Thursday, August 6, 2009

I'm back!!

Apparently, I took July off. It wasn't really intentional, just one thing after another. But somehow August 1st is always the day that I start to really think about fall, and plan for school.

This year's curriculum is all planned out for Hannah, and almost all of it is here.

We will continue with Bible Study Guide for All Ages. We left off in June somewhere in Unit 2, and will pick up again and go on. I have written before about this program, and I'm commited to it for at least another year. (Once our children are in grade 6, they start Bible quizzing and it can be too much to work on that and the BSG.)

We will also continue with JumpMath. I think the popularity of this program is increasing steadily, because it's temporarily unavailable to order! This leaves me three choices: work on the units of Grade4 that we didn't get to, start with the grade 5 fractions unit which I can print from the web site and get the books when they are back in stock, or buy the Jump At Home book that has only the Number Sense, and Patterns and Algebra units (this is the version you can buy at Chapters.) I'm leaning toward option #3.

And for the bulk of our program: Sonlight Core 5, Eastern Hemisphere. We'll be reading so many good books: Just So Stories, The House of Sixty Fathers, The Horse and His Boy, The Incredible journey, Around the World in Eighty Days, and a batch of missionary biographies. We will study India, Japan, China, Africa, and ohter cultures, both contemporary and historically. We are also using the Sonlight Language Arts program that accompanies the history, geography and reading portions. I am glad to be back to a Sonlight year. Their level 3 and 4 programs are based entirely on American history, so we skipped those levels.

One gap remains: I don't have a science program yet. We may pick up something, or we may pursue unit studies on different topics, using the books that we've collected over the years. I would like to visit the museums and science centers in September and maybe there will be a good topics arising from that.

As the days get less summery, I feel more and more ready to pull out the books and get back to work. I haven't asked Hannah if she's feeling that too, but I'm guessing she's still delighted to be free to climb trees and ride her bike as much as she wants. And that's good for her too, so we'll wait until after Labour Day to sharpen our new pencils.

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