's video series. Now I will go back to once a week or so!

OMGosh, really?! That is so neat! I am hoping we can figure out the mystery!!!

Even a couple days after filming this, I could see I might want to tweak some things but it is nice to have the framework

Thank you -- that is so nice of you to write that ❤️

I saw that on line! So different from when I visited in 1984... Not sure what to do there... Give it a shot I guess. We may make the Netherlands a separate trip because there is so much to do in that small area. Thank you for mentioning the tickets.

Hey! I just watched one of YOURr homeschool videos lol! Thanks. I have always mapped stuff out just because of how visual I am and it is fun to do. Also, I realised last year that my daughter really wants to know the schedule and be a part of it so it' helps feel empowered knowing what the schedule is and that she can change it, too.

Aw thanks. She is a sweetie.

I hear you. Our farm is never left without someone here. Also, those dates might not be right ;)

Oh gosh I colored it myself! I pulled a free generic one off a website and color coded everything for the video

Yes! Fern is our new addition. She won't be as big as Buddy (he's 130lbs) but she is only half her size now. She is small!

Awww…congratulations!

LOL! A lot of the newer things I haven't had before came from JetPens.com. They have great KZfaq videos and a super good website. Good prices. BUT... I went to Barnes yesterday and was amazed they have picked up a LOT of cool Japanese stationary and you can find a lot there. But for selection and price, JetPens was great. Also, Etsy, Michaels, Hobby Lobby, Wal-Mart, Target, our university bookstore & Amazon. But way less Target. I was getting kind of sick of being issued the same stuff year after year. I love target but not so much their stationary anymore.

Thank you!! 😁 It's super fun to be back. I'm glad I breaked for Summer though. I think it staves off KZfaq burnout for me. But I'm doing the regular tempo of things again now. Happy homeschooling!

I wanted to buy one of those old-school green wall mounted pencil sharpeners but I would want to nail it down to the dining table and I guess that would be weird... 😊

Thanks!!! Nice to see you and good to be back!

Thank you!! 😊

I got them on JetPens.com. They are Pilot Frixion brand stamps. I just got back from Barnes & Noble and saw there were some similar ones there. I think B&N really upped their game this year. A lot of stationary that is Japanese and Japanese inspired. You might find some there as well.

@@ThePattersonHomeschoolAcademy Thank you!

That is awesome! My husband and I just filled out a card for Morgan. Isn't it funny how we all think the same?

Hi! Thanks for liking our video! We had a great time making them. So nice you are here 😊

Hi! Thank you so much 😀 I hope you have been well and are having a nice summer

We are having a very busy, but super fun, summer. I’ve been reminiscing about all the long, slow summers with a younger kiddo. We’re in a new season of life with an extroverted middle schooler. :) Looking forward to the rest of your upcoming videos!

@@Hot_Springs_Homeschool oh yeah extroverts are exhausting! lol but we are moving into organized sports. Basketball this year and band. I’m not looking forward to basketball but in 7th grade she can do cross country. That’s more our thing. Low key.

Nice!

I know! Me, too! I should come up with a mom version.

You are so welcome!

In our case because we had addition and subtraction gaps and difficulty understanding multiplication, we started at Alpha and finished at Gamma in one year. Usually each book is a year long course but we were able to use the books to find Morgan's trouble areas and focus on them and then move on. So we moved through Alpha in a few weeks and Beta in 3 months, and another 3 months for Gamma. What I did was go online to Math U See and answer their questions in their little quiz for parents. That's how I realised we needed to start at the near beginning to catch everything. You could try that quiz and see what that tells you. With mastery, you can move as fast or as slow as you want so some of the books might not take any time at all and others could take the whole school year. Let me know what ends up working for you. I would be interested! Thanks for watching me! We will be on another homeschool math journey this year for sure. It will be fun!

@@ThePattersonHomeschoolAcademy thanks for your quick reply! We took the test and says we should start in Alpha. So much great advice!! Thank you!!🙏

@@susyrodriguez185 thanks! I’m glad to be of help. The mastery works quickly. If your child has the concept, u don’t need to stay on that chapter, just go to the next. If you need more practice than is in the book, u have access to their online resource and u can generate extra questions on the trouble topic. Have fun!

I'm go glad you found me! Thanks for watching. I just added our fourth grape wrap up video to the French play list because Morgan and I speak French together in it, so you can check that one out if you like. I don't really have an opinion on the À La Une books because I am not the one teaching it. It is usually taught by a French teacher with the audio files and who have used it before. Looking at the book, it actually confuses me. But Morgan does like it, it is more a proper French style of learning which I think is important, and she learned from it with the help of her Alliance Française teacher. Now that she will be taking French through The Well Trained Mind Academy, they use the À Plus Un book which is very similar in layout, style and tempo. I feel like I would have to be better at French to teach with these books - and really figure out the audio and schedule before I used it.

Thank u!!!

I'm so glad you like the French series. It's a niche for sure but there are certainly a few moms who are very interested. We do like the Language Together books. They were a huge confidence booster last year. Now we are delving into the world of small class on-line French with The Well Trained Mind Academy.

I sure do: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gdSakpd4vpnNd6c.html

Yay! Thank you! I'm so glad it was helpful. I have a playlist for French and will keep adding to it as we go. Thanks for watching and sending me a comment 😃

That is the very question I will be answering when I kick off 5th grade videos at the end of July! But here is a huge spoiler since you asked :) Yes. LOL But, something I will be covering about Live Education! is that you cannot purchase their curriculum à la carte. You must buy everything in full. And there are things like their grammar that I don't plan on using. I started my interest in Waldorf education specifically because I am intrigued by the way it approaches science, hands-on, with many experiments, art work, and essentially the child creating their own science book. No workbooks. It is very teacher intensive and that is the part I have been prepping for over the summer in lieu of videos. We are on a farmstead with a shop and there is a lot of room for lab experiments away from the kitchen. And then as I reviewed all the material this past month, the literature ties handily into the very era we have covered and will be covering with The Well Trained Mind. Sort of perfect timing really. I've already started listening to the Kalevala and I think Morgan will like it if I read it to her. It's a nice change from just Beowulf (which is also covered and personally one of my least fave things to read... thanks to my own schooling!). But to answer your question again from the other side of the curriculum I have chosen: so much of it is just English. She likes the creative writing, vocab, and reading. I do plan on reading with Morgan heavily so I bet you will see a lot of books I showed in 5th grade curriculum later in the year as we get through them. We will also likely not worry about finishing a specific program in a certain timeframe like a school year. I know we all have a tendency to get worried about finishing curriculum up before the next year. But we seem to be moving away from that. Even with math Morgan works at her own pace. Many things I will treat as a unit study -- all the Live Education! science and lit., the PBLs I bought from MCT (The Plague and The Ferret PBLs - I am really excited to see how Morgan likes those). I think I should caveat that we are really finding our true interests with education and have discovered some fantastic curriculum matches for Morgan, so much so that a lot of our schooling doesn't feel like school so we seem to be able to do a lot more in our day because it is just plain fun. And I only have one kid. The rules are different with a singleton! Way easier IMO. And finally, a mildly unpopular opinion I have always had is -- It's just 5th grade. I view everything leading up to middle school as education that should be fun and who cares if they don't retain dates or timelines or specific info? I'm throwing stuff up on the wall to see if it will stick for Morgan and from there, she will determine what is important and interesting to her and for her life -- and if I give her as much exposure to things as I am capable, then she can come back around to what she chooses when she is older and study it more deeply. If all I teach her is independence and a love of learning, and show her options, my job is complete and she is set up for whatever it is she wants to work towards. I think we will have a blast!

@@ThePattersonHomeschoolAcademy I have been LOVING going through all your videos. I have an only child, a daughter in the same grade as Morgan. We live in Oklahoma. There are virtually no homeschool requirements here, so we can study whatever and however we choose. We are very eclectic. I have picked and chosen from all different brands every year. I love Pepper and Pine and have dabbled in Waldorf, mostly just handicrafts and unit studies. We have not ventured into Waldorf science yet. I look forward to seeing how you implement Waldorf alongside other curriculums. My daughter has church camp this coming week, so I plan on spending my week researching and planning for 5th grade.

@@Polkadotpearl I am so happy to hear you like my videos! Morgan just got back from camp as well. Next year is the "real" full week-long one. Summer camp is literal heaven. I've been mulling over what I will start with for Live Education! while also taking account of our weather. I think I will start with Local Geography, History & Industry. Honestly, it's the easiest one for ME, gets us out of the house, and I want to start out on my best foot for Morgan. What curricula do you think you will choose this year?

Aw thank you so much!!! I'm glad you found our channel. My daughter likes to do some of the videos with me so you might see her now and again as we go through homeschool. Have a great summer :) I'll start videos up again in late July.

Hi! Glad you found me! Since I use Canva art they have the copyright and I can't sell. But I think I can give you the links to the pages I made. If you want to see if that works, feel free to send me email at [email protected], let me know the pages you want, and I think I can send you template links that you can edit and make your own. If that works, maybe I will post the links for all. I hadn't thought about it.

Hi! In my later videos, I discus how and why we eventually phased out Saxon all together. Morgan needed a math program that worked at her own pace. Saxon drives the train and the kids have to tag along. That is easy if you have a kid who can do that. A mastery approach ended up being what we needed. The pace was entirely up to Morgan as we filled the gaps she had in math. Also, in or case "I hate math" usually means "I don't get it" or "I'm bored." In our case, mastery did incredibly build Morgan's confidence and knowledge. Her test scores also showed it. I was really curious how she would test after this first year with me. She scored highly in everything she had covered in Math-U-See. There are a few videos out there of other moms also using 2 math programs. I would say a self-pace can also be a key. A lot of moms swear by Math With Confidence. We haven't used it but we might have tried it if we had started homeschooling before the 4th grade. Maybe something to look into. I wish you and your daughter the best in math!

@@ThePattersonHomeschoolAcademy this is super helpful information, thank you! I’m so glad you found what works best for your daughter. I do like the idea of being able to go as fast or slow as needed in a mastery type program. Thank you for this information! 🙂

Thanks for your comment! It makes me happy I can help. The planner I used this year was the minimalist planner by Schoolnest. She has her own website where you can see everything and then you purchase via amazon. I just created a playlist of the videos I did with any planner info: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gdSakpd4vpnNd6c.html In the latest video, I show that I made our own off Canva because I couldn't find the exact thing I was looking for: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gdSakpd4vpnNd6c.htmlsi=1ii9_nS14Nt5xNJI But now I am reconsidering. I may change my mind as I take a break from videos this summer. I need something smaller and easy to travel with since we will be homeschooling with backpacks for a few weeks next year. I am looking into the Traveler's Company notebooks. I know that isn't what most homeschool moms are looking for in a planner but we will see what I end up with. The ones I created on Canvas were super cheap and I made every page the way we wanted them with no extra fluff we wouldn't use. I'm also binging on JetPens website. They have the coolest ever office supplies. I'm an office supply junkie. Thank you for watching and subscribing! I'll start new videos at the end of Summer.

I’m so glad my video gave u something new to think about! There are quite a lot of interesting PBLs on MCT’s website. If u do one, let me know how it worked out for you 😊

@@ThePattersonHomeschoolAcademy I shall! It seems like it might be a good end of year or summer activity.

I'm really glad you gave me the title to this book. I've been wanting to read all of Darwin's writings and this would be a great addition on a theme. thanks!

It's a lot, that is true. I really only care about the pace of our core subjects of math, French and reading. I find when we focus on those, the rest just comes along naturally. A lot of books are longterm reference books or literature we can always have on hand if we don't get to certain novels this coming year. While I do read all the poetry so I can help pick and choose poems with Morgan, she will only read a couple per book. And I suspect we will stay on the purple grammar book from TWTM for a couple years. We will go at a slower pace with that one than we did with Lesson for TWTM level 4. When we do unit studies, we drop pretty much everything except our core subjects until we have finished the unit study. That really takes the pressure off and keeps the day fun. Thank you so much for watching and commenting. I hope you have a great summer!!!

I was seriously thinking about it… taking the train from Nice to Ventimiglia at least for the day. I have never been to Dijon. I’m going to look into it. There is so much. The hard part is choosing

Thank you very much 😊

So grateful for this video. I'm in South Dakota and new to homeschooling (17, 13, & 10yr old). I'm introducing my boys to being entrepreneurs...so always looking for more information on this topic. I'll check out the books you mentioned. Thank you!

Thank you! You too!

We are avid book readers and because my voice doesn't hold out well, we sit together and listen to some of the books over coffee and also in the truck wherever we go. Every morning when Morgan gets up, she comes into the study and sits and reads to herself for about an hour. And at bedtime, I read to her. We also don't get through everything. I always plan for more than we get through or sometimes we change our minds completely about books! When I read Little Women, I would get tired and we would switch to the audible version and both sit and listen and chat about the chapters alone the way. We were listening to maybe 2 hours a day. Same for Dracula. We loved that book.

I'm really glad it helped and you got some ideas! And seriously, it was so inexpensive -- and fun to create our own designs.

You are welcome! 😊

Thank you!

@@ThePattersonHomeschoolAcademy You're welcome 🤗

Thank u! We r thinking the same thing about our MUS tempo. I have both delta and epsilon on hand and we will just cruise through. The Live Education! Curriculum I bought has math suggestions as well and we may do some concurrently. But we will not have the same tempo as this year! That was an exception!!! Have a wonderful summer!!!