Thursday, July 24, 2014

The upcoming year

This year our school lineup is changing significantly.  It will be our 15th year of homeschooling, and two of our children will be in public school, 13yo "princess" one "the engineer"will be attending a prestigious private university (provided the remaining funds avail themselves!)

The remaining children are:
15yo Boy "Godzilla"
10yo Girl "Turkey"
8yo Boy "Einstein"
5yo Boy "monkey"


A couple  children are delayed. So developmentally i'll be doing Kindergarten, 2nd grade, 4th grade and 9th grade.

This year is interesting because princess wanted to try public school, so there's a wide gap between my 9th gradeGodzilla and 4th grade turkey and the youngers. This means he'll have to work by himself on a lot of things that he normally worked with his sister on. (they have always been close, like our non-twin twins)  So my strategy is to have him work with us through some parts of the day gleaning what he can and then do his extra work independently when possible.  So what are we using this year?

For the youngers, our main curriculum we are planning to use is, Build your Library grade 2, supplemented with Sonlight B level read alouds and 3rd grade readers for Turkey. The cool thing about literature based curriculum is that multiple ages can benefit from it with some tweaking.

http://buildyourlibrary.com/second-grade-medieval-world/


For Godzilla, We'll be using Sonlight G for the first half of the year, and Build your library 7 for the second half. 




So for the youngers and older, we will be studying medieval history for the year for the youngers and half a year for older.  His other half year will be spent starting Build your curric. 7 which studies geography, cultures and religions

Science for the youngers will be astronomy and earth science.  (build your library) 
Science for older will be either zoology or anatomy, he's not yet decided, and chemistry for the second half. 

For language arts:

Monkey will be starting his first year of kindergarten and will be using McRuffy Kindergarten LA


Turkey and Einstein will be using the Language Smarts series from the critical thinking company



Sequential spelling
 And Six trait writing

Godzilla will be using lightning Literature grade 8

And MAYBE One year adventure novel.  We have it and he was once really excited about it, but isn't now, so i'll encourage him but not MAKE him do it.




Also considering adding Life of fred Australia


MATH:

Monkey will be doing McRuffy Kindergarten Color math

Einstein and Turkey will be doing Teaching textbooks math 3

And Life of fred when time allows





Godzilla will be using a combination of Teaching Textbooks 7 and hopefully moving on to prealgebra




And Life of fred Decimals and percents and perhaps prealgebra