I know, it has been a while since I have posted anything on here. As a matter of fact I did not even post the last couple weeks of school. Things got so beat up around here right around then with medical appointments etc that the last thing on my mind was taking time to post. Anyhow, things are calm once more and I am ready to get back into the swing of the school year.
I will start my one teaching job on Mondays the first week of Sept and then my Wed night job on the second week of September. So I thought what might be a great idea is to start school early. But when I talked to the kiddos about it they were begging to wait. So we did a compromise. Now all summer we have been doing math and reading as much as possible. But this week we added History back into our school. Not bad. I did not really feel like we added to much at all. So next week we are going to add either Science or Geography or maybe English into our day and see how that goes. I figure if we add in one thing at a time we will not feel overwhelmed once we have it all in.
So what are we doing this year for curriculum? Well we are going right along with the history course we had last year. “The Story of the World. We are doing book 2, The Middle Ages”. Looks like a ton of fun and my hope is at some point we will be able to visit a castle during the study!Like Hearst Castle. I have never been and this gives us a good excuse to go. LOL
I decided this year that the children were old enough to do some sort of apologetic. So I opted to try “Who is God? And Can I Really Know Him?” for our Bible curriculum. It took me a bit to go through the book and figure out a lesson plan breaking it down to bite size pieces, but I think I did an OK job. We shall see. The book looks fantastic and you know I may learn a thing or two myself.
As some of my followers know I have never been that big into using a Geography curriculum but when I went to the CHEA convention, here in California, I looked at all the curriculum that was avaliable. And you know what “Trail Guide to World Geography” looked really good. There are 5 minute drills everyday and then a once a weeks lesson. Hey, that’s easy. And the best thing is no prep work needed on my part like a lot of the other ones I looked at. So this will be fun. WE are going to be learning about all the countries of the world. Yea!
Science we are going right back to what we love. Apologia! This year we are going to learn about Land Animals. I am so looking forward to this. It is kinda weird, but next summer for our VBS at our church it will be all about animals. Go figure. My kids we be able to tell the teachers a thing or two as they bring in some of the animals from our local zoo and neighbors. And for VBS this year it was Castles. Hmmm, seems like VBS was right in sync with our history and science curriculum!
Art will be starting up in October and we will be having some fun with out group. We still have to all agree on a curriculum for that but it looks like we will be using “Gluck Art of Drawing”. We will learn to draw as well as later in the lessons we will be learning how to water color. I love the look of water color and I feel it is a real skill to be able to place that paint on the paper and make it look soft yet focused. I am so looking forward to getting a more in depth learning experience in drawing for my kids. The program we have been using has been OK, but this will be MUCH better!
Math is still Abeka, Reading will be the normal reading aloud for my daughter with a retell and to himself with a retell for my son. Although I have figured out that my son has a very slight case of dyslexia, a friend of mine has offered to teach him the Barton Reading and Spelling along with her son. Hmmm, I will have to think about that a little and see. This might be a great opportunity for him. For English we will go back to what works which is Rod and Staff. And of course piano and choir for the kiddos.
Well, that’s it for now. I am off to a good start in my posting. There won’t be too much to talk about over the next couple weeks but I will post what we are doing for now before the real school starts!
For now have a great rest of the summer!
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