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Learning to Play the Piano in our Home
Why? ~ Introduction to Music ~ Our Piano ~ Piano for littles ~ Piano apps for a bit older ~ Starter Piano Song Books ~ Further Thoughts ~ Relationships “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” – Plato Like every subject in our homeschool, I think it is…
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What’s in our bag when we go out for a nature walk? Guest Post!
Irish nature lover and home educator Maireen has written a lovely post describing what she brings along for a nature walk. She has included some of her beautiful photographs of her family on a nature walk. You can see more of her photos on her Instagram. Maireen lives with her long-suffering husband, their two little girls and a motley collection…
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Making My Own Books
I was making some simple comb bond books as I get ready for more formal school. It is quick to make a book like this when you have a printer, binder and cutter, but fathoming it out the first time can take a bit of time. To simplify it for you, I made notes as I worked to create this…
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Irish Home Educators Online – Websites, Blogs, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook
Community is important to me. To support you in this, I have compiled a list of Irish home educators online that I have come across on my time on this home education journey, some of them very recently as I created this post! They are in no particular order. I have included links and the description from their page. I…
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The Hutchinson Treasury of Stories to Read Aloud
I wanted to recommend the book The Hutchinson treasury of stories to read aloud selected by Janet Schulman. This book was previously been printed under the title The 20th-Century Children’s Book Treasury. The content is the same. This book contains many books which are recommended on various US curriculum. It used to be on Sonlight’s PreK curriculum for families abroad…
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Learning Handwriting using Handwriting Without Tears
Both my children loved learning to write using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum. I think this is a fantastic curriculum for learning print handwriting, and it is available here in Ireland from Sensational Kids in Naas and Thinking Toys in Co. Clare. The aim of the program is for children to learn to write legibly and quickly. It is used…
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Do I need to teach sentence diagramming in Ireland?
When I was investigating US writing curricula, I found that some of them include a lot of sentence diagramming, starting around 4th grade or so. I had never heard of sentence diagramming, never mind done any myself in school. I asked around and was told that three moms with older children had just crossed out those exercises in their writing/language…
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Burgess Animal Book matched to Peterson Field Guide, The World of Animals and Draw Write Now
The Ambleside Online curriculum uses the Burgess Animal Book, read one chapter per week, in Year Two (so they recommend for ~ age 7-8. Mine did this together ages 7 and 5 and it worked great). We have the colour illustrated Living Book Press edition (Amazon UK, Book depo). The Burgess Animal Book is out of copyright, so you can…
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Start Here
I frequently see people asking: How to homeschool in Ireland? The first talk I listened to about home education about seven years ago was “Hold on to your credit card” and I am very grateful that it was. I’m going to suggest the sentiment of that talk here: Think about your why, look at you and your children – think…
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Art Appreciation Charlotte Mason Style
Charlotte Mason believed a child’s “education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…–– in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour…
