Homeschool Planning 2009/2010

I'm finally starting to figure out our plan for this coming school year. As I mentioned before, we've been going along fine with AmblesideOnline, but I felt like I needed to make some adjustments for our family. One of the things that I feel isn't really working very well for us is the history component of Ambleside. It really bothered Boog that we started kind of in the middle of history. It didn't help that I haven't been very good about making sure that we are doing timeline work to make that more understandable. So, I've decided that we are going to put more emphasis on history this year. Since we already own A Child's History of the World by Hillyer, we are going to start at the beginning and work our way through the book together as a family. I'm going to add in supplemental readings from the Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History book as well as from books that I check out from the library. I also found this site that had great suggestions for activities and supplemental reading. For now, I'm going to put the history that AmblesideOnline has scheduled on hold. I want to give my ideas a try and see if it works any better for us. I'm also excited to start with prehistory because my 1st grader loves dinosaurs. I think this will be a great way to draw him into school this year.

I've decided to keep almost everything else as-is and go forward with the AmblesideOnline curriculum. So far, we've really loved the classic literature that is scheduled. My oldest said his very favorite book from last year was The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and he even wants to dress up as Robin Hood for Halloween. That makes my geeky heart proud. heehee We're still going to use MEP for math and since we never got to Real Science 4 Kids Pre-Level Chemistry last year, we're going to do that in the coming weeks. After I get it down on paper and have a few weeks to settle into our new routine, I'll post how it's going.