My 2013-2014 curriculum picks

After months of looking and figuring and relooking, making notes, listing pros and cons, budgeting and doing it over and over, I have finally finalized out 2013-2014 curriculum picks for Emma and Daniel's 3rd and 11th grade year.
For Daniel:
History: Sonlight Core 100 for American History and Mystery of History Volume 3 to continue World Study (this is being continued because Daniel asked to continue it, he loves MOH)
Science: Ace Paces Chemistry plus other books (see my blog post discussing Daniel's Science) for half a year and Signs and Seasons for Astronomy for the other half (this is the plan unles Daniel decided on another science topic for the 2nd half)
Math: Teaching Textbooks Geometry
English: Sonlight core 100 literature and writing assignments plus some extra books from the readers in Core 200, Vocabulary from Classical Roots book C and D, and Wordly Wise

Daniel has finished all his electives and his 2 years of Latin so he has just 4 subjects this year. He will continue Fencing and the mixture of activities the Home School Assist Program offers for Teens.

For Emma:
History: Sonlight Core D, plus Time Traveler CDs, and American Girl Doll Books
Science: Sonlight Science D and Apologia's Flying Creatures
Math: This is still up in the air. Either BJU Math 4 or just play math for the year since she is ahead a year. She would create a math journal and also use grade 3 week essentials
Language Arts: Sonlight LA that comes with core D, the readers from core D plus finish the Mensa Reading List for K-3 and start the Mensa Reading List for 4-6. We will continue to follow the spelling as outlined by Ruth Beechick's You Can Teach Your Child (see the blog post I made on how we are doing this)
Art: Home Art Studio grade 2 and 3, (see past blog post on this)

I am not adding in any specific physical activities because she is very active still. Nature Hikes will continue each week as will her nature journal.

All my carts are full for the companies I will be buying from and am eager to hit the pay buttons. Neat thing, with Sonlight you can pick an interest free time payment plan that is 4 payments spread over 9 months. This makes it nice so a big chunk of money is not gone from our accounts. Once I get all my materials I will have to practice patience. In the past, I tend to drop what we are doing because the new stuff looks so good and I cannot contain myself or the kids....but I will be good this year. I promise. I should be able to hold off till July....I think.

Dot, dot, dot...

We have been studying France in Geography these last two weeks and part of our cultural geography study was on the french painter Georges Seurat. I picked him from the long list of french artists because I thought painting a picture using pointillism would be different. We used the book by Mike Venezia (I love his books and so does Emma) to first read about Seurat and piontillism.

Besides pointillism, Seurat also realized that if you paint a picture where the eye is drawn upward the picture gives off a happy mood, down is sad, and across is calm. Many of his pieces have a more directional feel to relay this feeling.
Next we tried our hand at pointillism.

I helped some, but just a little, Emma would get tired of the constant dot making so I filled in here and there. We had to make sure to add in darker greens for the shadow of the tree and yellows to show the sun shining on the ground and sky.
For the last part of our lesson, Emma filled in a notebooking page. I use History Scribe for the notebook pages (love this disc, I bought it for $5 but I see it has gone up in price).

We are enjoying learning about the different artist and I will probably go through each on the Venezia books the library has. This summer we will be taking a trip to Chicago's Art museum to see some of the works from the artists studied. I can still remember the Seurat painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, when I saw it when I was a young girl. Truly breathtaking.

The final say on Science for Dan

At least for this coming year.
I have been trying to figure out HOW to do Chemistry next year for Daniel since he is having trouble with the Chemistry aspects of Biology and because he is dreading the subject. I looked at curriculum. Posted on forums about what to do. Looked at non textbook ways to go about it...looked and looked and looked. Yesterday I got a brainstorm, does he REALLY need a full Chemistry course? What is actually needed for College admission at our local University? What is actually needed (in science)at the local High School to graduate? I checked. Local high school you need a Foundations in Science and Biology plus 2 more years of science electives. These can be anything from Astronomy to Zoology. In other words, Chemistry is not a necessity. The University requires undergraduates to have 3 yrs in Science, 2 of those years need to be either Biology, Physics, or Chemistry. He will have Biology and will be taking Physics. As long as I add in another science (does not have to be Chemistry) then he is good to go for the University. CHEMISTRY IS NOT REQUIRED!!!
However, to be a good homeschooling mom, I will be requiring some Chemistry. A general knowledge is important. With that he will study Chemistry and Astronomy (he might change this, but for now) and earn a half credit in each.
The Chemistry course will consist of:
ACE Paces Chemistry books 1121-1126
MicroChem kit for labwork
The Elements
and read these and/or others similar to these
A Poisoner's Handbook
The Disappearing Spoon
Napoleon's Button
Periodic Tales

This will give him a basic Chemistry course. If he enjoys this he can do the other paces for Chemistry, 1127-1132.
For Astronomy, the tentative plan is to use Signs and Seasons. This will be carried out for the whole school year but only used a few times a week, resulting in a half credit earned.

Whew...I am so glad this is decided and I can stop blogging about this science dilemma.

Spelling

The boys all used a typical spelling program, learn a given set of words, do some activities with the words and take a test. Each week new words. Nothing wrong with this but I just could not face doing this again with Emma. For one I kept seeing words Emma uses in her writings and gets wrong not being in the lists. Her working word list was not represented in the spelling books. Granted these words need to be learned, the spelling book ones, but other words do too. I decided to use the ideas in Ruth Beechick's book You Can Teach Your Child Successfully (I highly recommend this book).

In it she has several options for teaching spelling. The one we will be using is where you take the child's writing and pull from it words they misspell, words you think they should know, and keep a running list of them. When you get 10, or how many you want to work with, you then teach those words. I kept a running list on a piece of scratch paper and had it hanging on the fridge.
(here is a pic of our list written on the back of a calendar page)

Ruth Beechick then suggests making a note page for the different phonics sounds. She breaks this down in her book with page suggestions and examples of the letters that make the sounds. This is very helpful for me because it is hard to decide sometimes exactly where the different sounds go. I made Emma make the different pages that had to do with her mistakes. Eventually we will have all the pages represented if Emma needs them.

Before she wrote the words on the appropriate page we discussed the sound and letters as well as other words that had similar spelling/sound. Then I had her write the list out. We will have a test at the end of the week on these words. I am also having her write the words in script for hand writing practice but that is a separate subject and not necessary for spelling.

The lists she makes are her personal word lists. I can add words I want her to know how to spell to it. There is no limit to what we can add and no wrong way on what notebook pages we want to add. It is a personal spelling book. Ruth Beechick gives suggestions and lets you know it is okay personalize it. For now this is how we will do spelling.

Developing Me

Long ago I was tired and felt like I had no time for me. None. Even a trip to the bathroom had little ones trailing behind. This was when I had 3 little boys under the age of 7. I can remember my husband trying to console me one especially tiring day...he said, "One day you will have more time then you know what to do with"....at the time I just wanted to glare at him because how were those words going to help me when one had little sleep and hungry mouths to feed. I did get a taste of this promise, just a taste, right before Emma was conceived. The boys were older and 2 were teens. Then a new baby and once again any time for me was gone. Fast forward to present day. 2 of my 4 have flown the nest, and the 2 left are old enough to not need mom very much. With the exception of school and housewife duties, I am left to pursue my interests.

During this re-found freedom I have learned to knit and started this blog. As more and more time finds it's way at my feet I am finding my interests are branching out. Because I want to make a serious study of nature I decided to learn to draw and/or paint with watercolors. Gardening is another thing I want to pursue. Some I can start now and some I will have to wait a few more years, but I am preparing for that day. The day I retire from being a stay at home mom and become just a house wife...one where the day is all mine from the time hubby leaves the house till I make dinner. A good 6-7 hours free to pursue
knitting
gardening
art
nature hiking
journaling
Bible study
blogging
working on a book
puzzles
weaving
scrapbooking
reading
learning to play a musical instrument
video games (yes, I play these)
math studies
to name just a few. 

I have never had time for myself, not like this. As a child I had school, then college, work, and children. When hubby retires I want to work on our relationship. Getting to know each other once again. Doing things with him, just him and me. Sure there will be plenty of time to pursue my hobbies but it will be different...not in a good or bad sense, just different. But those years of just me, to develop just my interests...it will be my personal Renaissance, my time of enlightenment.

The science wheel is taking shape

Imagine my surprise when I opened a thread I started on TWTM forum and found a treasure trove of ideas, resources, and blog posts pertaining to my looking for an alternative way of doing high school science. The thread is found here TWTM Science Post. One of the links given to me by Faithr (I want to hug this woman) was exactly what I had in mind, a list of books...not textbooks...that read as a whole will give the student an understanding of the science. Not just facts or terms, but a true understanding of what the science(and it's parts) is by people who have a passion for the subject (can someone say living books). The link is Living Book Science .
I already have several of the books for Biology in my Amazon cart. Soon as these come in I will be working on schedules and course work needed to complete the Biology year. Just reading these books will not be the course. I will require note taking on these books. Some sort of lab work or field work is needed also. I still want nature study to be a part of the Biology credit.
I feel the plan starting to come together and am actually doing a mental happy dance. Cannot wait to get things written up on paper though.

Reinventing the science wheel

High school. I have gone through it 3 times, once as a teen and twice as a homeschooling mother. The 3 experiences were all different but had the same result....hatred. I went to a public school, that at the time was rated one of the top in the nation, and I was in honors (said not to brag but to let the reader know I was not in classes that had no merit). With that said, I entered college not knowing how to write (papers) and not knowing how to study and nothing but a bare minimum of things learned academically (graduated with a 3.4 GPA, again not to brag but to let you know I passes with more then the minimum). My oldest did high school pretty much on his own and made excellent scores on both the ACT and ASVAB (Navy bound graduate) but found everything we did extremely boring and it pretty much killed his love of learning. Second son was a different sort of child and after enough butting heads went into a Youth Challenge school (military run) and earned his GED by end of 10th grade. He also lost his love of learning somewhere around middle school. I am now on my 3 son and sadly it is turning out to be the same sad story. Loved school until it started getting textbooky and then the spark went out.

I don't honestly expect all his classes to be exciting and I don't expect it to be a party...school is work. But why can't work be enjoyable. For the most part I think I have found the right things for the main subjects. Daniel loves mythology so his English and Latin studies are centered around Mythology ( Classical Mythology and More for English and Latina Mythica for Latin). We solved his math hatred by switching to Teaching Textbooks and for the first time he mentioned math in a list of things he liked. Mystery of History is his world history curriculum and next year it will be combined with Sonlight (core 100). Science is the only subject I have not found a solution for. We did make it less painful by switching to Apologia but it is still a textbook and still dry, going into extreme detains that no one but a biochemist will need to learn. But even if it is a doable book it, science at the upper level has killed any love of the subject for my son. I cannot live with that, not again.

We are not talking about a child who is planning on pursuing a career in the STEM field or a student planning on going to a competitive college(if he plans on college). We are however talking about a student who loves to write, loves anything to do with weaponry, and loves trivia. Just today he over heard me teaching his little sister about comets and listened in. I happen to mention about Mark Twain being born and dieing during the passing of Halley's comet and he wanted to learn more about it. He spent time reading about Mark Twain and then found quotes about him that he had to share. This is Daniel. he hears something that piques his interest, studies it (maybe a cursory study or maybe an in depth study) and then shares his findings.

Because I do not want Daniel to follow the same trend I and my older 2 sons followed, I need to reinvent the study of science at the high school level. I keep asking myself why does science have to be taught with a text book? We can learn history using biographies, living books,original papers, and historical novels....why not apply this to science topics?

NOTE: I will be honest and add a disclaimer, as well, before I go any farther...I do not know what I am doing and if you follow anything I say here it will be like the blind leading the blind and the outcome is not know yet. Another thing...this will be tailored for my son and then retailored for my daughter. It is not a generic method. It will be tweaked, torn apart, put together and re tweaked and possibly thrown out. Please proceed with caution.

Here is my basic plan (the actual method will be written as I develop it). Use a textbook for a list of facts/terms he needs to know and let him learn about them on his own, keeping a notebook as he goes along. I also have Katheryn Stout's Design A Study Science Scope for a list of topics. Then incorporate Biographies of the scientist working in certain fields or who contributed to certain topics. Other books will be interesting ones I have come across in my search (example: for chemistry he will read Napoleon's Button and Disappearing Spoon).

I will post more once I have a better idea of what I am actually doing. Wish me luck.