I spent most of the weekend preparing to start homeschool next week. I am pretty much done. I will try to post a PDF file of the first or second week’s schedule tomorrow, so you can see how we do it. I just use and OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, but have gone from doing an individual sheet per day to one sheet per week. It holds all the same information, but we hope it will cut down on the amount of clutter we are generating for the kid’s notebooks. It is going to be a great year.
The big new thing we are going to try to do is read through Susan Rice Bauer’s Story of the World four book series together over the next two years. The Sonlight program includes a book called the Book of Time that is really just a spiral bound drawing book with pages marked from 5000 B.C. to present. The idea is that, as the student studies each era, they will draw and write something in their book that will help them remember something about the era. Kelly just finished a two year survey of the history of the world, filling one of those books with her drawings. She really loved it and I was pretty envious, so we decided that, as Christian goes through the next two years, I will read the history books to Kelly and Christian while they draw in their Book of Time books. We have two, brand new, Books of Time. Kelly does not mind that she is going through all this again because she had so much fun last time. The only bad part about that is that I will not be getting any of the novels unless I read them to myself.
I will write more about some of the things we are doing.