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.
I had a question about that Book of Time. I was wondering whether to get one for each kid, or one for them to share. So far I just ordered one and am going to have a look at it and decide if I need another one from there. So it sounds like you are planning to read the Story of the World to them instead of the read alouds? I’m just new to this so wondering. I have some GREAT and EXCITING news about our homeschooling this year. Florence W. (who your family had dinner with at our house) has agreed to teach our kids art this year! Maybe you’ve never seen any of her paintings, but I’m sure Gladys C. has told you of her accomplishments? We are absolutely thrilled. We’re tentativly planning a once per week class/lessons and will adjust from there. We go to convention this week and the Sonlight order arrives this week, so what more do we need?
Audrey, Wow, are we ever envious about your art classes. We would love to see Florence’s art. To have a real pro teaching the classes is worth gold. We really wish we could be there at convention with you. After Eric was so kind to take us swimming at the convention grounds, we have wanted to go there for convention! It sounds like you guys are really on a roll with homeschool now. As for the Book of Time, I really did not have much hope for getting much into it, but Kelly really got into it when she was doing her two year survey of world history. She did such a nice job, that I am sure it will be one of those few keepsakes that stays with her until she dies. Christian was looking forward to doing his, too, but said he was going to take a little bit of a different approach. Kelly did cartoons of a lot of the great events and people in history, but Christian wants to do drawings that are a little more realistic. We have enjoyed sitting and drawing together so much that we thought it might be kind of cool to read AND draw, so that meant that Kelly needed a second Book of Time because the first one was full. I think the circumstances just happened to work with us really well for each to have their own, but I could see how it could be VERY cool for the Book of Time to be a joint effort. That could turn it into a real heirloom. With the way we did it, each little thing they put in the book was a little thing, but with one book, each thing that goes in the book could be more special. As for the book itself, you could probably get by with just a big looseleaf binder if you did not want to get another book. That way you could fill stuff in wherever you wanted. Some of Kelly’s pages are very full and some hardly have anything at all. So the short answer is that we have THREE Books or Time, but if I had to do it again, we might just have done one or we might have done two or three again. Sorry for what I just read back through was a very unsatisfying answer. I do kind of like your idea about turning the thing into a family project, but I also like the idea of each kid having a very cool book by which to remember their homeschool.