Plans for this new school year

Now that May/June baseball is over, and July camps (scout and church camp) are over, August is here. That means the start of our new school year and many weekend family camping trips. So, as I think about what next year will look like, I see many changes. The first and biggest one is that we have a 7th grader living in the house! (Eek!) In an effort to allow him to grow up, he will have several subjects that will be more independent than he is used to.

Math will be the same as always - Math U See - continuing with where they left off last year (with a little review to start out.)

Language Arts will be one of the first major changes he sees. For writing, he will begin Institute for Excellence in Writing. This is a video based program where he'll watch Andrew Pudewa teach him a concept and then use it for an indefinite length of time (until mastery) and continue on to the next thing. The actual writings will span many different subjects (science, history, etc.), but the concepts he uses in his writings will be from IEW.

Also within Language Arts is reading. He will begin reading some classics (Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, etc.) and doing activities that go along with these stories.

In History, he will continue with Mystery of History, a program that combines traditional and Biblical history. He did early history last year and will begin Middle Ages this year. We will modify it some from last year, but he did it pretty much independently last year also.

Science will continue to be from Apologia, as we have done for the last 4 years. We do this together, with me reading the text aloud, doing experiments and projects along with the lessons, and them keeping notebooks on what they have learned. The last 2 years have been Zoology - beginning with birds, moving on to fish last year and looking at mammals this year.

For fun, we'll throw in some different unit studies along with way to give us a break in the monotony - roller coasters, trees, creeks, clouds, etc. Most of these will be done this fall when the weather is nice.

We will try to keep 2 read-alouds going this year - a biography and the other alternating between a classic and something fun.