We start Monday, and not a moment too soon, in my view. I’ve spent the last two days scheduling everyone’s reading and other work from now till Christmas, using the lesson-plan feature at Homeschool Reporting, the record-keeping service to which we’ve subscribed since the beginning of our homeschooling adventure in 2003. When we lived in Tennessee, we were enrolled in what’s known as a “CRS,” or a church-related umbrella school, which is one of several options available to homeschoolers under the laws of that state; and the record-keeping service was part of the package. In North Carolina you register with the state directly, so we dis-enrolled from the CRS, but kept up a family subscription to Homeschool Reporting to maintain access to six years’ worth of records.
The service is quite cheap: $20 a year for an entire family, regardless of how many children are enrolled. You can use it to record course lists, grades, and attendance; it formats nice-looking transcripts; it has a useful portfolio feature which allows you to keep detailed records of any extracurricular activities, projects, and community service in which your children participate; and it’s got this lesson-plan generator which lets you type in plans day by day and then generates a tidy, organized printout of everything you’ve got planned for a day, week, month, semester, or year.
My lesson-planning tends to be pretty sketchy on paper. A typical Friday for my 11-year-old might be rendered thus:
St. Joseph Church History ch 5
King Solomon’s Ring “Laughing at Animals”
Latin: whatever Fr. assigned
Math Wizardry 72-85, need ruler, compass, string, potting soil, avocado
work on poem for recitation at dinnertime
free reading
That’s the base. Whatever actually happens during a given day, in terms of instruction, conversation, and hands-on activity takes off from there. Also, the older children don’t necessarily work according to the order in which I’ve written things down; they order their own day and check off things as they accomplish them. I’ve always joked that my overriding educational objective was to produce autodidacts who did their own laundry, and we’re getting there . . .
In the past I’ve kept a detailed blog recording our activities and hashing out issues of philosophy and pedagogy. This year I think I’ll settle for jotting things in the online portfolio.
Anyway, here are more booklists:
The 11-year-old
Core texts:
Voyages in English 7
The Old World and America
All Creatures Great and Small: Life Science
MCP Mathematics E, which we’re finishing from last year
followed by Saxon Algebra 1/2
Barron’s Math Wizardry for Kids
Amy Welborn’s Prove It! series
St. Joseph Church History
Dover’s Calligraphy A to Z, because I’m hoping that this is how you improve handwriting in a middle-schooler
Henle Latin 1, for a class our priest teaches at church
Literature “Across the Curriculum,” as they say:
Henri Fabre’s Book of Insects
King Solomon’s Ring, by Konrad Lorenz
Sun Slower, Sun Faster: Meriol Trevor
Red Hugh, Prince of Donegal: Robert L. Reilly
Come Rack! Come Rope!: Robert Hugh Benson
Edmund Campion, Hero of God’s Underground: Harold C. Gardiner, S.J.
The Shakespeare Stealer and Shakespeare’s Scribe: Gary Blackwood
(highly recommended!)
The Blood-Red Crescent: Henry Garnett
Enemy Brothers: Constance Savery
(to slake an inexhaustible thirst for World War II stories)
and whatever else he can get his hands on via the library, the secondhand bookstore, where he is a regular customer, and our own shelves. “Voracious” does not begin to describe this child’s appetite for information. He’s also a Boy Scout, which is a curriculum unto itself, and wants to try Irish dance with some of his friends, by way of P.E.
The 5- and 7-year-olds:
I work with these two together, because there’s no way not to. At sixteen months apart, they’re not exactly twins, but they function like twins in many ways, and the 5-year-old wants to be doing whatever her brother does. So I pitch things to him, and she follows happily in his wake.
Our program is a mix of texts and literature, with an emphasis on literature, as well as a lot of learning-through-play and life-learning which booklists don’t reflect. Here are the books:
Emma Serl’s Primary Language Lessons
Fr. Furlong’s The Old World and America as a read-aloud
Marigold Hunt’s A Life of Our Lord for Children, The First Christians, and Saint Patrick’s Summer
Ethel Pochoki: Once Upon a Time Saints
Miquon Math
Introducing the Periodic Kingdom to Its Heirs
Minimus Latin (great fun!)
The Golden Fleece: Padraic Colum
City of the Golden House: Madeleine Polland
Detectives in Togas: Henry Winterfeld
Sarah, Plain and Tall: Patricia MacLachlan
Happy Little Family: Rebecca Caudill
A Lion to Guard Us: Clyde Robert Bulla
and other read-alouds, though I’ll be having the 7-year-old do a good bit of “tandem” reading with me. Additionally, I keep a rack in the kitchen full of picture books, easier-readers, Usborne books, and other reading material which younger children can handle on their own.
We’re also repeating the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy as a family evening read-aloud this year. Never gets old.
Other resources on my shelf, in no particular order:
Handbook of Nature Study: Anna Botsford Comstock
Catholic Heritage Curriculum’s A Year With God
The Year and Our Children: Mary Reed Newland
Around the Year With the Trapp Family
(excerpt: “The Land Without a Sunday”)
For the Love of Literature: Maureen Wittmann (highly recommended!)
A beautifully-bound timeline book, History Through the Ages, to which all the children have been contributing for several years, as a kind of history-scrapbook project. I’m reminded now to schedule some timeline-book days into our semester . . . haven’t done that yet, and if I don’t write it down, it’ll never get done.
Various Usborne books on art, science, history, and cooking themes; I sell these, though not very proactively and mostly because I want them for myself, at a discount. Good when you need a ready-made lesson at your fingertips, and always fun.
Meanwhile, coming soon at I&C:
Music from Michael Linton
Reading and culture from other homeschooling households
Discussion of Robert Kunzman’s Write These Laws on Your Children
Not to worry: our regularly-scheduled curiosities will return anon. They’ll return even more anon-ly, in fact, if people will send me things. Not that that’s a hint or anything, just a reminder that reader contributions are always welcome.
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