Our Homeschool Plans {2014-2015}
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I have been wanting to sit down and write out a post about our homeschool plans for the coming year and now I am finally getting to it!
I love beginning a new homeschool year and plotting out our course of study. Very rarely do we follow my “plans” exactly, but it does help to have a plan in place so that goals can be set and much learning accomplished! Below I will lay out for you our schedule, the basic things we will be studying, as well as the resources we will be using. Enjoy!
Planning
To plan our homeschool year this year, I am using a combination of Evernote and Lessontrek. I used Evernote to plot out our monthly plan, by making notes for each month of our year. For each month I typed out what I wanted to accomplish in their math and language arts studies, what books we will read for history, how many lessons to complete in science, etc. Lessontrek will be for keeping track of specific assignments for each day and recording when they are completed.
Bible
We will continue reading through The Child’s Story Bible each day after breakfast.
At some point I may switch over to reading through the HIStory: The Reader’s Bible volumes. I am loving the format of The Reader’s Bible so much and think it would be great to read aloud to the kids at breakfast. I also want to begin incorporating some of the Our 24 Family Ways devotionals, but we may decide to do those in the evenings together before bed.
Math
We are trying something really different this year — CTC Math! I was able to get the discounted price that they are offering to homeschoolers. I have all the kids doing this math (Grades 1, 3, 5, and 10) and so far they are all really liking it. I’ll try to do a more thorough review and post later in the school year!
Language Arts
I decided this year to use Queen Homeschool’s Language Lessons for my younger three. Besides doing these short daily lessons, they have other notebooking projects that they are working on. This should give them plenty of writing practice and opportunities to learn some grammar and spelling along the way. My youngest is still learning to read, so I will be doing the Language Lessons book with him to learn his phonics and also incorporating some other resources to help him along! My oldest will be working on some notebooking projects in areas of his interests.
History
No matter how many different history curriculums I try, we keep coming back to just reading books together as the bulk of our learning. This year we will be covering American History (Revolution & Expansion) and World History (Ancient Greece & Rome). I will be using my book lists to choose books to read together and also pulling in some other resources such as videos and audios to go along with our studies. Our History/Science/Literature studies will be in the afternoons for 1-2 hours. We have always enjoyed read aloud time in the afternoons, so we will be enjoying reading together for these studies.
As far as scheduling, we will be rotating each month between American History, World History, and Literature, doing about 3 weeks of focused study each month on one of these topics. For example, this month we are studying American History, in September we will be doing Literature, in October World History, and then repeating like that through the year. The other week of the month will be our science focus and I’ll explain what we are doing for science below.
If you want to see what books and resources we will be using for our history studies, you can see those here!
Literature
As I stated above, I will be incorporating Literature studies in a rotation with the history studies. On the months where we are studying Literature, I have a list of books that I want to read to the kids and we will simply spend time reading through them together. You can see what we will be reading here!
Science
For science this year, I chose Summer by the Sea by Queen Homeschool. This is a full year high school biology study that is Charlotte Mason style. We will be reading and working through it all together though. One week each month will be our focused science studies. This will allow us to cover a lot of material during each week. Basically we will be covering a month worth of lessons in that one week. We can do this because we will not have history studies during that week.
I am also going to be incorporating some other books and videos for our biology study. You can see the biology resources here!
I am really looking forward to doing our history and science this way!
Fine Arts
We will be doing an informal study of composers and artists during breakfast on Mondays each week. I have picked a composer and artist to study each month (see below) and will simply read about the artist/composer and then look at a painting or listen to some of their music. This will be a new addition for us, so we are going to add these studies a little at a time. But I think it will be enough for us to get a taste of some art and music that we would not otherwise have studied!
Composers to Read About:
Sept. – Bach
Oct. – Beethoven
Nov. – Mozart
Feb. – Verdi
Mar. – Liszt
Apr. – Schumann
**Read about composers using these books.
**Listen to music of all of these on Homeschooling Central website.
Artists to Study:
Sept. – Leonardo da Vinci
Oct. – Vincent van Gogh
Nov. – Georges Seurat
Feb. – Edward Munch
Mar. – Pablo Picasso
Apr. – Michelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio
**Read about artists using these books.
**Look at paintings using the Fine Arts Pages Collection that I purchased from Classical Composers.
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If you have made it all the way to end, congratulations! I hope you have enjoyed reading about what our plans are for the new school year. The kids will also be doing lots of reading, creative playing, sewing, and other educational activities that are too many to list (and some yet to be discovered!).
May each of you have a blessed new homeschool year!
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