Homeschool Curriculum 2011-2012

It's late, so this will be a fairly quick post. First I'd like to just tell you a brief philosophy of our homeschool. I desire for my children to be prepared for whatever God calls them to do, so it is important to me that they get a good education, but I homeschool, primarily, for Spiritual reasons. I desire to spend as much time as I can using life lessons to teach my children to walk with the Lord. That being said we are not and probably will never be a family that "schools" all day long. I look for curriculum that has a lot of good information that can be used in a short amount of time. There is one primary exception to that this year and I'll explain that as I go.

Kelsi and Keeli's 8th grade curriculum
Teaching Textbooks Math (This is our exception. It takes my girls anywhere from 1-2 hours to do one lesson. However, it's a VERY thorough curriculum, takes all of the guesswork out of it and my girls really like it.)

Notgrass American History (We will be using this for Literature, History and Bible. However, we are pairing this with a presidential study and will be taking two years to go through this with that study.)

Apologia General Science

Wordsmith

Easy Grammar Ultimate

Vocabulit

Keeli is also still working through AVKO Sequential Spelling. She LOVES it and we have seen an AMAZING improvement in her spelling ability since we started. If you have a struggling speller, I highly recommend trying this.

The girls are taking a break from ballet this year. They LOVE ballet and are very sad to have to take a break, but the karate studio that housed their homeschool dance classes was flooded during the April 27th tornadoes. This caused the teacher to have to move her classes to a farther away town and move it to a day and time that was just impossible for us. We are hoping she will be able to move back next year. However, it's enabling us to spend some time doing things the girls have been wanting to do. They are going to be learning to cook more and bake more as well as do more sewing and crafting, so we're very excited for the extra time.

Mason's 4th Grade Curriculum

If you didn't already know, I'll be transparent for a moment, ALL of my children read late. I read a book in my early years of homeschooling entitled "Better Late than Early" and boy am I thankful I did. I tried to teach them to read at the "normal" time and it just seemed that I hit brick wall after brick wall, but then there would be a random light bulb moment and suddenly they would be interested and everything would just click. For Kelsi it was the middle of 2nd grade, for Keeli it was much later, due to her dyslexia and auditory processing issues and thank you Jesus, Mason has FINALLY decided that it's time. He's having major revelation every single day! Just wanted you to understand why he has some of the curriculum that he has.

Explode the Code workbooks (Last year we did the online version and he enjoyed it, but it advances you based on what it considers the students readiness. That decision is based on accuracy and speed. Mason was very accurate, but slow and could not get past book 2, so this year we are back to the workbooks and he's flying through them.)

Spectrum Sight Word Workbooks

A Reason For Hanwriting

Modern Curriculum Press Math

Modern Curriculum Press Plaid Phonics

MCP Spelling Workout

He will be joining the girls for History and will be doing Unit Studies for Science.

I don't have our schedule finished yet, but I'm thinking this schedule should take Mason 2-3 hours per day and the girls 3-4 hours.

Lack Of Posting

My life has been busy, busy, busy and of course I've been posting more of it on Facebook than here. I'll try to do better. Look for a post about my newest adventure and our homeschool year very soon!