one year!

Happy one year anniversary to our adventure in homeschooling! To celebrate (actually, not really - just perfect timing), we're going camping at the beach!

I didn't realize when I created this blog how totally accurate the blog title of We Live in a Library already was. We have always owned lots of books. When we moved into our second apartment, we were right around the corner from the library. Since then, we've made regular trips to the library and come home every time with as many books as we could carry. However they come through our front door, our home has always been wall-to-wall books. They're EVERYWHERE.

That's how our version of childhood education seems to be shaping - we read. Read read read read read. If we want to know about something, we get a book. We find it on our own shelves, or get one or four from the library, or order it online. We're going to the beach, so for the past week or so, we've been reading about the ocean, dolphins, whales, and the beach.

We even read fairly regularly about math. Even though we've been struggling with it, it's the workbook that's the problem. Not math itself. Sunny has read plenty of story-type and mind puzzle books about math in the past few months. No, she's not memorizing the addition tables like that, but there's definite exposure to math concepts.

We don't only read. We do art projects. We're growing a garden, and recently had a discussion about why we prune bushes. We take short vacations and incorporate fun learning things into them. We have books with science experiments in them that the girls like to try out with Dad. We find videos and activity websites online. We practice the piano (even me). So even though our education method so far is very book-centric, I think we're still covering a lot of territory and fairly well-rounded.

There are a lot of methods and techniques for homeschooling - classical, Charlotte Mason, Thomas Jefferson Education, Waldorf, Montessori, unschooling, etc etc etc ... we're doing the Library Method.