Homeschool Plan 2019-2020 Edition

School starts on Monday around here. We’ll be doing 5th, 4th, 2nd, and a little bit of preschool this year. I’m frantically organizing curriculum, planning our schedule, and cleaning our mess of a school room (does anyone else have a hard time getting rid of books and curriculum??). I took a picture of our school room at this very moment, resisting the urge to clean it up for the photo. This is after I spent hours yesterday organizing, rearranging, and purging:

Okay, let’s be honest. I didn’t really purge much. A small stack of books went to my donate pile, and I threw a bunch of the girls’ papers in the recycling. I have a really hard time getting rid of books and curriculum. Anyway…

I have commandeered the island in our kitchen for planning for the past week, which I think drives my husband crazy but is unavoidable, since as you can see in the photo above I have no room on the table in the school room yet. Plus, I have to keep an eye on little boys while I’m planning, and I’m certainly not letting them loose in that mess. I know it will soon be a delightfully organized space, perfectly conducive to learning, but for the moment it is not a good place for little boys (or anyone else for that matter).

Here’s what my island has been like:

In terms of curriculum, we’ve made quite a few changes this year that I’m really excited about. One pretty big change comes from having discovered Our Lady of Victory as a source for wonderful traditional Catholic curriculum. We attend a Latin Mass, and it has been a bit hard to find curriculum that teaches about the Mass in the traditional Latin rite, so this was a great find (I learned about it from a friend). Look at these amazing books, which are Miss’s 5th grade religion:

We are using OLV for religion, spelling, and handwriting, and also grammar for Lass and Sis.

Miss’s language arts/literature is another thing that is new this year. It’s called The Good and the Beautiful, and it is absolutely both of those things. You can get a lot of their curriculum free for download if you want to print it yourself, which we did a little bit the last two years. I like how it includes spelling, grammar, literature, art, and geography in fairly short daily lessons. And Miss can mostly do it independently.

Yet another change is from Singapore to Saxon Math for Miss and Lass. I think Singapore was getting the job done, but I like how Saxon includes daily math facts speed practice, mental math, and problem solving at the beginning of each lesson, and includes constant reviewing.

So, yeah. I just realized that for my girls’ individual work, I changed almost everything: religion, math (except for Sis), spelling, handwriting, grammar… Miss is still using the same typing curriculum from The Good and the Beautiful, and we’ll still use IEW for writing practice and assignments. Sis still has Singapore for math and All About Reading, though I actually bought her the reading curriculum from OLV too and might switch that as well. Yikes, that’s a lot of changes in one year!!

Here’s the basic stuff/core subjects for each girl:

Miss

Lass

Sis

Much of our work that we still all do together, which includes memory work, religion, history, science, geography, latin, and fine arts will still be the same. Most of our memory work will come from Catholic Schoolhouse, which we have enrolled in again for this year. We will also do additional poetry and Bible verse memorization. And we will continue to memorize the Baltimore Catechism too.

We will be using The Story of Civilization again for our history spine (Volume III this year), and continuing to mix it up with various living books for science and geography. Science will cover ecology, physics, earth science, and health. Geography will cover Oceania, Central and South America, Africa, and Antarctica. We’re going to start off the year with Draw the World, so I won’t forget this fun geography activity like I did last year. Then we’ll do the books for the individual continents as well.

I’m switching latin to Prima Latina, which I’ve had for years but never used. Fine arts will include picture study portfolios from Simply Charlotte Mason again. I’m thinking Da Vinci and Michelangelo this year. The girls will still have piano lessons, ballet/jazz, and knitting classes. They will also all be choosing, planning, and implementing at least one project this year.

We will read a lot of books. Here are a few that are on the list for the year, either as read alouds or individual reading assignments for the girls:

That’s a lot already, but we’ll also try to add in art projects and games. One of my favorite things that we have ever done in school is using Five in a Row for learning through picture books. We don’t seem to have time to do that too much anymore, but I’m going to add these in a few times this year because we all love it so much, and because I have a preschooler again, who will especially enjoy these I hope.

And speaking of my preschooler, I’m keeping things very loose with him. I think he will really like being able to join in for parts of the school day with his sisters. I am not planning to bring him in more than twice per week, but we’ll see how it goes. We’ll mostly just do coloring, cutting, pasting, and playing. And lots of reading. I have plenty of faith and Bible based picture books and alphabet picture books, so I will try to focus on those. But I will likely just follow his lead. My goal is for him to have fun and to learn the Sign of the Cross on his own and become more familiar with lots of Bible stories. He knows many basic prayers already just from hearing them every day, but we will work on those as well. I got these boxes for sensory bins for him to play in too:

I’m thinking his sisters can take turns planning little activities to do with him each week too, like felt board activities, learning a new nursery rhyme/song, simple crafts, games, etc.

And that’s about it. Of course, we will do lots of praying and working on growing in virtue. Those things are more important than any of the rest of it anyway, and hopefully will help keep us on track.

I’m very excited to start. As long as I can get that room organized first…