The 2007/2008 school year will be our fifth year of homeschool and our fourth year in a row. It is still very exciting to get ready for the year even though we know the routine. Kelly’s eighth grade history, literature, and science texts have arrived from Sonlight. Christian has all his sixth grade books out of their box and on the shelf. The kids are scheduled to do a thorough cleaning and organizing of the bonus room today so that I can make a final purchase list. Today, I will try to go through and make the final purchase list to start the year. It is never the real final purchase list because I always end up buying a ton of stuff after the fact, but we are getting better.
We really like to follow the calendar and schedule of the local government schools so the Kelly and Christian can be out of school the same time as the other kids in the neighborhood. It facilitates playing while minimizing whining to do it that way. The problem here in the county to which we moved is that, this very year, the schools are switching from a typical nine month academic calendar to four or five differing year-round calendars so that government school kids in the same neighborhood do not even have the same school year. The parents are hopping mad. Enough parents pulled their kids out to homeschool or send them to private school that now there is way less budget than was expected for the government schools which has made the bureaucrats hopping mad. It is a real mess.
I looked at the statistics for the schools here at the School Matters website. They are better by just about every measure than the schools in Salem, Albany, and Corvallis. That includes reading and math proficiency as well as students per teacher. Still, it would be very difficult to put our children in these schools. At least here in North Carolina the people seem to understand that the government schools are a big problem. In Oregon, even though the best of the schools operate at a lower level than here, the people seemed to be satisfied with what their children are getting.
What we have decided to do for our school calendar is to start next week on math, then start the regular school year the third week in August. That way, we will be close to being in sync with the little neighbor girl (Kasey) who goes to a Christian school with a classical focus (grammar-logic-rhetoric). We will have to do some shuffling to make things work out, but I think we can make it work. The reason we are starting a little early on math is so that we have a good chance for Kelly to finish Algebra II and Christian to finish Algebra I by the end of the year. We are on schedule for that, but just barely, so we want to give ourselves a little buffer. We swap Algebra II with Geometry relative to the way that the subjects are traditionally taught, but it makes sense to us to do it that way for our kids and is in alignment with the program we use.
On top of all this, I read a new article from HSLDA that touches on the subject of homeschool socialization and citizenship. It deals with some common misconceptions on the subject.
Ken,
Wow, you guys are really far ahead of us! I have decided to do Sonlight this year for Addie and Konrad. I have even chosen which program I want to use with the two…now I’m just searching for the funding! For Konrad I want to use the condensed American history, Core 3+4. And for Addie I want to do the first year of World History. But I’m being picky and want to get the Singapore Math, and elective beside recorder ( the kids already play different instruments) and not get the science part. My question is if you guys choose the core, core plus, or core ultra programs. Can you choose your own math, science, electives, etc with any of these programs? I want to use a different science than Sonlight offers. So…can you answer these questions? If not, I can try to call Sonlight and ask them some questions, I’m just trying to avoid a 3 hour phone call at this point!
Thanks,
Audrey
Audrey,
Thanks for the note! First off, we are enjoying all of Allegra Montana’s posting on the AuthorGirls blog. We are very excited that you are going to do Sonlight. It has been good for us and we hope it works as well for you. The math part of the program is always selected separately, so that part is easy. Singapore math worked really well for our kids. I have heard that Saxon and some others are great, too, but Singapore served us well. We always bought the core plus programs, but if I had to do it again, I would do it exactly the way you are doing it and get my own science until the excellent seventh grade science Kelly did last year. I am pretty sure that the Core alone does not include Language Arts or Science. We really did not use the Language Arts either. The one thing about the Sonlight people is that they have been VERY responsive to emails with us and you can get answers very quickly on the forums, too. Do you have any idea what science you will do? We are to the point where we have some science that we really like, but we struggled with that through the elementary school years. I think Adie will really love the first year of World History. Also, Christian and Kelly both made that comment that they would have hated to have missed their non-western culture year. I would love to keep trading ideas on this stuff. I am going to write note (like the one you wrote for Kelly to Lydia — it has been a WILDLY successful venture as many additional connections have been made through that one) to a couple of Sonlight homeschool mothers, Rebeka and Lisa in Texas. Lisa’s two kids are very close to the same age as yours!