Simply Convivial: Organization & Mindset for Home & Homeschool

Season 6: Evernote for Digital Planning Evernote is awesome. It is my digital filing cabinet. Instead of lugging around a heavy binder, or filing reams of paper, it all goes into Evernote. Not only does Evernote save my documents in an organized way, it even recognizes text – printed and handwritten – in images, pdfs, and scans saved there. This means I can search for documents when I need them instead of going through and looking in the right folder. I can type “Costco receipt” and up comes all the Costco receipts I’ve saved, whether they’re in the same notebook or note. With such quick retrieval, a huge database of saved records and notes is no longer daunting and useless to flip through. Read the original post here: Evernote for Homemaking Plans [thrive_2step id=’28499′][/thrive_2step] Become a paperless planner. More podcast goodness:

Season 6: Homeschool Planning What, out of everything in the plan, is essential to make our homeschool day count? Because more often than not, at least at my house, the entire plan doesn’t get checked off. So what does need to happen, without fail? Here’s my version. 5 Essential Pieces of Our Homeschool Day Read the original post: 5 Essential Pieces of Our Homeschool Day Listen: Recommended: Clever Curriculum Connection: Latin So, I use a simple practice page for this that I created not because there are not enough review materials in Latin for Children as it is, but because it simplified our review process. I pull sentences provided within the LFC workbook, but copy them onto these sheets for a few reasons: *I’m not confident enough in my own Latin yet to compose my own Latin sentences. * Those sentences were already composed to help the student review the lesson material. * My boys’ handwriting doesn’t fit well in the space provided in the workbook a lot of the time. These workpages have much more blank space. * If I copy out the sentences, I can pull sentences from previous lessons. Chances are, they don’t remember the sentences they did last month anyway, and I can at least swap out a different verb with the same conjugation if I want to change it up. This allows us to get a lot more translation practice, which I consider the most valuable part of Latin, while still using the sentences written by the curriculum people (i.e. people who know what they’re doing). * Usually the workbook only requires parsing or translating, and rarely marking sentence parts. But if the boys already have to mark sentence parts, then they’re a step ahead when they have to parse. I want them to do all 3 steps as much as possible. In helping my boys through these translation exercises over and over again, I have finally made it over my own Latin difficulties and see how the endings work, what they’re doing, and that they are communicating something. I have several key phrases I repeat each and every time as I help them over their own bumps and stalls: * “What is the ending?” * “What does that ending tell you?” * “Is it a noun or a verb?” * “What parts does a noun have?” * “What parts does a verb have?” * “What’s number mean? What are the two options?” * “What’s missing in your translation?” (Usually it’s a capital letter and a period.) The good news is that after about 100 repetitions of the same question, they actually do start to ask it themselves. Just when you think it will never happen, suddenly you hear one muttering the question under his breath to himself and then you know it was sinking in after all. Just don’t be surprised if it takes a solid year – or two. It takes patience, certainly. So we are all being stretched and growing: they are learning discipline and I am learning patience – and we are all learning perseverance. Learning is often difficult, and that’s ok. We used to only do two sentences in a sitting, because it stretched them so much. Now they can do four, and though some days are still tearful, by the time we’re done, we’ve pulled through and taste success. Learning to read Latin might be an important classical aim, but even if we never do, learning Latin will have made us better people. [thrive_2step id=’16067′][/thrive_2step] Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 6: Evernote for Digital Planning Because you asked… When you scan things to Evernote, is this time consuming? Do you scan it to a PDF file and attach the file? I’d be very curious as to what this process looks like for you. I tried with a manual the other day and it seemed to take forever, and I had to try several different ways to get it to work. It’s fast and easy, I promise! Read the original post here: Is it easy to scan to Evernote? [thrive_2step id=’28499′][/thrive_2step] More podcast goodness:

Season 6: Homeschool Planning It’s one thing to buy the books and supples, to make a plan, to create a chart and quite another to actually pull it off in a typical day. Days never go exactly as imagined, but it’s worth the time to imagine it even so – and the more you practice imagining it and planning for contingencies before the heat of the moment, the better you’ll become and rolling with the punches of a real-life homeschool day in a household bustling with people. Here are three tools I use to help me put together my homeschool day. Read the original post: 3 tools for a sane homeschool day Listen: Recommended: Clever Curriculum Connection So, I use a simple practice page for this that I created not because there are not enough review materials in Latin for Children as it is, but because it simplified our review process. I pull sentences provided within the LFC workbook, but copy them onto these sheets for a few reasons: * I’m not confident enough in my own Latin yet to compose my own Latin sentences. * Those sentences were already composed to help the student review the lesson material. * My boys’ handwriting doesn’t fit well in the space provided in the workbook a lot of the time. These workpages have much more blank space. * If I copy out the sentences, I can pull sentences from previous lessons. Chances are, they don’t remember the sentences they did last month anyway, and I can at least swap out a different verb with the same conjugation if I want to change it up. This allows us to get a lot more translation practice, which I consider the most valuable part of Latin, while still using the sentences written by the curriculum people (i.e. people who know what they’re doing). * Usually the workbook only requires parsing or translating, and rarely marking sentence parts. But if the boys already have to mark sentence parts, then they’re a step ahead when they have to parse. I want them to do all 3 steps as much as possible. In helping my boys through these translation exercises over and over again, I have finally made it over my own Latin difficulties and see how the endings work, what they’re doing, and that they are communicating something. I have several key phrases I repeat each and every time as I help them over their own bumps and stalls: * “What is the ending?” * “What does that ending tell you?” * “Is it a noun or a verb?” * “What parts does a noun have?” * “What parts does a verb have?” * “What’s number mean? What are the two options?” * “What’s missing in your translation?” (Usually it’s a capital letter and a period.) The good news is that after about 100 repetitions of the same question, they actually do start to ask it themselves. Just when you think it will never happen, suddenly you hear one muttering the question under his breath to himself and then you know it was sinking in after all. Just don’t be surprised if it takes a solid year – or two. It takes patience, certainly. So we are all being stretched and growing: they are learning discipline and I am learning patience – and we are all learning perseverance. Learning is often difficult, and that’s ok. We used to only do two sentences in a sitting, because it stretched them so much. Now they can do four, and though some days are still tearful, by the time we’re done, we’ve pulled through and taste success. Learning to read Latin might be an important classical aim, but even if we never do, learning Latin will have made us better people. [thrive_2step id=’16067′][/thrive_2step] Spread the word!

Season 6: Evernote for Digital Planning Evernote is simply my external brain. Everyone should have an external brain of one sort or another, and Evernote is mine. I keep everything corralled into one of nine stacks. These stacks are named after my vocations. Developing your own vocation categories and goals is part of Simplified Organization: Learning to Love What Must Be Done, so I won’t go into that here. The stacks are numbered so that they are ordered in the order I want them in and not alphabetically by their names. The “Records” and “Reference” stacks are like long-term archives – information goes in there when it’s no longer current, but I’m probably not going to need it unless I need to know something about what happened years ago. Read the original post here: How do you organize Evernote stacks? [thrive_2step id=’28499′][/thrive_2step] More podcast goodness:

Season 6: Homeschool Planning Does the word schedule make you break out in hives? Do you picture yourself harried and deflated at the end of a day on a schedule? Maybe for you, like me, that’s a vivid memory, not a theoretical picture. There’s a lot of visceral reaction against schedules in the homeschool world, and I totally get why. I mean, can I schedule diaper blowouts and my doorbell ringing and the toddler pulling an open bag of powdered sugar onto herself? Where does that go in the schedule? If there’s one thing that trying to live by a schedule teaches us right off the bat, it’s that we are not actually in control. Read the original post: Three Secrets about Schedules Listen: Recommended: Clever Curriculum Connection: Latin When we read Latin together once a week, the child can choose a selection from our collection: * Winnie Ille Pu * LFC History Readers * Fabulae Mirabiles They only read aloud and orally translate (and we use an online Latin dictionary to help) about 3 sentences at a time and we stick with one story until we’ve read it all. It’s hard, but we do it together, and I’ve found this addition has actually helped both my boys enjoy learning Latin more. Perhaps it makes it seem worthwhile instead of merely an exercise in abstraction. It’s decoding, and what boy doesn’t like a code that tells a message when you work it out? I have been surprised how much just finding the right weekly rhythm has helped make Latin happen consistently and with less resistance. I am always afraid I’m over-tweaking and making changes just out of discontent and for fun, but then I stumble upon a logistics tweak like this that makes it easier to be consistent and I find it all worth it! Now I just need to leave the Latin routine alone and adjust something else, like the logistics of mopping the floor. [thrive_2step id=’16067′][/thrive_2step] Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 6: Evernote for Digital Planning I am all about the tips and tricks to minimize the time and brain-power we pour into menu planning. It’s something we need to do, something we need to become consistent with, but it doesn’t have to drain us or take an entire Saturday morning. We can streamline things and make it simpler. One tool I use to streamline a lot in my life is Evernote. I heart Evernote. Here’s how it helps my menu planning routine.   Read the original post here: Evernote for Menu Planning [thrive_2step id=’28499′][/thrive_2step] * Learn from gospel-centered homemaking & homeschooling self-paced courses you can navigate on your own terms. Level up your plans and progress, one step at a time.* Find a community of likeminded women, working to find what’s important, and do it – every day.* Get support through ongoing conversation, discipleship, and prompts to increase your skill and your motivation as we spur one another on to love and good works. The direction & accountability homemakers need to make noticeable progress in their home management skills. just $15/month – for a limited time Enroll today. More podcast goodness:

Season 6: Homeschool Planning We might think that making a plan and working a plan is all about the planner, the app, the method, but the truth is that how we think about our planning going into it matters tremendously. I remember very vividly being struck by a line of poetry by T.S. Eliot once quoted by Cindy Rollins: What I really, really wanted was a system so perfect that I wouldn’t have to expend any effort at all, I could just hum along doing whatever I wanted and everything would just work out. Turns out life doesn’t work that way. Read the original post: Why do we make plans when they rarely work out? Listen: Recommended: Clever Curriculum Connection: Latin Being consistent with Latin over the years has been a struggle – one I have not always won. My oldest began Latin for Children Primer A when he was 8 – four years ago – and he’s now 3/4 of the way through Latin for Children Primer B. I’m sure glad Dr. Perrin’s favorite motto is festina lente. In my years of Latin inconsistency, we’ve had to continue to go backward before moving forward, reviewing vocab again, reviewing grammar again, because you can’t build on a foundation that isn’t there. In the end, I think this will actually help their forward progress in Latin, because we ended up not moving forward until concepts clicked rather than getting into a groove and simply moving on when they could give the right answer without understanding. Just as students should be drilled in their math facts until they are second nature – and this might take the entirety of their elementary education – so we keep revisiting what case means, what conjugating means, what declining means, not to mention how to do so. This year consistency is possible for us, and I spent the first two terms of school focusing on getting our Latin consistent and solid and prioritized. I went through many iterations of weekly Latin assignments before I found one that flowed and worked for us. I’m not sure this will work for you, but I offer it as a starting place. It’s much more feasible and realistic for a homeschool setting than the schedule offered in the book, I believe. It makes about half the Latin work independent work, which frees me up. This is the routine I use for both my boys, so it works with Latin for Children Primer A and Primer B. Our Weekly Latin Assignments * Daily: We listen to one Latin chant track from both Primer A & B most Morning Times for chant & vocab review * Day 1: Watch a Latin lesson from the DVD, complete the Latin worksheet for that lesson * Day 2: Practice reading & oral translation with mom, complete the lesson’s derivatives worksheet in the workbook * Day 3: Fill out a conjugation practice worksheet (homemade), copy the lesson’s vocab into a Latin copywork spiral notebook. * Day 4: Complete the lesson’s quiz in the workbook, write 2 original Latin sentences that contain at least one word from this lesson’s vocab (Mom has to conjugate & translate them) * Day 5: Latin translation page (homemade, with sentences from the chapter) [thrive_2step id=’16067′][/thrive_2step] Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 6: Evernote for Digital Planning I’ve written before about the benefits of writing a daily to do list on an index card, but for several months I’ve experimented with using Evernote for my task list instead of a daily index card – just to see how going all digital would work out for me. I have gone back to writing out a short daily to-do note, but I learned a lot from my little experiment. Using Evernote for a daily to-do list and journal is definitely a viable option with several benefits. Read the original post here: Keeping an Evernote daily to-do list [thrive_2step id=’28499′][/thrive_2step] More podcast goodness:

Season 6: Homeschool Planning I love new year goals and resolutions, but they can lead to discouragement unnecessarily. Sometimes we conclude that because we can never reach and maintain our ideal, then it is the ideal bringing us down. We’re tempted to stop trying to clean the house, organize the toys, lose the weight, balance the budget, or train the children because we never reach our desired (usually unrealistic) goal, or if we do, it doesn’t last long. However, the primary problem is our own paradigm, not our goal. Focus on habit-building rather than goal-reaching, and your abilities to reach goals will be dramatically increased as a side benefit. Read the original post: Planning for Real Life Listen: Recommended: Plan Your Year Planning Kit will not only give you the beautiful forms you need to make a complete plan, it will walk you through each step of the way, clearly and succinctly. I highly recommend it. Clever Curriculum Connection: Latin Because we are following the classical model of education in our homeschool, we have added Latin to our average days. I have zero background in Latin and only 2 barely-passed years of Spanish under my belt. Yet, I agreed with the principles of classical education so much that I decided we’d take the practice of Latin on trust and see what happened. There are generally three reasons given for studying Latin: * It helps with vocabulary and thus with high test scores. * It helps with logical thinking, because it’s grammar study that actually makes sense. * It is the language of Virgil and much of the literature of Christendom, which we should be trying to read in the original. When my son was 9 and had just taken his state-mandated standardized test, he asked me afterward, “Mom, what does donor mean?” “A donor is someone who gives something,” I replied. “That’s what I guessed!” he exclaimed, “because dono means I give.” That vocabulary word had been in a Latin lesson from the previous year. There is certainly something to the first reason for choosing Latin, but I hate to let state-mandated tests determine my curriculum choices. No, it is option 2 that got me on board with Latin and keeps bringing me back to it every time we have fallen off the boat. I love grammar, and I know how much my smattering of Spanish helped with my understanding of grammar. I am also an Elizabethan history buff and I knew that simply translating Latin into English and English into Latin constituted a large part of Queen Elizabeth I’s education – and that seemed to turn out pretty well. So, we take a grammar-heavy approach to Latin rather than an immersion approach, which would be nearly impossible for us anyway. But grammar, grammar I can do. Find out more about how we homeschool Latin. [thrive_2step id=’16067′][/thrive_2step] Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 6: Evernote for Digital Planning There is so much to keep track of at home. Where is the best place to keep track of daily and weekly routines? If you’re a paper planner, you might have a separate page in your planner, you might have your own weekly list you print, you might keep a list behind a page protector and reuse it or on a whiteboard where everyone can see it. But what if you’d rather not deal with paper? What if you prefer glancing at the screen in your pocket to look at your list? What if you don’t like the visual clutter often attendant with paper? Evernote is the answer, of course. Read the original post here: Evernote for Home Routines [thrive_2step id=’28499′][/thrive_2step] More podcast goodness:

Season 5: Why Convivial? What sort of elderly person will I be? Of course a large part of the situation will depend on circumstances and what my particular physical or mental ailments will end up being. But what of the different temperaments? Will I be a sweet old lady, grateful and encouraging up to her dying day? Or will I be a fault-finding, cranky old lady? When whatever my infirmities will be come upon me — no matter the age at which it happens — what will it do to me? Can hard circumstances turn you into someone you were not? Or do they reveal who you actually were by removing your defenses? Affliction will come, sooner or later, and what will it show? If how I respond then will be simply a magnification of how I respond now to minor irritations and inconveniences, then I doubt I’ll be a sweet old lady. What story do I want told at my funeral? Whatever it is, now is the time to start living it. Read the original post: Convivial Home: Now & Later Recommended Reading: Simple Sanity Saver: Homeschool Checklists for Kids So, you’ve decided to create a homeschool checklist for your kids. Now what?

 There are lots of ways to make a checklist and keep a checklist. Using a spiral notebook for a daily list is a popular option. Creating a weekly template you can print also works well. Or, you might even use an app like Asana or Trello or use your weekly template digitally on Google Drive or in Evernote. The important thing to do is to find the workflow that smoothes the way the most. Your checklist system should appeal to you and to your kids, so it’s not a headache to check. It should include all the items your kids are responsible to complete – for example, ours includes their morning chores. And it should be clear to everyone how to use it. Spread the word! Leaving a review on iTunes will help other homeschooling moms discover this podcast!

Season 5: Attitude Organization Why do we do what we do? Sometimes, an end result can look the same even when the motivations behind the action are opposite. The exact same action and the exact same result could be caused by a completely different heart. Your heart matters. Recommended Reading: Read the original post here: Gratitude will make you more productive

Season 5: Why Convivial? Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Keeping short accounts leaves no room for resentment, no room for bitterness. It also means that even in the midst of argument, I am more careful in how I express myself, or where I let myself go — better to not sin in the first place than have to ask for forgiveness and make it whole and right again. It also means I can express myself openly and honestly and have confidence that we are both striving to reach unity and oneness, and in the ways we fail on our way there, restoration will be sought. We all fall short; we all need short accounts kept for us. Read the original post: Making a Convivial Home: Unrelenting Fellowship Recommended Reading: Simple Sanity Saver: Homeschool Checklists for Kids Encouraging ownership & independence with our kids often feels like a mysterious process and we don’t know how to go about it. We hope it just happens with age and maturity, but it doesn’t – it’s not a given. It’s a character trait that’s developed over time, but it won’t develop without practice. A checklist is a means of practice – and skills come after a period of deliberate, consistent practice. If you want your child to grow in independence with his schoolwork, start with a checklist and a daily meeting – one to start the day and one to make sure it’s done. When he wanders off, redirect back to the checklist. When he asks you what’s next, redirect back to the checklist. Make free time or a hobby pursuit contingent upon checklist completion – then he becomes master of his time. The amount of free time will be directly dependent upon his use of his time. There will be hard life lessons along that line, but holding the line and showing him that he has some control over his day will, in the end, grow responsibility and maturity. Independence only comes along with responsibility and maturity. Focus on responsibility and maturity, and independence comes as a bonus – for you both. Along those lines, keep in mind that independence will start developing in the double-digits. You might give your seven or nine year old a checklist – I do – but they are in the hand-holding phase. I don’t expect them to work independently with that checklist; they are only learning, by my pointing referring back to it with them, where to go to find what needs to be done next and what “done” looks like. Baby step elementary kids into responsibility with a checklist, but don’t expect it to bloom until middle school – and trying to force the bloom will not result in a healthy plant. Remember, if we want them to be responsible, so must we be. Spread the word!

Season 5: Attitude Organization I set the timer for fifteen minutes. Surely in fifteen minutes, I thought, I can make a difference in this room. The room was mine. The mess was an assortment of laundry, books, accumulated junk, out-of-season kids’ clothes, and random bits. I knew there was no way I was going to finish cleaning the room in fifteen minutes, or even that day, but I had to make a start. Starting is the hardest part. Recommended Reading: Read the original post here: The frustrations of tidying up