Homeschooling: Taking the Plunge

When we decided what to do for M’s first grade year, we toyed with the idea of homeschooling full time, but ultimately chose for her to stay with the three day per week distance learning program she’d been in for kindergarten, giving us a balance of school and homeschool.  As the weeks have gone by, I’ve thought more and more about homeschooling M-Th and having her attend the 1 day/week enrichment program at her school.  Last week, we made a big decision, after Christmas break, she will start doing exactly that so we’ll be full time homeschoolers.  I’m very excited and so is M.

Since deciding to make this change, I’ve been indulging my love of planning and book and curriculum shopping (a bit dangerous to both our budget of money and time).  For the most part, we’ll continue with what we’ve been doing.  The biggest change I’ll make for M will be the addition of history and more science, subjects she’s previously been soaking up a lot of on her school days.

For January-May, we’re going to combine the two into a study of prehistory covering everything from the formation of the earth to the first farmers.  All this will lead up nicely to a study of the Ancient World which we’ll likely do next fall using Sonlight Core 1.  I’ll be sharing lots more here about the prehistory curriculum I’m putting together for us.

Here’s the rest of our curriculum:

Language Arts: Sonlight Language Arts/Readers, Explode the Code, journaling

Handwriting Without Tears

Math – We needed some new life in our math studies so I recently ordered Singapore Primary Math and M loves it.  We’re also using Mind Benders logic puzzles and Math Analogies (both from The Critical Thinking Company)

Latin – another subject she’s enjoyed at school, still looking for curriculum though I’m leaning toward getting Minimus

Music – very unschooly exploration of classical music using Classical Music Start Up Kit, Volume 1 and random pieces from our collection

Art – Meg takes time to do art daily.  We’ve done less formal art lessons/projects than I’d intended since she typically just wants to create on her own and that’s fine with me

And of course oodles of read-alouds.