Plans for Rabbit
Rabbit is enrolled at the local community college to take English Composition 1, College Algebra, and Music Theory 1 with Lab. She will take Spanish through our co-op. This will be a totally hands off semester for me, except for any help she needs with math or English. She is also a company dancer and dancing in competitions this year for her dance studio. I hope she can keep up with it all. In the spring, she will be starting at a local university.
Rabbit is enrolled at the local community college to take English Composition 1, College Algebra, and Music Theory 1 with Lab. She will take Spanish through our co-op. This will be a totally hands off semester for me, except for any help she needs with math or English. She is also a company dancer and dancing in competitions this year for her dance studio. I hope she can keep up with it all. In the spring, she will be starting at a local university.
Plans for Pooh and Tigger
This year we are repeating 1850 to Modern Times from My Father's World. Last time through they were third graders, so they just did the 2nd/3rd grade supplement. This time a lot of the information will be new. We will not be doing the Bible memory, as the boys participate in Awana. We will read the other books under the Bible section though, as those are good. They will also be doing Apologia's physical science curriculum with labs at co-op, rather than the science in 1850 to Modern Times.
Language Arts will be looking a bit different this year. I am adding in vocabulary, using Vocabulary Cartoons. We'll just do one word a day, 4 days a week. There is a quiz in the book after every 10 words, so we'll even do the quizzes. It will probably take us 2 years to get through a book, and I do plan on continuing them through high school. I feel like the boys are lacking in vocabulary. They don't like to read as much as Rabbit and it shows in the words they choose when speaking and writing. We are doing Easy Grammar as recommended by My Father's World, and continuing in Sequential Spelling as Pooh needs more spelling. Pooh will continue in Writing With Skill 1 this year, but Tigger will be taking a middle school writing class at co-op. I think it will be very good for him.
I'm going to continue with VideoText Interactive for the boys for Algebra 1 this year. Rabbit has done really well with it, and I like the way they teach it. I did briefly consider Shoremann math, but I think I like to be more involved with math, especially with Pooh's dysgraphia. This will allow me to keep up with what they are doing and not hand off a topic completely.
Apologia's Exploring Creation with Physical Science is recommended for 8th grade, so we are doing that. Our co-op has a teacher that offer's labs to go along with this text. I've already talked to her about Pooh's dysgraphia and how to go about handling that. The teacher really loves science, so I think this will be good for the boys.
For Foreign Langauge we are going to try a Spanish curriculum I picked up for $5 from the Build Your Bundle sale (if you consider I bought 5 things for $25, it was $5). I had OfficeDepot print out 2 copies and spiral bind them. It is written as a one semester course, but we will spread over the school year. Mostly I want to expose them to it before taking Spanish at the co-op in 9th grade. I might also add a little DuoLingo to it as well.
Art and Music we'll continue as part of the 1850 to Modern Times curriculum. We usually don't do the art projects. We read the art history and technique, but the boys aren't really interested in doing the art projects, so I let it go. We've got enough on our plates already.
There are also some really good read alouds this year that the boys didn't listen to last time. I'm looking forward to reading those with the boys. The books have longer chapters, so I don't know if I'll be doing those during lunch. Hopefully I can find some audio to go with the books so I don't have to do all of the reading myself. I did manage to get audio for Sargent York last time, though I ended up reading it because the audio seemed slow with the southern drawl. I know I got Across Five Aprils audio from the library last time, and that was helpful.
Tigger is also taking acting again at our co-op. Both boys take music lessons. And Tigger is planning on hip-hop, flag football, and basketball this next school year. Oh, and we'll be doing P.E. classes as usual. I suspect our days will be much longer. History will take more time due to outlining each chapter (but that will be good for them). And I suspect science will take longer, as the co-op teacher said part of the homework is not only writing up the lab, but watching related videos and such. And, math too. But, I like to use a timer, and when we hit a maximum time for a subject, we stop for the day.
Preparation
So, I've read through the introduction section of the teacher's manual a couple of times. I went shopping for a few items we need. I've printed the first few weeks of the Student Activity pages (bought the PDF this time) that we'll need and the timeline pieces. I cleaned out their history notebooks from last year, bought new binders, and put all the page protectors in the new binders. I've also put lesson plans for physical science, vocabulary, the Progeny Press guides we're doing this year, and Easy Grammar into my Homeschool Tracker Plus database.
What's left? A little more organizing the bookshelves, ripping the CD's for music to my phone (because the cars no longer have CD players, and I plan on listening to the music in the car on the way to co-op), reserving books from the library (that needs to wait until closer to our start date), and finishing lesson plans to go along with our Awana program this year. We start in a month, so hopefully I can get it all done.
