As I said in my last post, we are going with the Classical Conversations at home method this upcoming school year. Which means that the foundation of our school will be, ironically, the Foundations guide from CC and the audio CDs of the memory work.
One of the biggest decisions we had to make this year was whether to formally classify Hunter as Kindergarten or whether to hold him back until next year. His 5th birthday is ON September 1st, which is the cutoff, so we could have gone either way with him. I leaned towards holding him back a year at first because, like most little boys, he has the hardest time sitting still and tends to fidget all. the. time. But since we are not going to enroll them in a CC community until the 2016-17 school year and he'll be 6, I think we will be able to train him to sit still long enough for the lessons. My other reason for going ahead with Kindergarten for him is because this child has an amazing memory. This has really become evident with AWANA this year. He has no problem memorizing his Scriptures and even some of his sister's! Any song that comes on the radio he can sing the words to and we have an audio book of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas that he can recite all the words to from memory. So since the CC memory work will be our main focus, I think that it will be perfect for him.
Our Bible study starting out will be Who Is God? And How Can I Know Him? by Apologia. I've read several very good reviews of it and this year I want to do a family study instead of one that is segregated by grade-level.
For math, we will be sticking with Saxon. It has worked well for us this year and so far the kids have enjoyed it. I will be using Level 1 for Taylor and repeating the Kindergarten book for Hunter. He sat at the table with us when we did the activities for Taylor and seemed to really enjoy them. I want to reinforce the ideas that he picked up on this year before we move on to new material for him.
For English/Reading, we will be using First Language Lessons for The Well-Trained Mind, Level 1. This is another one of those that I've heard good recommendations for, so we are going to try it out. I still have Explode the Code that we used this year and I will probably have Hunter go through it again before moving on to FLL the following year.
I debated back and forth between Story of the World and Mystery of History for a while, but I think we are going to go with Mystery of History this year. The deciding factor for me was that it is more Biblically-centered than SOTW. My only concern is that I've read reviews that it may be geared more towards older elementary school students. Of course, if we try it and end up not liking it, we can always change it!
As a supplement to CC science, I am going to get Science in the Beginning by Dr. Jay Wile. I like that this science book is geared towards younger elementary students and that there are simple experiments with household items for each lesson. The other great thing about this book and the subsequent ones is they explore science following the timeline of history. It helps that we are starting with Cycle 1 in CC this year, so we will be learning our history and our science starting with Creation.
If that didn't seem like enough to keep us super busy throughout the year, I would like to throw in a few lessons on fine arts and classical music. I would love to get both kids into music lessons, but they also want to do soccer and baseball and I know I've got to draw the line somewhere! I keep having to remind myself that we will have a newborn when school starts as well and I'll probably be running on very little sleep for a while!
To organize all this and help keep me sane, I will be using The Well-Planned Day planner again. I have loved how it has room for everything for the kids' school (and mine!), including my dinner menu for the week and shopping lists. It suits my Type A personality very well. In fact, I hinted to Marcus the other night that my current planner expires in June, so I'll be needing a new one soon! :-)
I know that I am overextending myself, but honestly, I'd rather schedule too much and not get it all done than to schedule too little and then be scrounging for things to add mid-year. So we're shooting for the stars! :-)
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