What is The Well and the Ash Tree?

I started this blog (like I mentioned in my first blog post) to help provide information and ideas for homeschooling.  I was frustrated by the lack of free information out there on things like basic curriculum or lesson plans, I was frustrated by the lack of decently priced textbooks, and I was frustrated that I couldn't seem to find the type of worksheets that I was looking for.

By the time I started my blog I had begun to find my footing, but I realized that I couldn't be the only person out there who needed help getting started.

So this blog was made to help people find resources, give them ideas, and let them know that they are not the only homeschoolers fumbling around in the dark.  It does get easier the longer you go at it, and it's always fun.

So what are the pages?

The Optimus Prime & Bumblebee and Scooby Doo pages are a brief outline of our curriculum for the current quarter.  There are 4 quarters:

• August - October
• November - January
• February - April
• May - July

There I post why we are covering the subjects we are covering, what days we cover the material on and why, as well as what worked and what did not work from the previous quarter.  Why quarters and not a whole year?  Because sometimes something does not pan out and it sucks rewriting an entire years schedule up at once.  Plus, it would take me FOREVER to write up an entire year's curriculum at once!

Did you notice that we homeschool during the summer?  Gasp!  Yes, we homeschool all year round.  Why?  Because if we take too long between lessons my kids tend to "brain dump" and move on with life.  I found this out one year when I got sick real bad with the flu for 3 weeks (I caught it, lost it, then caught it again - it sucked).  My kids took three weeks off, which I figured was no big deal since this was right around New Years, a time when kids were normally out of school for about 2 weeks.  Well, once we finally went back to homeschooling it was like all the material that we had been covering had never been covered at all.  Me being sick for 3 weeks set us back almost a month.  We had to recover so much ground, on top of covering the lessons that we should of been covering when I was sick, as well as covering the lessons we should of been doing right then.  Granted, my kids were 5 at the time, but I'm still baffled how they could go from counting up to 30 and memorizing the entire alphabet to not knowing any of that 3 weeks later.  They caught up pretty quick - it only took a few days - but it was still very frustrating and not helpful at all.  So in order to prevent something like that from ever happening again I decided that we would homeschool all year round (which we actually were already doing anyway ever since they were 3 - after all it's not like they knew what a summer vacation was anyway!).

The Previous Curriculum page is where I post the links to all of our previous Quarterly Curriculum's.  Once the current quarter is over with I repost the page as a blog post and put up the new curriculum in the old spot.  I want me and my readers to still have access to back curriculum and ideas, even if we are not using them anymore.  After all, this is supposed to be a page filled with information about homeschooling, so deleting the information is not much of a help.  Instead, it will just get reshuffled a bit.  

The Concept Week page talks about extra projects that we are doing for the current quarter.  The first week of every month is a Concept Week where we either focus on a unit that they need more help learning, or a unit that is not normally covered in their schoolwork, or a unit that they absolutely love and we want to spend more time on.

Concept Weeks are covered more in depth while we are doing them, and I post about them all the time.

The Previous Concept Weeks page is just like the Previous Curriculum page.  It's filled with links that bring you to the original posts about previous Concept Weeks.  You can also access our previous Concept Weeks from the Home page.  Way down at the bottom I have all the labels listed and you can just click on the one that says "Concept Week" and it will bring you to a list of Concept Week posts.  This page is just to be more organized.  After all, who wants to scroll through dozens of posts when they can just click on this page and see a list (with links) for them? 

The Reading List page lists the chapter books that we are reading together as a family right now.  I update the page every week or so for the quarter, and at the end of the quarter (or at least towards the end of it) I move everything on the list to the next page so we can start the quarter with a clean slate.

The Book Series We Have Read page lists the book series we have read together as a family.  Hopefully soon it will also reflect the books that Optimus Prime & Bumblebee have read on their own.

Lastly, the Spelling Units page lists all the links to our spelling units so you don't have to shift through lost of pages to find what you are looking for.  The posts are listed by grade.

I hope that this page helped you out.  If you have any questions please feel free to ask!