Homeschooling, Curriculum and Schedules

Since we just started our year of homeschooling and I just finished buying all our curriculum for this year I thought I should write about it. Every year I have used material that I have found for free, dirt cheap, or was gifted to me. Every year my kids get burnt out about halfway through because they don't really love the curriculum that we are using. This year I decided to totally revamp what we use and I bit the bullet and bought some curriculum that was NOT cheap. Shhh!!! Don't tell my husband! I am sure he will see the bill and ask me later...but until then....

I thought I would share what our homeschool center looks like. This is where we store the basics for daily use. It is super messy right now, but I figure that if I cleaned it up and then took a picture you might think that  it was always clean! Actually it looks like this a lot of the time. 

So, for the first time ever I actually sat down and mapped out a full year for each of my kids. Maybe it's because my oldest is in 7th grade this year, or maybe it's because I realized I just needed a bit more organization than I have had in the past. Actually it was because I finally bought the book A Well Trained Mind and it made such sense that I implemented a lot of her ideas. I was already doing some of them, but she made it so much easier for me to plan and get precise about what I wanted. I highly recommend this book for all homeschooling parents out there. 

Here is a picture of our June schedule. I got this printout from Donnayoung.org

I did not put every subject on here because I didn't think there was a need. The subjects that they do on their own without help, and the subjects they do daily are NOT listed on this. I use the weekly schedule below to list everything. I found it at fivejs.com. (I just checked and her website was down. Hopefully it will go back up!) It's back up! She has some really cool stuff on her website. You should go check it out!

This is my daughters weekly assignment sheet. I list the subjects and how much of each subject my kids are supposed to do every day. As they do them, they check them off. I grade everything at the end of the week. I used to grade every day but it became to time consuming. 

This is a list of everything we are using this year. I figure it's easier to make a list rather than explain why or how we are using each thing. That way if you don't want to read this whole post you don't have to. :) If you want to know what we have used other years or how I like what we are currently using, just ask!

Math: Math-U-See (MUS)

History: Story of the World (SOTW) and A History of US

Science: Simple Schooling, living books with notebooking, and Netflix

Writing: Wordsmith Apprentice for my oldest 2, and Writing Strands for my 8 and 9 yo

Foreign Language: Prima Latina for Latin

Music: Color the Classics

Art: Drawing with Children and McGraw Hills Art Connections

Grammar: Easy Grammar

Spelling: Spelling Power

Logic: Mind Benders

Literature/LA: Learning Language Arts Through Literature (LLATL)

Reading: Whatever the book is for LLATL or personal reading 

Learning to read: McGuffey readers and the app that goes along with it

Scriptures: reading and activity sheets

Keyboarding: We use this fun BBC website but may switch to this one.

Next semester my oldest will be using this site to learn programming, and this site for foreign language.

Any questions?? I was so enthusiastic that I have already planned NEXT year too....and part of the following year.