2009-2010 School Year

Now is the time of year that I have been planning what we're going to do for the next school year. The school board counts the homeschool year as July 1st to June 30th and even though we aren't reporting yet, I'm trying to get us on that schedule.

We have enjoyed doing Little Hands Toward Heaven over the last few months, but Samuel is getting bored with the letter activities since he already knows all his letter sounds. He likes the Bible stories and activities so we are going to keep doing those until we finish, but drop most of the rest of the Little Hands stuff. Instead, we are moving on to Sonlight. I had planned on switching to Sonlight in Kindergarten anyway, but we just decided to go ahead and make the switch now.

So for the upcoming school year (starting July 6th) we will be doing:

• Sonlight Core P 3/4
• Sonlight Language Arts & Readers K
• A Reason for Handwriting K
• Rightstart Math Level A - we probably won't start this for a few months mainly because I haven't ordered it yet, but also because I want him to move on with writing and reading a little bit first so everything won't be brand new
• Rod and Staff Workbooks - we've been doing these with Little Hands and Samuel loves them! They are basically just readiness activities like finding the smallest object, largest object, cut & paste activities, matching, etc.

We have also realized that Samuel does much better with doing some school each day and gets into more trouble when we have long breaks, so we are going to school year round at least for the younger grades. A normal school year is 5 days a week for 36 weeks. We are going to do 4 days a week for 45 weeks. That gives us a longer school year, but the same amount of days overall. And we can use our Fridays for trips to the library, field trips, etc.

This is probably way more info than anyone other than me wanted to know, but I was mainly just thinking and planning out loud.