Curriculum Thoughts for 2009/2010

I am taking a much needed break from studying for my classes to talk about some of my thoughts for next year. While I love Sonlight and have used it exclusively since The Ark was in preschool we are taking a bit of a deviance this year and only using part of it. One of the reasons is because I didn’t like Children’s History of the World for younger grades and I switched it to Story of the World by Susan Bauer. Well here we are getting ready to go into our second rotation of history and Sonlight uses SOW but we have done them. So we are going to Mystery of History  with Sonlight Readers and Read Alouds. I had already left Sonlight’s science since I’m not fond of it, we are doing Astronomy, will finish Botany this summer and then go to Zoology 1 this fall. If we get through it on a good pace, we will move onto Zoo 2 next spring.

The Ark has been flying through Saxon math for the last two years but I want him to have a solid foundation in fractions since they are so important in Algebra and I want to wait for his brain to hit the logical thinking stage before we hit algebra, meaning not earlier than 8th grade. While Ace and the Princess have been doing Horizons Math. Ace has the hardest time getting through that work, I guess it is not hands on enough for him so we are switching all three of them to Math U See. I like their newer program, so we will see how it goes. The Ark was complaining a bit until I explained how Algebra is mostly fractions and then he realized that he really needed to get fractions down pat.

The next change is grammar, the kids hate it. So we are going to take a year to do more hands on things with it as well. Starting with reading GrammarLand

We will also do Hands of a Child ’s  Operation: Grammar and  Mission:Paragraph Island Rescue for lapbooking. For writing we will use Writing Strands for all 3 of them.

I had panned Latin for The Ark since he was still struggling with his dsylexia. We are adding in Ace and will start it back up in the fall.

For Art and Music we are doing Harmony Fine Arts, with Artistic Pursuits and Meet the Great Composers.

Of course we will be doing swim lessons, swim team for the boys,bike riding and hiking this summer, as well as lots of playground time while we are waiting for swim team and swim lessons to be over.

My Daisy girl (Kendra’s nick name from a friend) and The Ark are going to camp in June. I’m helping out with VBS  again in June.

I have some books at my amazon wish list that I want to add into our homeschooling. I will post them as i buy them. I found some really great math stories and will probably get the ones that fit into our ancient history theme.

Ok, enough of an update for now.