I was chatting on a workboxes homeschooling group, having one of those conversations where a mom asks if we all think she may be overloading her exasperated kids with “too much work” (the answer is invariably “yes” in these conversations, in case you’re curious). A lot of times, I find those conversations very exhausting, because they’re about the mom wanting strategies to be able to force her kid to do a lot more boring, tedious stuff, and then doing a lot of flailing because no one gives her any and instead tells her to relax and consider chucking, like, everything. Fortunately, in this case, it wasn’t like that, but had been initiated by a very well-meaning and thoughtful mom whose 7yo was getting frustrated despite the mom’s very best efforts, and she was looking to make the day more enjoyable for the family, a good goal to have imho . During the conversation, she said their school day was lasting over 6 hours, and I said:

Just so you can see a different perspective: That’s over an hour longer than my son’s average workbox day – and he’s in the SIXTH GRADE, and he studies 2 foreign languages, practices 2 musical instruments, reads poetry, Shakespeare, Hymns, logic, Bible devotional, art history, music theory, medieval history, united states geography, literature and astronomy.

Another mom then asked me some questions about how it’s possible to organize my son’s time with the boxes (we don’t call them workboxes, just boxes) in such a way that it takes “so little time.” I think four hours is a lot of time! I thought I would repost my detailed response here. Italics were her questions, the rest is my response. It’s been a good talk, with the other mom asking a lot of good questions that made me think a lot and helped me clarify my own values some more, so hopefully this is helpful to someone. This is an ongoing dialogue, so there will be follow-ups with people’s questions in future posts, but feel free to ask your own! (Some of you longtime readers may notice we’ve changed a lot since starting this school year and are no longer using Ambleside Online’s recommendations. My son is still really interested in the Middle Ages, though, so he asked me to buy a few of the WinterPromise resources to learn more about the Middle Ages. More on this change at a later date!) A few of my answers have been proofread and/or expanded upon from the conversation where it was necessary for greater clarity.

My 6th grader does three subjects at a co-op (one is no homework), plus French, flute, history, and science at home, and it’s really hard for me to schedule all her subjects. Would you mind sharing a sample weekly schedule?

I don’t mind at all

The last few months, we have settled into a comfortable, flexible routine, where we get a much earlier start in the day than we used to. But we are both early morning lallygaggers and I work nights, so we get started later than most families. Typically my son starts his boxes between 10AM and 11AM, we break half an hour for lunch somewhere in there, and we’re done with the boxes by 2:30 or 3:30, depending on what we are doing. We then go out and do errands, or go to the park for a playdate, or other outings or sometimes we just chill out and goof off on the Internet, watch TV, play video games, build robots, or whatever else he’ll feel like doing. I try to schedule all doctor’s appointments for this time, too.

I will say that we don’t do any co-ops (my kid hates them) and I try to keep our field trip type outings for the weekend. We don’t do more than 2 field trips with our local homeschooling groups per month and it’s ONLY if my son seems excited about it, for example, the trip to see a Norman Rockwell exhibit next month. We have a lot of cool weekend and night time outings, but I’m a single mom and have to work, and there are only so many hours in the day! He has a park date weekly and a youth group twice a week at night, and sometimes a playdate with a friend, and that’s about it during the weekdays.

These are things which are not in the boxes, that he either does of his own free will and doesn’t want me to organize for him, or we do together as a family every day:

• Computer programming/Internet surfing/ video game design
• TV. We both like TV a lot and I won’t apologize for that. I’ve written several posts about why I love it and think it’s awesome. I don’t restrict TV in any way, but I do watch things with Shorty and talk about things we watch. Shorty is currently really into marathons of Everybody Hates Chris reruns
• Afternoon walk, weather permitting, approx a mile and a half a day, for exercise and fresh air and chatting and sometimes Shorty likes to take our digital camera and take pictures of our walks and post them on his Facebook (he’s got a great eye for photography!!);
• Instrument practice (guitar and piano) 10-15 min each, though he sometimes will spend hours in the afternoon practicing on his own;
• Morning Bible devotionals and daily Bible reading, which Shorty has requested we do before anything else;
• Bedtime literature. He says he’s too old to call it a bedtime story. *g* Sometimes he reads it out loud, sometimes I do, sometimes we switch off. Currently reading The King’s Fifth by Scott O’Dell, in concurrence with our study of the middle ages. It’s pretty awesome!!

These are the boxes we do daily:

• Latin, Shorty’s pet subject #1 – Getting Started With Latin has turned out to be a big hit;
• Math – typically two worksheets;
• Wordly Wise vocabulary, Book 5 – pet subject #2;
• Some kind of history reading. We have many books on the Middle Ages,  so sometimes we have more than one history reading – reading from the “spine” or main book (currently The Kingfisher’s Atlas of the Medieval World) and then a second book about the subject, usually very brief on each count. We’re talking no more than 2-3 pages, unless he wants to keep reading.
• Geography/ map drawing, pet subject #3.
• Poetry – we just read 1 poem a day from a Walter de la Mare poem book. We don’t discuss it too much or analyze it. We just read it for fun.

These are the boxes we do 2-3 times per week, as our schedule and his mood permits:

• Spanish – We are native speakers, and live in Little Havana, so our focus is vocabulary expansion so that Shorty can communicate with locals more easily;
• Astronomy: short reading, plus occasional notebooking/games – that would be a 2nd box;
• Some kind of history-related project, lapbook or activity – currently we are alternating between a project from The Days of Knights and Dames and lapbooking about knights and castles;
• Christian studies – we did a wonderful Advent study during Christmas that Shorty absolutely fell in love with, and he’s been reading A Little Pilgrim’s Progress;
• Tangrams, which my kid loves, but not too often or he gets tired of them!

These are the subjects we do once per week:

• Nature walks with nature studies,
• Guitar lesson;
• Piano lesson;
• Logic – having great fun with The Fallacy Detective;
• Hymn study with the book and CD, Then Sings My Soul;
• Shakespeare – usually a couple of pages from a “Tales from Shakespeare” book;
• Biography. Currently Diane Stanley’s Joan of Arc. Shorty really loves and gets into biographies and we are discussing organizing a study of inventors and industrial-revolution people (his other favorite historical era) when he finishes his current stuff;
• Grammar – one weekly exercise from Simply Grammar by Karen Andreola for my little budding wordsmith;
• Reading out loud from the McGuffey 3rd Eclectic Reader – he has great dramatic flair

These are the things we only do every other week:

• Juggling, a popular medieval pastime which he’s always wanted to learn anyway;
• Art History OR Composer studies – We alternate between the two. One week we do one, the other week, we do the other. Shorty really gets excited about these, though, so I’m looking to see about doing this more often. Currenttly we are listening to a lot of Edvard Grieg and Sibelius, and leafing through my huge Norman Rockwell book, whose realism in illustration Shorty admires and envies. Fortunately, there is a traveling exhibit of his work right in town!

I’d love to see how you approach scheduling so many topics.

I have my little weekly workbox grid that I made. Because I like to plan for the whole year vs. little-by-little planning, even if I inevitably end up changing a million things as we go along, I printed out 36 of those, one for each week of the “school year,” which is all I have to keep track of for record-keeping purposes, though we do cool stuff almost every day all year long. I put subject dividers between each 12 - twelve weeks in a term, which our private umbrella school requires us to track. 180 days.

I am not married to this schedule in any way.  It is a list of possibilities for the day and nothing more.

I then take each resource and divide it up. If it’s a book, I divide its pages by 180, if it’s something we want to take all year to do. For example, the Latin curriculum he wanted has only 120 lessons. So we figured out that he needs to do about 3-4 lessons per week to finish it by the end of the year. So I go through the 36 weeks and put “Latin lesson #whatever” 3 or 4 times per week all year, until I get to 120. If it’s a shorter book, for example, we are reading the book Medieval Medicine and the Plague which has only 12 chapters, each about 2 pages long, I put it once per week for one term. Or I could put it once every 3 weeks all year, or whatever else had suited us.

NOTE: You do NOT have to plan things out for a whole year. You can divide the resource this way above, or you can plan one or two weeks ahead and not pre-determine how much you’re going to do. Then you’d just write “Legos” or “art/craft” or “Read such and such book.”

I do not feel the need to tell my son what to do all day long. My son has explicitly asked for help organizing his time and attention between his many interests, so I divide it up for him, but of course, if he wants to work ahead or postpone something one day, we do.

Sometimes I have a set amount to cover in a set amount of time. For The King’s Fifth, the novel we are reading right now, which has 31 chapters, I did not want to take months to read it, because we both lose interest and start to find it tedious when that happens, so I decided we’d read one chapter per day, which was 6 weeks if we read one chapter on a weekend. So I put in the “notes” section of my planner for week 1: “The King’s Fifth, Ch 1-5″. And then I put a checkmark as we read them, so I can at least tell where we are if I lose the bookmark. LOL!

FIRST, I do this with what he wants do every day. I fill in all the workboxes all year for those – labor intensive up-front, but saves me tons of time over the year.

THEN, I do this with the things he only wants do a few times a week.

FINALLY I plug in the ones he only does once a week or every other week. I just stick them wherever there’s an empty box!

I try to leave at least one empty box per day for spontaneous projects or for things he didn’t get to the day before or whatever. But it’s not necessary because the stuff we’re doing IS fun for him. If it’s not something he’s enjoying, I chuck it and we try something else or drop it. We have very few “schooly” things in there. I am constantly introducing new and interesting things, and I try to pay very close attention to what my son responds well to and what he doesn’t. I feel the materials should serve the child, not vice versa. I don’t understand why I see so many moms try a curriculum, notice it tanks with the kid, and conclude there’s something wrong with the KID! And then post, “How can I make my kid want to do this thing he hates that I think he should do anyway?” To me this is a backwards approach to education.

I’m guessing you don’t do everything, every day, but how do you decide what you don’t really need to do on a daily basis when so many things like music and foreign language need constant practice?

Some of it, as you saw above, decides itself. It is very obvious that Simply Grammar, with its 39 in-depth lessons, cannot be done every day and fits better as a weekly visitation. A lot of my notions, I got from Charlotte Mason, who really believed in child-gentle interest-whetting vs. a proscribed set of information delivered in a prescribed manner. This is also why we study hymns and Shakespeare, and only once a week. That was her recommendation and we tried it and it seems to work for Shorty. The rest, I take my cue from my son. I don’t think anyone NEEDS to do geography five times a week (or ever, really), but since my kid is endlessly fascinated by maps and state trivia, and thinks it’s great fun, we do.

Also, *I* don’t decide this. We decide it together. If he wanted to read Shakespeare every day, we would. And we only read it once a week because he asks me to read it. I think for him it’s like a little radio play. LOL, as in, ”This week on SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMATIC SOAP OPERA…”

And I realize this goes against conventional wisdom, but I don’t think a foreign language needs daily practice to master, and music practice is something my son is expected to do on his own. We are both musicians, so this isn’t really something he needs a reminder about; it’s just his great passion that he’s currently pursuing. We listen to, talk about and play music all day. I don’t think a child should be forced to play an instrument if s/he doesn’t want to. If s/he wants to play one, I would just be very frank about what’s required. “People who don’t practice the piano every day stink at piano. If you do practice every day, in a very short amount of time, you will be totally awesome at it. It’s up to you what you wanna be!” My son knows I’m honest and that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to music, so I only had to tell him this once!

I think when a child trusts you to respect his comfort zones, they trust your opinions a lot more, instead of finding them suspect and wondering if you’re trying to con him into doing something you think he should be doing, whether he hates it or not.

Do you do homework after dinner or some other trick to be done for the afternoon more quickly?

Nooooo. We do no homework. We are anti-homework! LOL! Once the boxes are done, either just before or just after lunch, his time is totally unscheduled, except that it is convenient for both of us if he showers while I’m making dinner. Otherwise, he does whatever he wants with his time. Basically, the workboxes are just a way for me to help him structure his time. He finds this helpful and encouraging. I am by nature a very UNSTRUCTURED person with a good internal clock, but he’s the opposite, he likes to plot out every minute of his time and has asked me to help him do this, so while it’s more controlling of his time than I would prefer, I need to acknowledge that his preferences are  not my preferences and I use the workboxes to help him in this way.

My son has a large workspace he likes very much because it is a very business-y roll top desk that he says “makes him feel like an executive.” LOL.  I sit next to him and let him do his thing while I work on mylaptop, unless he needs me for something, but if I see he’s taking forever on one box, I will use humor to check in with him (“EARTH TO ELI, DO YOU COPY?!” ) Sometimes this is enough to get him back on task. Sometimes he’ll then say he’s struggling and needs help. Sometimes he’ll say “Mom, I reeeeeeeally don’t feel like doing this today” and that is okay because I also am not always in the mood to do something every day. The homeschool police will not arrest us if we chuck a worksheet… or a whole workbook!

Obviously I’m a very laidback parent/ person/ homeschooler. When I say my son’s time is unscheduled except for the boxes, I mean it is totally unscheduled. I put no limits on any activity. He is allowed to watch TV, play video games, listen to music, chat with his friends/grandma on Facebook, or WHATEVER as much as he wants. I am right there actively engaging him in what he does, of course, but I am very much about not controlling every waking minute of a kid’s life. I think this is why workboxing and homeschooling is so low-stress for me and my kid. We just do whatever makes us happy, and don’t do whatever doesn’t. So far, so good!

People frequently ask me how it is I get everything done. I am sometimes taken aback by this question because I have such a long to-do list every day that rarely gets finished. Time management is a skill that takes time, practice and refinement to really find what works for you, but it is also the case that I look at the term “single parent homeschooling” as a holistic lifestyle and “job” – I am single, meaning I need to figure out how to do things by myself such as earn a living and run a household; I am a parent, which is a whole other set of responsibilities with child rearing; and i am a homeschooling mother, which means I am primarily responsible for my child’s education.

How to mesh these three components into a cohesive whole has been an ongoing quest for me, so I’ll share a few perspectives that have helped me, in the hopes that it helps and encourages someone else.

1. I Am Single.

I must do or oversee everything in my house or it does not get done. This includes homemaking and breadwinning, and if I am not careful, I can burn myself out to the point of illness. This isn’t just a cautionary tale – it is a fact and has happened to me more than once.

I have been working from home since my son was an infant. I would like to say that this is less challenging now that Shorty can entertain himself for longer periods by himself and has studies occupying a lot of his time, but it’s not any easier, it’s just different. As an infant he needed constant attention in basic needs; as a preteen, and an only child, he wants to chatter with me all day long about everything, and wants to share every new discovery that pops into his head with me. This is wonderful and I do not want to discourage this, and do not want him to get too lonely, but it doesn’t leave for any more free time for me than before.

What has helped me with being the sole breadwinner and the sole manager of the home has been to learn to delegate and to help my son to be as independent and self-possessed as possible for him. He cleans his room fairly well; he makes his bed; he dusts his own space; he chooses and gathers his own clothes each week (I made this craft to help him organize his clothes each week – they did not come out as pretty but he loves them anyway) and so on. He can even make a few simple meals, such as a chef salad, PBJ and frozen pizza. He also helps with the laundry (we do not have one in our building and have to go to the laundromat) and helps with that, as well. I still do all the heavy lifting, organizing and cleaning, but it helps that he does a lot on his own, too.

This isn’t just for my convenience. These are valuable life skills. Plenty of practice is helpful, and these are habit training methods that will benefit him in the long term and help relieve the burden of me having to do EVERYTHING for him.

Parents, if you are single and you homeschool, you CANNOT do everything yourself. There are only so many hours in the day and there is only so much of you to go around. You must learn to delegate household duties somehow. You DO NOT need to be SuperWoman/Man; neither do you need to radically overhaul your household overnight to achieve this. Baby steps are better than nothing!

Here are some links you may find useful in helping to develop good habits in your kids.

• Comprehensive list of age-appropriate chores
• Cute printable chore chart for kids – laminate it at OfficeMax (or wherever), hang it on your fridge, and use a dry-erase marker for week to week chore management for the whole family!
• Habit training – an incredible e-Book by Charlotte Mason that will revolutionize the way you see habit formation as a parent.

Keeping your kids accountable is one thing, but you also need to keep YOURSELF accountable and find a way to not overfocus and to learn to manage your own time. Here are some links that may help you to that end, as well!

• LifeHacker – a blog about how to get more out of your time.
• Motivated Moms – a printable chore planning system to help you have a clean and organized home and still have time for yourself
• FlyLady – a personal time-management and household organization system used by millions

If you are able to seek outside help, such as an older homeschooled student, fellow mom or church friend, who is both responsible enough and willing to help with household responsibilities or anything else you may need, please do seek it. Some people feel like getting outside help is a failure on their part somehow, but the real failure is not being able to recognize where you cannot meet a need in your home all by yourself and failing to seek a way to meet it some other way.

I am single, but I am not the only person on this planet, and cannot and should not do everything alone.

2. I Am a Parent.
Running my own business and keeping up with all my duties, I have occasionally not made as much time to be an active parent as I should be, content that my son’s life was productively filled with playdates, schoolwork, activities and time spent with relatives. But children above all want time with their mom and/or dad, and this is especially true of children of single parents. Single parents work very hard, so hard that sometimes all they do is work.

This is a mistake. All children need to be actively engaged by interested adults in their lives. They need to know that they are not alone in their world while being given safe spaces to learn decision-making. As a child, I was materially indulged very much by well-meaning family that raised me but was not interested in my interests or passions; I now see where it left me feeling like I didn’t have anyone to turn to in times of crisis, even though I did in fact have those people. I had not been taught to look to anyone’s counsel but my own. Children need active parents in their lives making safe spaces for them to make mistakes, not careen out of control at will.

Parents, no matter how tired you are, no matter how stressed you are with other matters, find a consistent way of structuring your home so that your child knows his home environment is safe and relatively predictable. Make family traditions for every ridiculous holiday you can think of (we love our yearly viewing of 1776 the musical on July 4, for example). Talk often. Have a family game night, if only once a month. Take an interest in their video games or whatever else catches their fancy. Go on nature walks. Tell them about your own childhood as you see fit. Talk about how your values compare to what you see in a movie you’re watching. toss a ball for 5 minutes in your backyard or at the park (even if you stink at it, like I do).

I say these things not because I’m awesome at integrating these ideas and am looking down on others who don’t – but because I personally often forget that children want your time more than anything else you could provide for them. Single parents are sometimes so overwhelmed by meeting their immediate and more mundane responsibilities that active participation with your kids takes a back burner. It shouldn’t. It can’t.

I suggest setting aside at least one day a week where you spend time having utterly frivolous fun as a family. For us that day is usually Sunday. We go to church and Bible study, then we go out to the beach, or rent a movie and have a movie night, or invite the grandparents over to play board games, or what have you. My son is never happier than when I sit down to play a video game with him, even if I’m absolutely terrible at them.

3. I Am a Homeschooler.
The principles that apply above also apply to homeschooling as a single parent.

You must learn to delegate if necessary, either through a co-op or a virtual school or a tutor, or whatever works for your child. Look for materials that don’t take a ton of planning on your part. Try to give your child things to do that he can explore as independently as possible. This builds confidence and gives you a little breathing room.

If your kids like hearing stories, let me introduce you to a wonderful web site called Librivox.org, where audiobooks of thousands of great books are available for free download. We rip them on CD, listen to them in the car and upload them to our iPods. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DO IT ALL YOURSELF, remember?

I also highly recommend the workbox system as a homeschool organizational tool. Its primary use is to foster child independence and self-motivation.

Finally, do not be afraid to blend some of the above strategies. Nature walks can help you foster closeness with your children AND be educational; life skill training is educational AND helps you manage your time as a single parent better; teaching your child to be responsible for his belongings and space, and incorporating him into the success of a well-run household, fulfills parenting duties AND helps you delegate your responsibilities as a single head of household.

As a single parent homeschooler, I have a lifestyle that has three equally valuable and important components. Finding the balance between the three, and finding ways to integrate them in a fulfilling and meaningful way, is an ongoing challenge – but it is doable, and oh, is it ever worthwhile.

I’m very sorry that I haven’t chosen the winners of my giveaway yet.  I’ve had a very rough summer, largely due to a) getting laid off in July (I’ve since found several other new jobs, but that was a good one, and it took me a while to find more work); b) puberty has kind of set in with Shorty and c) the biggie – I’ve been beset by extremely bad dental problems that, thankfully, my church is helping me to pay for this week, but that have been plaguing me and making me unable to sleep/eat very well for several months.  I promise to try to get to the giveaway this weekend.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. This post is a general overview for what my son is doing for sixth grade. Which he starts on Monday! I can hardly believe it This year, I took the plunge and have decided to use Ambleside Online as a curriculum completely, as-written, with a few minor exceptions as noted below. Though he is sixth grade age, I placed my son into Year 2 for various reasons.

1. Ambleside years do not coincide with grades. It is a very, very advanced curriculum and it’s not unusual to see children start Year 1 in the 3rd or 4th grade. Completing Year 7 and Year 8 is the equivalent of a regular high school education; Years 9 and 10 are the equivalent of honors; Year 11 and the tentative Year 12 are AP/college level.  So I am okay with Shorty being in Y2.

2 .Shorty struggles with narration, inference and comprehension and doesn’t read for pleasure of his own free will unless it’s magazines and science/video game code books. I think he COULD do Y4 (the recommended level for older children starting AO) but it would be extremely challenging for him, and I wanted to put him at the level where he would be challenged, but still be successful.

3. He chose that era of history to study – knights and castles and vikings! – and we’ve never studied it in depth. Should be a fun year!

Here is the curriculum we are using:

Bible and Christian Education
The Little Pilgrim’s Progress
Daily morning devotionals
Bible readings using Penny Gardner’s Bible “episodes” (see bookmark I made here)
Weekly Psalm copywork
Weekly reading of missionary/ Christian hero stories from Glimpses for Kids

World History
Story of the World, Vol 2 and Vol 2 Activity Guide – I am supplementing AO with this because of the hands-on stuff and what I feel is a more well-rounded, less obsessively unicultural than AO’s selections
An Island Story
Discovery of New Worlds

American History
This Country of Ours
Leif the Lucky

Mathematics
Developmental Math – Levels 8 and 9 - four times per week
The I Hate Mathematics! book and math games like Timez Attack once a week
Grid Perplexors Book 3 – once per week

Natural Science
Exploring Creation with Astronomy, with corresponding notebook and lapbook
Handbook of Nature Study with the Outdoor Hour Challenge
Burgess Bird Book for Children and Burgess Book of Animals

Biography
Joan of Arc
The Little Duke

Language Arts
copywork 1-2 times per week
dictation once per week
daily reading from the Y2 free reading list
daily oral narration of all readings
1-2 written narrations per week
Spelling City (science vocabulary games)
Simply Grammar – we will only get through half the book this year, one lesson per week
Grammarland

Literature
Understood Betsy
Wind in the Willows
Pagoo
Robin Hood
selections from the Y2 free reading list
daily poetry readings: Walter de la Mare, James Whitcombe-Riley, Eugene Field and Christina Rossetti

Geography
Trail Guide to US Geography – divided into 2 years, we are only getting through 35 states this year, with a 2-week project about Florida history
Geography through Art
Uncle Josh’s Outline Map

(Please note, Ambleside suggests a very different course of study: learning geography through Holling C. Holling books like Minn of the Mississippi and Seabird. My kid hates Holling C. Holling books for geography – he finds them way too abstract and the stories off putting and boring, so we’re going with a more map-centric concrete geography.)

Fine Arts
Rod and Staff Growing with Music
Recorder lessons using the Nine Note Recorder Method – weekly lesson + daily practice
Drawing with Children using the lesson plans here
Artpac 3 – one project every other week
Handicrafts – Home Depot Kids’ Workshop monthly
Weekly hymn study based on AO’s rotation, using Then Sings My Soul CD & book
Folk song study, once per month
Artist study: Raphael, John Singer-Sargent, Claude Monet
Composer study: Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Sibelius, Ravel, Grieg

Foreign Languages
Teach Them Spanish! Level 4
Getting Started with Latin

Physical Education
Daily one or more of the following: Wii Sports/ Wii Fit, 15 minutes of aerobics, mile-long walk, free play, scootering on the bike path at the park, introduction to weight lifting, warm-ups.

Electives/Other
4H Club
Church Youth group
Typing (one term only)
Health for the Glory of God (Rod and Staff – two terms)
Introduction to Filmmaking

Life Skills
Social skills exercises from Do2Learn
Selections from The Dangerous Book for Boys

I think that sums up our year pretty well! I am very excited that with workboxes, it really looks like we’ll be able to fit it all in this year. Even the “extras” like artist and composer studies and handicrafts – which aren’t really extras! I think it’s going to be a terrific year.

We usually don’t school year-round. More accurately, I have attempted to in the past, but it didn’t work very well. This summer we are doing very lazy selections from Ambleside Online – free reading from the Year 3 selections, catching up on This Country of Ours, which is his main history spine next year (we started AO mid-year for fifth grade this year and missed this title), a little daily math workbook, a little GrammarLand, a little art, lots of hands-on activities, file folder games, a little handwriting – but we still aren’t really “doing school” per se.

This upcoming year, though, for the first time in seven years of homeschooling, I’m trying a year-round schedule based on Ambleside’s rotation: three terms of 12 weeks apiece, each followed by one week of exams, and with a month off in between each one. Factoring in birthdays and holidays, it doesn’t QUITE work out this way, but so far, my plan looks like this:

Year 4 Term 1 starts the Monday after Labor Day, September 7. We will then do the first term straight through. This will give us 11 weeks until Thanksgiving. We’ll take the week of Thanksgiving off, then resume Term 1, Week 12 the first week of December, with exam week the second week. We will then take 3 weeks off for Christmas/ New Year.

Term 2 starts January 4, and we will work uninterruptedly for 5 weeks. Both my son’s and my mother’s birthday are in the 2nd week of February, so we’ll take a week off there to go on vacation like we usually do. We’ll end the term the first week of April, with exam week the second week of April, and take the remaining 3 weeks of April off. Spring break!

Term 3 starts May 3, and we’ll work straight through the end of July, with exam week the first week of August, and the rest of August/ the first week of September off.

There will be a few days off here and there (Fourth of July weekend, Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day, etc.) We are required to do 180 days of school. But since the 3 exam weeks give us 15 extra days, I am not remotely concerned about this.

If all goes well, we’ll repeat this for the next six years until he graduates high school. If not, it’s back to the drawing board!

Ambleside’s term schedule was really the inspiration for this schedule for us. I am really thinking it will help avoid the usual January/ April burnout we experience every year!!

What does your schedule look like? I love hearing about how different families structure their lifestyles around education!

Continuing my series about what we’re doing for sixth grade and why, as Charlotte Mason educators, here’s what we purchased for math:

This year, we did MEP Math, Year 2. Since they start Year 0 in first grade, this is actually third grade. He is in fifth grade, but this was the appropriate level for him. Shorty liked the gentle format, but his progress was very slow, so much so that we have been doing it consistently and we’re still not halfway through the year. Neither of us are happy about that.

A big hindrance is that he still hasn’t memorized all his math facts (though his speed has drastically improved) and so he hasn’t progressed very much. Neither of us enjoy the fact that it’s extremely teacher-intensive. This, I knew going into it, having read up on the Yahoo! group. but Shorty seemed to take it as an opportunity to argue with me constantly. I understand math triggers his OCD in an extreme way and I’m the only available target to vent his frustration on, but as a single parent that needs to work full time, I just can’t afford to spend 1-2 hours just on math every day, and that’s hwo long each lesson was taking. So we started limiting our math time to 20-30 minutes per day, which helped with frustration levels, but slowed our progress to glacier pace.

He was also getting discouraged that he’s still in “third grade math.” Exacerbated by the fact that MEP calls their third grade “Year 2.” He has recently developed a real desire to independently work to catch up to grade level and this was taking a toll on his self-esteem. I read many reviews of many different approaches and curriculums, trying to find one that would best remedy all these issues.

Developmental Math, Level 6 seems like the answer to our prayers – it is inexpensive; it is self-paced and entirely completed by the student; it emphasizes skill mastery over spiral progress; and he would start in “level six,” which he might think is sixth grade math (it’s midway through third, in reality, which is where he is, but he doesn’t have to know that – he can just be proud that he’s working on “level six.”) So that’s what we’ll be using next year.

Shorty is aware that his progress in math is not where it could be. I have no problem with children doing work below arbitrarily determined “grade levels” if that’s truly where their capacity is. But I don’t think it’s that he is not capable of doing higher level math yet, but that his OCD has been so severely triggered by math these last 3 years, causing tantrums, delays and just general obstinacy, all of which have delayed him significantly. I know he knows he can do better and that he’ll be better served with his career goals of computer programming and electrical engineering with stronger math skills; it is his own independent goal that he be “caught up” to at least 7th grade math by the 8th grade. I think this is totally doable with hard work on his end, and am pleased to see him taking so much initiative.

Recently Shorty asked me to dig out his addition and subtraction flash cards; he’s been working on his own for a couple of weeks with that and I already see an improvement. We’ll be spending the summer doing math drills and working on math facts, as well as working through the I Hate Mathematics book and doing a few lessons per week from MEP Y2.

Then he’ll be tackling Developmental Math Level 6 in the fall. We are very excited about this as a potentially low-stress method of building strong mastery skills he’s lacking. I am excited that he’ll hopefully be able to complete it on his own with minimal input from me. The only downside is that levels 7, 8 and 9 are all currently unavailable because they’re being revamped by the publisher. But I figure, by the time my kid is done with level 6, they should be done, or at the very least it will give me time to track down an older copy. If we don’t like it, we can always go back to MEP!

I just put in a huge order for our books for next year. This means that I can no longer change my mind about what we’ll be starting out with in the fall for Shorty’s sixth grade year (egads! sixth grade already!) without causing myself financial pain. Since I am not a masochist of any variety, this is a strong motivator for myself to make up my mind already! I started writing about ALL my curriculum choices and the post was 90 miles long, so I decided to break the post up into several posts by subject. He’s what I bought for:

Language Arts

Tales from Shakespeare – by Charles and Mary Lamb
This year we used the book of the same title, but it was the one by the Williamses, which had the story in comic book presentation, with the narrative prose under the pictures, and the speech bubbles in the pictures using excerpts from the play. I understand this is frowned upon by Charlotte Mason educators (it’s “twaddle!” and too watered down) but my kid has autism and is helped by the illustrations and the silly humor. We took several weeks to read through one play, then we would watch a BBC version of the play, then read through selections of the play together. Shorty LOVED this. He loves the drama, craziness and intrigue of Shakespeare’s dramas and the wacky wordplay humor of his comedies. Next year we are taking a full 12 weeks apiece to study A Midsummer Nights Dream, Hamlet and The Tempest. We may still read through the comic version for a week or two, but I want to focus more on the more mature, detailed retellings from the Lambs.

Simply Grammar: An Illustrated Primer – by Karen Andreola
This is a gentle, well-recommended grammar study for grades 4 through 8 based on Charlotte Mason’s original grammar primer. We’ve been using GrammarLand this year to study grammar 1 or 2 times a week. It is amazing how much Shorty is retaining understanding about the parts of speech from this adorable and highly accessible storybook format, but we will be finished with it by mid-summer. Simply Grammar has gotten mixed reviews, but most of the negative reviews have come from people merely complaining that its language was too archaic or quaint and that they themselves have had difficulty understanding grammatical precepts in general. This seems more the fault of the reader than the text; grammar is a strong suit for me and Shorty enjoys books with “fancy language” – he has no trouble with Shakespeare or the King James Version of the Bible, which we use exclusively – so I don’t think this will be a deterrent. Also, I think we’ll be spreading it out over 2 years, so this was likely a good investment.

Reading Detective: Using Higher-Order Thinking to Improve Reading Comprehension Book A1 Grade 5-6
We are big fans of Critical Thinking Press, having used their Mindbenders books to study logic these last couple of years, but we are a little burnt out on them and I feel like Shorty needed something more comprehensive that would help him utilize logic not just in pure theoretical form but in practical application to things he reads. He thinks logic is really fun and this came very well recommended. Pricey for a single text, though. This is not really Charlotte Mason, and is more classical, but it emphasizes a skill weakness for Shorty, who decodes what he reads at a college level, but comprehends far below that, and struggles with making inferences.

Poets we will study: Kipling, Longfellow, Dunbar, Whittier and a special focus on Jose Marti, both in Spanish and in English.

Literature read-alouds (also known as bedtime stories in my house) will be taken from the Ambleside Online Year 5 literature recommendations. Free reading will incorporate the suggestions for Years 3, 4 and 5.

We will also be tackling Bulfinch’s Age of Fable some more. We started to this year, but got bogged down in the language, until I decided he needed a less formal introduction to fables and myths, having missed out on the simpler foundations of previous Ambleside years. So per recommendations on the AmbleRamble mailing list, we’re reading through Aesop’s fables and Aliki’s Greek/Roman mythology book first, then starting up Age of Fable over the summer again. He understood the language just fine; he just didn’t comprehend the meaning or significance very well.

We will no longer be using a formal handwriting curriculum. We’ll just be doing short copywork with selections from books he is currently reading, or songs we are currently learning, or poetry, or what have you. He is dysgraphic, so my goal there is to just maintain passable handwriting. He will also be learning to type better with Spongebob Typing.

For composition, we will continue with oral narrations for all his daily reading, and we will begin doing a weekly written narration with 5 or 6 sentences to start building paragraph skills, in preparation for essay writing. There will be some poetry memorization and recitation, which he enjoys, and a vocabulary/spelling list from that week’s readings.

My goal in our homeschool this year is to have Shorty really become an independent learner, with my role shifting more towards that of an educational facilitator than a “teacher.” With the methods of AmblesideOnline, I see him taking real responsibility for managing his own time – he is given a weekly list of readings to complete, and he can either stretch them out over the whole week, or read them all at once, or read them in 2 days, or whatever. This is good practice for college… not to mention real life!

Our modest little container garden is thriving. We’re FINALLY getting broccoli heads growing in, we have 3 different kinds of lettuce, two greenbean plants, a strawberry plant that keeps getting bigger and bigger, a lime tree brimming with limes, four sunflowers shooting up, several herbs, fresh spinach, and four pepper plants – one red, one yellow and one orange. We grew those from saving seeds from veggies we bought at the store  Peppers of the non-green variety are pretty expensive favorites here, so we’re happy at the prospect of growing our own!

It’s been a great experience for Shorty, a gentle introduction for nature study that has let him pick up a bunch of practical life skills and given us hours of enjoyment.  I know that gardening and nature study aren’t the same thing, but for a loud, hyper little boy who is all arms and legs and scares away wildlife because he gets so excited when he sees them that he can’t contain himself, studying plants and the cycle of agriculture has been a safe, non-scareable starting point for us We’re in the rainy season, too, so the tedious task of daily watering is no longer necessary, and our kindly neighbor has become inspired by our efforts and is donating the wood this weekend to build two actual 4′x4′ square foot garden containers. All is well!

Except that with summer and with rain come… mosquitoes. More bugs in general, but mosquitoes are the gift that keep on giving. They’re darn near acrobatic here; yesterday I doused my arms and legs in mosquito repellent and wore long pants. Somehow, i still ended up with mosquito bites on my ribcage and hip. I have no idea how that happened, but somehow they managed to bite me there. This doesn’t thrill me at all, because it’s a well known fact that here in Miami and any tropical region, mosquitoes carry evil diseases like the West Nile virus and our times call for a little indulgence of one’s germaphobia.  But even if they didn’t, they’re just a relentless pest that really acts as a killjoy for us whenever we try to hang out in our grassy garden.

We’ve tried carbonella candles and other mosquito repellents but they’re more persistent than the telemarketer that keeps calling me to tell me that the warranty on my car has expired. (My car is so old that if it were a person it would be eligible to vote, so thanks for the heads up, telemarketing people.) We even tried the little zapper lights, and, well, it bears repeating, this is SOUTH FLORIDA, so even if they killed 90% of the mosquitoes, that probably leaves about 23572752352 of them still alive.  I’ve been reading some Mosquito Magnet reviews – a friend of mine has one and swears by it. I was watching their little online demo of how it works and experiencing a high degree of schadenfreude at the mosquito genocide being demonstrated.  The price range is kind of steep, but if it means I can spend the next 5 months (and next summer, and next…) lounging around in my garden instead of just enjoying it from my window with my nose pressed to the glass, it might be a small price to pay.

Rain is clearing up! Time to check on the strawberries we transplanted yesterday; I can already see the newly thinned row of pepper seedlings are happy and pert. I’m already itchy from the stupid mosquito bites yesterday so I feel like a soldier going into battle. “Cover me with the spray repellent – I’m going in!!” Wish me luck.

Per Ambleside Online’s recommendations, we’ve been using the “episodes” divisions of Penny Gardner’s Bible schedule for a few weeks now. We read and briefly discuss/narrate an Old Testament passage on Monday, a New Testament passage on Tuesday, a Psalm passage on Wednesday and a longer Proverb on Thursday. Shorty has a verse to memorize weekly, which he enjoys doing, and he also has to read a verse or two in Proverbs daily as well, which he must tell back to me in his own words. Fridays are our Bible memory challenge, where he recites the verse he’s been working on (and me too!).

To make it easier on me, I turned her schedule into a bookmark, which can be tri-folded and flipped around back and forth easily. I’ve decided to post it here and make it available for people to download and use/print out on their own. You can go through them all sequentially, or alternate Old and New  Testament readings, or whatever works for your family.

No copyright infringement is intended toward Ms. Gardner. Please do check out her site – it contains a great deal more information about Bible study than this simple bookmark provides.  Due to space constraints, I left out all her optional readings as well, so this isn’t a complete list, just the main gist.

Please right-click and save to your hard drive. Please do not open directly from my server, as this creates a rather significant server load if people do it over and over. Also, if you’re going to link to this on your own blog, please link to this PAGE, and not the document directly. Thank you!

Bible Reading Bookmark - PDF (62)

Bible Reading Bookmark - MS Document (21)

About once or twice a week I get an email from a single or working parent who wants to homeschool their child(ren), but they don’t think it’s possible, because they have to work. Whether they’re single, or their spouse is unable to work for whatever reason, or has faced job loss, or they have determined they cannot live without two incomes, or whatever. The point is – “But I have to work…” is one of the biggest roadblocks many, many families see as insurmountable to homeschooling their children.

It’s hardly an insurmountable one, however; many people homeschool and work full time.  I am cutting and pasting a response from a Yahoo! group. It was to a lady whose husband has been laid off, and the husband is demanding that she get a job outside the home and put the children back in public school. This is hardly the only alternative; it’s just the only alternative when you don’t think outside the box.

What most people don’t realize is that homeschooling is a lifestyle choice, just as putting your child in public school is a lifestyle choice for your family.  The means and methods by which you educate your children dictate the way your family lives, either way.  When you make the lifestyle choice of homeschooling, you’ve already decided your family’s time will not be spent the way most people choose to live. This almost certainly includes finances, and if you have to work and homeschool, it’s just time to accept that your lifestyle will be unorthodox, and work from there.

The point is: there are many alternatives to just sending your kids back to public school if the mother must work.

One or both of you could get jobs from home.
I have a links directory with a work-from-home section of over 100 legitimate work-from-home companies. I’m not affiliated with or paid by any of these companies so I’m just listing the ones I have either worked for in the past or know they have a good reputation. There are many excellent work at home forums that help you vet legitimate WAH jobs and offer resources and support, my two favorites are WorkPlaceLikeHome and WorkAtHomeMoms (not just for moms), and RatRaceRebellion has new pre-screened WAH job listings daily.  It takes time and persistence to find a work-at-home-situation that works for you, but it’s worthwhile if your goal is to spend more time with your family while being able to meet your family’s financial needs and goals. I have a few tips and starting off points here for people who want to explore this possibility more.

If people want advice or starting points, please feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to help. I work as a web designer during the day and transcriptionist at night so I won’t be making any profit off helping anyone, I just have a passion for helping working and single parents homeschool.

Homeschool at unorthodox times.
If working from home isn’t going to make ends meet or it’s not for you for whatever reason, you can work full time and homeschool in the evenings and weekends. Remember that homeschooling takes a lot less time than traditional schooling, because there’s not nearly as much crowd-control and busy work going on. Getting an education doesn’t need to be limited to traditional school hours. Learning can take place at any time.  You can fit your children’s academic needs around your job schedule instead of the other way around.

Share the homeschooling duties.
If you’re a married couple that needs a full-time income, this doesn’t mean that this income needs to be earned by one person or bust. You could both get part-time jobs with rotating schedules and split the homeschooling duties if you are a two-parent household. If you’re a single parent household, perhaps there is a relative – or better yet, a grandparent or two – who would be willing to read, help with math, assist with science experiments, or just drive the child to a weekly co-op or something. You do not have to do everything yourself!

Teach your kids to be self-directed, independent learners.
If your children are reading independently, they are ready to take on increasing responsibility for their own schoolwork, with the goal being that eventually they are doing most of their own academics themselves, with you acting as a facilitator. Isn’t that our overall goal anyway?  To teach children how to learn and how to be active participants in their own education is a worthy goal, and easily accomplished over time in manageable increments.

Initially, they can be left with a sitter during the time you work, with a checklist of stuff to read and do themselves. This checklist should have only one or two things on them at first, then slowly added to, so that eventually the child is doing the majority of his or her own reading and schoolwork. My son has a checklist of things he must do weekly. He has the choice of spreading them out over time so that he only does a little every day for 5 days, or reading them in 3 or 4 days’ time, or reading all the assignments for one book in a single day, etc. In this way he learns to manage his own time – an essential life-skill for success in both post-secondary education and the workplace.

Once you get home from work, the children can narrate/ tell back to you what they read that day over dinner, and you can read a few texts at night like a bedtime story.  This is essentially what my son and I do with Ambleside Online – he has a daily checklist of things to read himself while I work in the same room with him in case he has any questions or needs help. Around 6 o’clock we do a brief math lesson, handwriting/grammar, art/poetry/Shakespeare/composer study (we do one of these each day of the week), and read the Bible together before dinner – about an hour or so. Then we talk about what he read that day over dinner, and read Age of Fable, a brief history reading and perhaps a literature selection before bed. We do our nature studies/ walks on Saturdays. I spend less than 2 hours a day homeschooling him directly and he spends perhaps another 1 or 2 hours doing his own independent work.

If your children are very young and aren’t reading independently, this is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they don’t need as much formal academics as older kids do, so it’s even easier to fit their academic needs around a busy work schedule.  On the other hand, they need more attention and supervision than older children do and academic struggles present themselves at a larger scale in younger years. Either way, it is possible to find a solution that fits your family.

Ask for help.
You could rally your homeschooling community for support. One family won’t want to take on your children 5 days a week, but perhaps 5 or 6 families might each be willing to help you, especially if your family is in financial dire straits, by each taking your kids 1 day a week apiece (have an extra family on hand in case of an emergency). Then the kids could be in a homeschooling family setting while not being too much of a burden on any one particular family. I’m sure many families would be willing to help; many may have a homeschooled teenager who is willing to babysit and maybe even tutor for relatively low cost compared to daycares.

You can do it!
Your homeschool does not have to look like anyone else’s; it just has to work for YOU.  Where there’s a will, there is a way. I’ve been working from home and homeschooling my son for 6 years, so I know it can be done, but I also know the stress of financial worries, and the stress of managing a family’s finances AND homeschooling at the same time.  But this is not an obstacle to homeschooling – it’s just one more way in which we have to rearrange our lives to make this lifestyle choice fit. It’s not easy (when is anything with kids easy?) but it can be done.

… when I start pouring over curriculum catalogues and figuring out what we’re doing for next year. Sixth grade! I can hardly believe my baby is officially a junior high student as of this September, but as the song goes, the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’.

There are things we’re keeping from this year, things we’re trying that are new, things we’re throwing out altogether.  The reality is that I’ve spent too much money on books these last couple of years and I can’t afford to do that again. Also, I’m going to try to design a homeschool for us that focuses more on nature study, art and music appreciation, and low-cost or free resources. WinterPromise is a wonderful curriculum and we may still be using their booklists for free reading since Shorty blazes through books (a habit I’m trying to discourage – a subject for another post though) and we’re going to rely on the excellent Miami-Dade Public library system more than ever. I’m attempting to focus our time and energy less on textbooks and more on real books and real-life  hands-on experiences right now, and hope to expand that in the future. So without further ado, here are our curriculum choices as of right now for next fall.

Main Spine: AmblesideOnline.org – Year 5, since we are finishing up the third term of Y4 this year. It’s not really “fifth grade” – many sixth through eighth graders are using it.  We’ll be using this as a guide for Bible, history, art, music, Shakespeare, nature study, composer study, poetry, literature and language arts.  It’s free, and relies heavily on public domain or easily obtainable texts.

So far I am really appreciating the schedule for Ambleside, which doesn’t have a day-to-day checklist (though parents have created many for your use each year on the various Yahoo! groups).  Each week I give Shorty a list of things to do that week. He can break it up into daily readings or read one book per day or however he chooses to do it. This is how real life works too; when I have a deadline, I can choose to cram it all into the last minute of things or do it little by little over time.  We are really enjoying the readings so far. There have been some growing pains about self-directed learning (no, you may not do the next month’s worth of reading in one day…) but I think we’re making really good progress and he really adores the books so far.

Caveat: The one major criticism I would have about Ambleside is its lack of cultural diversity. There is very little in the way of studying art, music and literature from anything that isn’t American or British.   Of course, this is based on a British woman’s pedagogy, which should not be undermined because her ideas were spectacularly ahead of her time, but there’s no reason why a little Cuban-American child in Miami needs to be memorizing that much about British history.  No Our Island Story for us.

Other modifications I’m making to the curriculum in order to broaden its access to cultural diversity:

• In addition to composer studies, I’m going to add in modern music studies in between. Do 3 weeks of classics, 3 weeks of jazz and contemporary music.  I’ll be posting my schedule soon.
• Their reading list is great, but since I’m assuming Shorty will get through it rathe quickly, and since Y5 includes books he won’t touch with a 10 foot pole (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm AND Little House on the Prairie for an 11yo boy? Please.)  I’m going to compile my own reading list of living books, with an eye toward books about people of various races, cultures and countries.  This, too, I will be posting.
• Likewise their poetry reading and biographies. Shorty happens to love biographies and we intend to read one per month, not three the entire year. So I’m going to add in people like Jose Marti, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Simón Bolivar, Clara Barton and Milton Hershey. (We’ll probably do a fun project/ lapbook on chocolate for that one. LOL).  I’m going to swap out one of their poets for Jose Marti too. It fits the time period, and why not? His poetry was at least as beautiful as Wordsworth.
• I notice there is not one Latino, Native American or Asian artist, and only one or two African-American artists, in the art rotation schedule for the next few years.  I’ll swap a few of those out, too.
• We are not touching Plutarch for now. There are only so many hours in the day, people.

Logic
I’m keeping our formal study of logic, because as a philosophy major and highly logical person, it’s important to me. Using The Well Trained Mind’s recommendations of the Mind Benders and Case of the Red Herrings books for now. They are each about $9 on Amazon.

Foreign Languages
I’m going to try to have Shorty do a formal Spanish class through the Florida Virtual School; barring that, I’ll do the Teach Them Spanish! workbooks with him. Kinda iffy on whether we’ll be doing Latin. I know Charlotte Mason recommends starting in the fourth grade, but yeah, as I said, there are only so many hours in the day. A lady on a mailing list recommended a fairly self-directed curriculum that is inexpensive; I may check that out, called Getting Started with Latin. I do think it’s important for many reasons, including the study of science, music, and etymology, but I remember last year I bought the Prima Latina set, which is intended for the K-3 set, and found it so dry , lofty, overwhelming and irrelevant to the average 5-year-old that I felt actual pity for any kindergartener upon whom this was foisted. Your mileage may vary. Shorty thinks etymology is fun, though, so if I find a short, gentle curriculum that he can largely do on his own, I may give it a try.

Science:
We’ll be trying Jeannie Fulbright’s economical Exploring Creation with Astronomy next year. It’s intended to be done fairly independently, though I have heard that it is a little thin for a sixth grader, but then, my sixth grader likes “a little thin.” He’s not very science-oriented. I think this’ll be extra cool just because we are planning on going to Homeschool Day at the Kennedy Space Center in 2010. We’ll also be getting a telescope to look at things from our backyard. Good times! We’ll also be doing the weather/ sky/ rocks/ etc. portions of The Handbook of Nature Study (free to read online) to tie it all in together. Over the summer we’ll be studying the bird section of that.  We have the Audubon Florida guide, some binoculars and some nature journals we bought at Michael’s Arts and Crafts for $1 apiece, so we’re good to go. Also, I am considering checking out the eco-science/nature class at the Deering Estate next fall. There’s an orientation on Tuesday that we’re going to; more on this later.

Math:
Ummm. As of right now, we’ll be continuing with MEP math. This may change. We like the format, but the reality is, he hasn’t learned his math facts after working on them for 3 straight years. I’ve tried everything. Manipulatives, flash cards, board games, drills, worksheets, spiral, mastery, whatever, I’ve tried it. And he still pauses when asked what 5+3 is. Frustrating, to say the least.

Over the summer I’m going to concentrate on lots of living math, we’re learning blackjack, dominos (an important cultural skill anyway – Cubans loooove them some dominos!) playing Yahtzee, stuff like that, plus doing a lot of the things from Math Wizardry for Kids and The I Hate Mathematics Book, and for now we’ll continue doing MEP math lessons for 20-30 minutes at a time. This means we take up to 4 days to do a single lesson, but it beats sitting there for 2 hours trying to do one per day. I guess we’ll just keep plugging away at his pace.

Electives
Shorty will be studying a musical instrument. We’ve decided on an electric piano, since he already likes his little electric keyboard, and unlike a real piano, it will fit in his room and he can practice with headphones. It’s a big investment, probably the most expensive thing I’ll buy all year.   Later this summer I will be looking into piano teachers to visit our home once a week.

He’ll be learning how to type over the summer informally, and perhaps taking a semester course on typing through the FLVS. There is also a semester course on drawing, which we may check out.

We will continue to do the Home Depot Kids Workshop all through next year, as it’s the last year he’ eligible to participate, and are considering rejoining the Boy Scouts, or possibly the Society for Creative Anachronisms, depending on what my schedule looks like. And depending on finances, we might start taking a kids-and-moms judo class at a nearby studio – only $40/month apiece.

A Special Note About Language Arts
I was considering buying the language arts program from Queen Homeschool, but now I’m not sure, and am instead considering just committing to the Charlotte Mason approach of narration (he still needs work with oral narration so we may stick to that for atleast another year), copywork and dictation, as well as poetry, Shakespeare and lots of great books with spelling and vocabulary lists taken from those books. I’ve disliked every single vocabulary, spelling and grammar text I’ve ever seen, because it treats language as an intellectual exercise rather than something that can be put to great and immediate, relevant use. He’s a great speller anyway, and likes to learn new words, and I think he’d enjoy it if I made vocabulary lists from his readings and maybe did a “find the word in the chapter!” kind of thing out of it. Still, Sandi Queen’s products are all so straightforward and simple and inexpensive that I may check out the program anyway. Lord knows I’ve spent a whole lot more than $20 on books I never used!

What are you using for next year, if you homeschool? Like most moms, I’m a curriculum junkie and enjoy reading about what other families use and why it works for them!