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!