We just finished our fifth week of school! Yay! We usually follow our local school’s schedule pretty closely (starting the first Wednesday after Labor Day) but this year we decided to start as soon as the fair was over. The pool was closed, there wasn’t much else to do, so we started.
It actually worked out pretty well for us. The beginning of our September was a bit rough, since we were gone for several days. The early start gave us a bit of a buffer to not get behind before we had even started.
What are we using this year?
We’re still sticking with Sonlight this year. It worked well for us last year, so why mess with a good thing. I know a lot of people shy away from Sonlight because of the cost, we’ve spent between $800-900 for each year’s curriculum, not including our math and handwriting (usually another $100 total). There’s a great post HERE about the cost of Sonlight and whether it’s worth it for the elementary ages.
In a nutshell I love Sonlight for a couple of reasons:
- I love building our family’s library, Sonlight has fantastic books as part of their curriculum.
- As a first time homeschooling mom (who wasn’t homeschooled) who has 4 other younger kids, I love that every day is already planned for me.
- All of it will be used over and over again (minus having to purchase enough worksheets for all the kids).
While Sonlight covers our Language Arts (with Explode the Code–Ave doesn’t like it), History, Science, and Theology, for Math we’re using Math-U-See again.
What we are supplementing with…
Avie is in the Alpha level. It’s getting a bit tougher for her now, but she’s completely capable of what they’re teaching. My only qualm with Math-U-See is that the DVD quality isn’t that great. The volume doesn’t go up loud enough for us to be able to really HEAR what he’s saying unless it’s dead quiet in the house. That, and I wish it were available through a log in on my phone, then we could use headphones and maybe hear better.
Our only other supplemental curriculum is A Reason for Writing. We used this last year and Avie did well with it, so we’re at it again with Level A. Her handwriting is getting better, but boy, does she HATE doing it. The nice thing with ARfW is that they’re short, sweet and build up a bit each day, so it’s not this huge daunting task.
One of the things we’re doing a bit differently this year is attempting to throw in some Five in a Row picture books (I’m TRYING to get the triplets involved). Rather than taking the week off for Thanksgiving we’re planning on reading Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin and throwing in some unit study type-things.
My problem with this is trying to figure out where to squeeze read-alouds into our day. I really need to spend sometime looking at our day and figuring out a set routine (we do have a loose routine), but that is a whole ‘nother post.
We started early this year too, in hopes of getting ahead so we don’t get behind quite so badly. Bringing Benj home last year really cramped my homeschooling style because there were so many heart-things to deal with that take presidence over school-things, but this year has already had a good jump start. I also thinned out our curriculum this year, making reading, writing, and arithmetic our main goals and allowing extras like geography, history, and science to come more organically. We’ll see how the year goes!
I think the best thing is knowing your limits and prioritizing what’s important. How is your school district with working with you?