January Homeschool Plans Until Baby Arrives

I made some relaxed plans for school to keep us in a bit of a routine until baby Rebekah arrives. We could probably take off most of January and February and still finish the school year on time since we started early but the lack of routine would be bad.

Core Subjects - All kids will continue math and either assigned reading or reading lessons. The 7th grade and under crowd is continuing history with the Liberty's Kids dvds. The 11th grader is continuing chemistry and writing.

Morning Basket - This will happen each day and has the following categories:

• Hymn - This varies. We're starting with I'm Trying to Be like Jesus and Let Us Oft Speak Kind Words, but I'm also open to kid requests.
• Prayer - We take turns praying as a family, a different person prays each morning.
• Devotional - We're going to use 52 Weeks to Fortify Your Family (Amazon affiliate link). It's a simple book that has a theme for each week. The first week is Kindness. Each day of the week is a verse or set of verses to read aloud and discuss on the theme. The end of the week has a couple of questions to talk about and a general conference talk to take our learning further. The best part is the daily readings will be 5 minutes or less, just right for our morning basket.
• Fine Arts - We will rotate through different things in this slot. For the first week I have: Picture study, Composer Study: Mozart, Doodle Prompt, Picture study, and Composer Study: Mozart.
• Scripture Memory - We're starting with Romans 8:16 and will change our scripture verse every few weeks. We simply read it aloud together until we have it memorized.
• Read Aloud - I decided to pull one of the history books on Makayla's shelf for this year to read aloud to everyone. It's set in the 1930s and tells the story of a Mexican family who becomes migrant workers in the US due to unexpected circumstances. It's called Esperanza Rising (Amazon affiliate link) and I love what I've read ahead so far!
• Other - This will vary every week. This week the slots are filled with Mad Libs (Star Wars themed), Mathemagic, science exploration, Mad Libs (Mad Scientist themed), and a writing game.

That's it! The kids are always welcome to pursue their own learning interests, ask for resources to help with that, or pull out a game to play. They have a variety of interests and there is often something going on.