More on the New Schedule (part 15)

I have had a few questions about our new winter schedule posted below, so here is a bit of an explanation and an update on a change I've made already. (yes! already! after only one day...)

Where it says "Bible with Mom", this is our family devotional time and consists of me reading from the Bible outloud to all the children while they draw what I'm reading about in their Bible Journals. After reading, we have prayer time and pray for the persecuted church, missionaries, our relatives, our pastor, and our president. We have a prayer notebook with pictures of many of these people inside, and we hold the pictures as we pray and rotate through them. We finish up this time with hymn singing. We usually learn 1 or sometimes 2 new hymns each week. We don't sing hymns very much anymore at our church, and I LOVE hymns! They are so rich in theology and truth, and the language is often so much more expressive than the language we commonly use today.

After Bible time, our two older children have their own personal quiet time in their rooms. They set a timer for the same number of minutes as their age and are free to read wherever they desire in their own bibles.

IEW stands for Institute for Excellence in Writing, and is the writing curriculum that we use. It is wonderful, I love it, and I wish we had time for it every day, but right now that is just not working for me. So our older two do it together 3 times a week. On the other two days at that same time, our oldest and I study Latin together. We did it today as a matter of fact ~ I was very rusty!!

ETC stands for Explode the Code and is a phonics workbook series.

At lunch time we practice poetry memorization, and at dinner time we dazzle daddy with it! We use another product from IEW called "Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization." The kids love doing this, and even our Little Man has learned several poems!

Our daughter, whose color is red, has "History Reading, AQ's and TQ's" after lunch. AQ's stand for accountability questions and TQ's stand for thinking questions. This is part of our history curriculum, Tapestry of Grace, and are questions that can either be answered from her reading or that require a little thought and input from her own mind. She is learning to answer them as she reads as opposed to answering them all in one day after she has done all the reading and forgotton what she read 3 days earlier.

Before we started back to school yesterday, I told the children about the new schedule, and that chores would now have to be done BEFORE having breakfast. The children gave me shocked looks, but when my hubby told them that if we lived on a farm they would probably do chores for about an hour before eating, they were quite content to do their one little 10 minute cleaning job. Problem was, not everyone finished at the same time. So two of the children were still eating breakfast at 9:00 when it was time to begin our Bible time. Since this is something that we all do together, the rest of us had to wait for them.

So last night at dinner, we told the children that not only would they have to do their chore before being allowed to eat breakfast, the kitchen and dining room would be closing at 9:00, and all food and dishes would need to be cleared at that time. We heard gasps, and "how come you are being so mean?". Wellllllll, what a pleasant surprise this morning to see ALL of the children getting dressed as quickly as possible, making their beds, and hi-tailing it downstairs to do their chore before I had even finished putting in my contacts!! They wanted to be sure they had plenty of time to EAT! :-)

I have found the secret. Food is a powerful motivator!!!

I am thankful for two days of accomplishing much, and pray that this new schedule will continue to help keep us on track.