Planning stage

We've got a lot of catching up to do! At the end of May, I attended a homeschool conference. I had a great time & learned a lot of useful things. I also found some treasures - like a spiral-bound kindergarten-lined notebook (I've been looking for those for months!) & a chemistry curriculum for Jimmy's age group. I found a neat looking phonics curriculum but also found a very cool tool that I could use to teach phonics & reading to Jimmy for free! So we'll try the free one first. =) I highly recommend a conference to homeschooling parents! It is a veritable wealth of useful stuff. Just go armed with the ability to say "No, thanks!" There's a lot of stuff out there, but it isn't all going to be useful for your kids or your family.

So, after the conference, I sat down with what I had learned & the materials I had decided to try to use. I did a rough plan for the next school year as well as a plan for the summer. We had nearly two months of no school, and I realized that the boys do MUCH better with a routine. School definitely helps the routine. Plus, having some lessons ensures that the boys get my attention directly on them for a while - positive attention. With everything on my plate, I don't always remember that. Back to the plan... I have decided to make our summer session 10 weeks long & our regular school year plan 26 weeks. We'll be doing a chapter from our new catechism book through both sessions - there are 36 lessons. Our chemistry book has 10 lessons & 10 experiments - perfect for our 10 week summer session. Our FIAR book has 21 books, so there will be room for either additional books or unit studies (I'll plan the details as we get closer to the start of the regular session). Math grade 1 has 130 lessons, so 26 weeks of 5 lessons per week. (I haven't looked yet to see if we'll be skipping any of the more monotonous lessons - anything skipped will just allow us some flexibility to skip a few days of school here or there.) We'll be able to repeat the letter-of-the-week during the 26 week school year. We'll also add a few other things here & there.

So the plan - this summer: 10 weeks, skipping over the two weeks of VBS. We'll do a short lesson each day, doubling up as needed to allow flexibility to go to the park, go to the beach, do chores, or just plain veg. It is summer, after all! But the overall plan is to do one day of the chemistry lesson, 1 day of the chemistry experiment, 1 day for German review (i.e. watching the Muzzy DVD), 1 day for the catechism story (reviewing the catechism questions throughout the week - great for the car!), and 1 day for history. We will be doing a general overview of history, broken up into 10 segments: creation-flood, flood-exodus, exodus-Jesus, life of Jesus, the early church, the medival era, the renaissance era, the reformation, pilgrims/US constitution, and today. My goal is to develop a timeline that we can then build on in future years.

For the regular school year, Jimmy & Caleb will share lessons in letter of the week (Bible story & memory verse) & arts. Caleb will have B4FIAR lessons with his own book & discussion time. He'll also work on letter recognition (name & basic phonics sounds) with the phonics game I learned at the homeschool conference. Jimmy will have his FIAR lesson, his math Grade 1 lesson, handwriting (based on the LotW and/or copy work using some easy reader books), sight word work/phonics lessons (also using the nifty phonics game), & catechism story/Q&A memorization. Depending on how the summer session goes, I may include Caleb in the catechism work as well.

I've got all of the basics worked out. The only thing left is to decide what order to do the FIAR/B4FIAR books and what additional books or unit studies we'll do during the year.

So exciting!!