Homeschool Stuff

For those who are interested…

This year Keenan enters grade 5 and Thaddeus grade 2.  We will be traveling to Australia in Sept / Oct 2010, and Australia’s school year begins in February.  So it’ll be an interesting transition!

We are going SIMPLE and FAMILIAR this year since we also have a 3 1/2 and 1 1/2 yr old, and I’m PREGNANT again due the 1st week of March.

MATH:

We’ll keep Teaching Textbooks for Keenan and choose something ‘off the shelf’ for Thaddeus when we get to Australia so we don’t have to travel with it.  I will take some of my Living Math Resources with me so we can do real life and fun math.

LANGUAGE ARTS:

I found a new curriculum that we will use for Keenan.  Character Quality Language Arts.  I downloaded the free month of samples and am really pleased with it, but unfortunately it really is TOO much for Thad.  We’ll continue to do Explode the Code with him and maybe choose some of the grammar topics from Keenan’s stuff, and also do journal writing.  Thaddeus is a late writer and reader and I don’t want to burn him out before he is ready.

HISTORY:

Story of the World Volume 2 and 3 (we never finished Volume 2 a couple years ago)

Diana Waring’s History Alive recordings to compliment it.  Our boys love listening to recordings 🙂 the more stories the better!

SCIENCE:

Apologia – Botany and/or Astronomy with the new notebooks that are available.  Keenan is really looking forward to those… Not sure if we’ll do the note booking with Thaddeus.  If so, a very loose version.  He isn’t so into all that! 🙂

Everything else will be life… music and art… when we get to it.  we like to draw and paint and we have lots of CDs they listen to.  We’ll continue with piano lessons when we get to Australia courtesy of Uncle Brad.  We are going to do a trade 🙂 I teach his, he teaches mine.

Plus there will be a new country to explore and family to get to know again and a puppa (my dad) dealing with extensive skin cancer and a new baby.  There’ll be plenty of learning!