School's In For Summer

Shiny new plans

School gets out here right before Memorial Day, and by July, the kids have spent as much unstructured time productively as they are likely to. Everyone is starting to get on each other’s nerves, but it is truly too hot and humid to lock them outside, and the youngest two are actually begging for lessons. So we will be starting up again next week. Because everyone knows that ✨planning✨ is the best part of homeschooling, I’ve been having a fun-filled few weeks with Internet Archive and my coil binder and now present to you the fruits of my labor.

Little Kids

My three youngest students will be doing a few things together - a dedicated morning read aloud while the teenagers get to sleep in a bit,¹ some Montessori language presentations, poetry study,² and spelling.

Cute new clipboard-binder for mom

This will be the first time I’ve bothered with teaching spelling formally. My first two kids’ spelling suddenly and dramatically improved without intervention after a few years of fluent reading in large quantities - generally around 5th grade after they have passed through the series-binging phase. In Kateri’s case, she will tell you that her spelling was also helped by a massive research project she undertook on her own initiative that mainly consisted of copying several thick horse books from the library into a spiral-bound notebook.

With these precedents, I was hoping that Edmund’s spelling would also evolve over the past year, but alas, it has not. The bright side is that I now have a chance to try out Words Their Way, a word study program that has long intrigued me. And if I’m going to the effort of printing and cutting out a ton of word sorts, might as well have Nicholas and Agnes³ tag along.

Agnes - 2nd grade

Agnes loves lessons until she doesn’t. Especially math, which will start this year with the Miquon Green Book if we can find it, because she’s been carrying it around for weeks begging me to let her begin and now we don’t know where it is.

Agnes will be reading the Free and Treadwell Third Reader aloud to me every day, and I expect her to get through it before the year is over. After the Third Reader, I consider my students to have completed the “learning to read” process and ready to “read to learn.” When she is ready to move up to the Fourth Reader, she’ll read it independently and then narrate the day’s reading to me.

For handwriting, Agnes and Nicholas will be learning cursive with Handwriting Lessons Through Literature. They will also be reading the same history spine, A Child’s First Book of American History and continuing UD’s delightful Latin program with their dad.

Is it really better? This year, we find out.

Nicholas - 4th grade

In addition to all that he is doing with his siblings, Nicholas is continuing with Math Mammoth and starting the Fourth Year Language Reader. He might be starting band - the Principal and I have yet to decide if we think he has the necessary maturity to practice with adequate diligence. I’m skeptical.

Edmund - 6th grade

Edmund is peak upper elementary child right now and so delightful - I think he is really ready for more academic challenge. He’ll be working through Math Mammoth 6 and this Sixth Year Language Reader, reading the Landmark History of the American People by Daniel and Ruth Boorstin and various botany books, and learning to write outlines from his reading.

6th grade is when kids start formal Latin studies around here, so I’ll be embarking on my third time through Familia Romana. I’ve found the pace of the exercitia to be too fast with not enough repetitions for my students, so this time around I’m experimenting with some different ways of practicing the grammar based on Jesuit Paul Distler’s excellent book Teach the Latin, I Pray You.

Big Kids

Kateri is old enough this year that I’m grouping her and Benedict together for some high school content so that we can hopefully have some discussions that feel more like discussions and less like interrogations. The two of them are going to go through A Workbook for Arguments and will be driving together to math classes taught by a friend (Kateri for Algebra 1 and Benedict for BC Calculus).

But what I’m really, really excited about is American History, the field in which I did graduate work and about which I have many opinions. After much, MUCH agonizing, I’ve decided to use Wilfred McClay’s newish textbook response to Howard Zinn, Land of Hope, which conveniently comes in high school and middle school variations. The teacher’s guide includes a solid selection of primary source supplements, and the whole thing is compact enough that we should still have plenty of time for me add a few things I think could use more attention.

Yes, my kids are color-coded.

Kateri - 8th grade

Kateri will be working through her last school reader this year, the Everyday Classics Eighth Reader, practicing sentence composition with Model English Book 1, and, if we don’t dawdle, finishing Familia Romana. She’s continuing to play violin with our local homeschool music program and is also picking up, sigh, the saxophone.

Kateri is most excited about a vet science study we’ve put together for this year that, if all goes well, will feed right into 9th grade bio next year. In addition to studying a textbook, she will be managing our Jersey cow’s prenatal and postpartum care over the next few months, keeping a logbook of all the homestead livestock care that happens this year, and making an end-of-year presentation to our former babysitter, who is graduating from vet school this spring.

Benedict - 11th grade

I resolved my high school science angst by putting Benedict in a dual enrollment chemistry class with the local four year university this summer. The class is all online, which has been underwhelming. On the bright side, the state is paying for it, he’ll be done in just a few more weeks, and we won’t have to worry about science at all this academic year, except for some reading about the history of science I’m going to assign. I was kind of hoping that dual enrollment would turn out to be a good enough solution for high school science for everyone going forward, but based on how this is going so far, I’m not sure that it will be, alas.

After a really intense year of Latin preparing for the AP (scores came out this week - it went well! I’m not a complete failure as a Latin teacher!), we’ll take it a little easier this year: some prose composition and reading Roma Aeterna, possibly with the Principal joining us. For English, we have Intensive Studies in American Literature and Model English Book 2. Benedict is continuing with flute and singing tenor and maybe joining the concert band of the local youth symphony, if he can get his driver’s license and get himself there for rehearsals.

With my new magnetic fridge calendar, this year I will be truly unstoppable.

We’ve reached the age when I have to think about preparing a student for standardized testing - Benedict will take the PSAT in the fall, and I guess the ACT at some point (I grew up in an SAT region so I really need to figure out what is the deal with the ACT), and the BC Calc and US History AP exams in the spring.

All Together Now

For years I have wanted to do more⁴ fine arts, and this is finally this year! For real this time! For about a few minutes after lunch every day we are going to work through a list of beginner drawing books - starting with Mark Kistler’s You Can Draw in 30 Days - and some of Sadie Hoyt’s Classical Encounters modules.

Everyone will also be working out of Trail Guide to US Geography. This is a neat resource with daily short assignments for elementary, middle, and high school along with an extensive menu of other longer projects. I’m not totally sure how much we will use it beyond the daily geography drills, but I can imagine some of the kids really getting into based on how much everyone enjoyed our world geography year.

So that’s the plan! Excelsior!

1. First up, one of my all-time favorites, Johnny Tremain, I cannot wait.

2. Beginning with “Hiawatha’s Childhood,” a rite of passage around here that Agnes should have undergone last year but we are running behind.

3. Who, to be honest, is already a better speller than her two older brothers

4. any