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I'm a little bit overwhelmed with my thoughts, so don't know how to start. Last year was our first year of homeschooling and HOD. Being new to it all and jumping right in and h/sing all three of my older kids my first year, my focus was on establishing a new normal for our family, making school a priority, and adjusting to the new dynamic for our family. I was very encouraged to have found a curriculum in HOD that didn't need any tweaking or supplementing. That was wonderful for me as I just didn't have the courage to step away from the guide and introduce anything else on my own. As the school year progressed, I found that there were things that I wanted to add to our palette that sounded fun, but I just didn't have the confidence or the knowledge of where to start. I had intended spending this summer experimenting with a few things to add for the upcoming school year. The things that I want to incorporate are art, a nature study, a foreign language, music/composer study, etc. I guess my question centers around how did you choose what to use for those extras and where did you start? I don't want to overwhelm myself or my kids, so I would really love some advice or ideas with what maybe worked for your families. Thanks for your patience with my rambling.

I keep things simple for artist/composer study.

I have a bulletin board that I've divided into sections. Here's a blog post I did on the topic...

http://daisyhomeschoolblog.blogspot.com ... l#comments

Nature Study is done on Fridays.

We have a Nature Study Table - http://daisyhomeschoolblog.blogspot.com ... table.html

and we like to follow Handbook for Nature Study's blog and her Outdoor Nature Challenges - http://handbookofnaturestudy.blogspot.com/

For Foreign Language, we keep things simple. My children frequently hear Spanish spoken in SoCal. We play Spanish CD's and this year I'm adding The Fun Spanish by Kimberly Garcia. - http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-b ... l-1/643100

Hope that gives you some inexpensive ideas.

Daisy,
I looked at the links you posted and they seem very interesting. I'm not sure I am understanding what is being done with the nature study exactly...is Anna Comstock's book being used more as a reference tool and the outdoor hour challenges are the main guide for the study. It seemed wonderful. And our boys seemed to do better before when we were going for walks first thing before any lessons. I should have caught on then

faroutback

Hi Kimi,

I am not sure what manuals you will be using this year, but Preparing and above have 4 day weeks so I just use the 5th day for my extras. With the earlier Manuals (LHFHG, Beyond & Bigger) they usually don't take more than 2-3 hours a day leaving plenty of time to add the extras that you wish . Maybe you could schedule one extra subject per day with 5 minutes of review every day for the foreign language.

She walks you through Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study. So some of the outdoor assignment have you reading a few pages of Handbook for Nature Study and then you go put it into practice. I love how to she broke the book down for me. You can find the book free online so you don't even have to buy it. Anyway, just some ideas.

We also enjoy walking before school in the morning. Course where we live we almost have to since it will be 100 degrees by lunch time even in September.

Daisy- Thank you for the ideas! They give a good point of reference for my crew here! Hopefully I can glean wisdom from what has been posted to jump start us to including those things I would love to incorporate. HOD is so rich and full and we love it! The rest is "gravy" as the saying goes!

Eazbnsmom- We will be using Beyond and Bigger this year. So I think that doing one extra a day sounds like a great idea. I just get dizzy when I think of all I would like to do with my kids in art, music, and nature study- I just don't know where to start. It's a good problem, but challenging for me nonetheless.

I agree with my4sugars the rest is gravy and Daisy this idea seems like a very rich and flavorful one. Thank you. I looked at it some more and I truly like how you said walks you through it-something that would seem overwhelming on its own. Thanks for the tip about finding it online I'll have to do some searching. Thanks again.

faroutback

Daisy thank you for posting this. The links are perfect for me. I love how you keep it simple but get it done. Over complicating things is a struggle for me so this was really helpful.