My Favorite Time of the Year!

No, I don’t mean the long, lazy days of summer. I mean time to gather resources and write lesson plans for next year!

There have been a lot of changes and adjustments taking place here at our little academy. The most significant is that we will be reducing our student enrollment by half next year. Although we had hoped to hang onto her for another couple of years, Moonheart decided to go ahead and apply for admission to the early college entrance program she’s had her eye on. She has been accepted and is due to start classes in August. So, we’ve spent a lot of time this spring and summer filling out forms and arranging finances and combing through class schedules and other information.

We’re very happy for her and very proud. (And no one would blame me if I were just a little melancholy, right?)

So, this means that I now have the freedom to tailor RobotBoy’s curriculum and schedule for next year specifically for him. I’ll get to that in a minute.

We also made a local move last month, and the new house has a spare bedroom that will allow us a real schoolroom for the first time in a few years. At the moment, the décor and furnishings still consist largely of half-unpacked cardboard boxes, but I plan to have things in much better shape by the time school rolls around in the fall.

Now, since RobotBoy is my highly social, places-to-go, people-to-see student, I’ve decided to arrange lots of outside-the-house activities for him. In previous years, I’ve had to juggle the schedules of the two kids and balance RobotBoy’s need to be out and about with Moonheart’s need to stay home in order to manage her heavy academic load and, especially, her commitments to online classes. With her away at school, though, we’ll have the freedom to do more. So far, the anticipated schedule looks like this:

Monday
Piano Lesson 4:30 – 5:00
Drum Lesson & Practice 6:15 – 8:00

Wednesday
Homeschool Class at Science Center 12:00 – 4:00 (twice a month)
Ballet Class 5:30 – 7:00

Thursday
Choir Rehearsal 4:30 – 6:30

Friday
Ballet Class 6:00 – 7:30
Jazz Dance Class 7:30 – 8:30

The other big change is that we’re going to try scheduling desk work only four days each week, allowing him Wednesdays off as long as he is caught up on his assignments for Monday and Tuesday. I noticed last year that Thursday and Friday tended to be his most productive days, and I suspect it worked that way because he knew he would be grounded or doing make-up work all weekend if he didn’t finish his assignments before dinner time on Friday. So, I’m hoping that dangling the carrot of a day off in the middle of the week will keep him motivated to work efficiently.

In terms of curriculum, we’re doing a few things differently there, too. First of all, I’ve decided to back off on the amount of writing I’m asking of him, especially for history. It was just so unpleasant last year that I’ve decided we both need a break.

We’re also going “spine free” for history. Or, perhaps, the more accurate way to put it is that I’m using his reading list as the spine. I’ve been collecting books from closeout and discount bookstores and culled anything useful from our existing collection. By the time I was done, I had a shelf full of about 6000 pages of non-fiction, biographies and historical fiction, plus several reference books and anthologies from which I wanted him to read. So, I just arranged all the readers in chronological order and broke them into chunks that would fit into the number of weeks in our academic year.

We’re a little off track from the history divisions recommended in The Well-Trained Mind, because we spent a year on American history back In 2004-05. This year, we’ll be covering “modern” history, from about 1700 forward. I’m doing this in order to round out the complete world history cycle and allow us to start over with the ancients next year.

Here’s the list:

Peter the Great, Stanley
Ghost in the Tokaido Inn, Hoobler
Robinson Crusoe: Young Reader’s Edition (Running Press)
Gulliver’s Travels (Dorling Kindersley Classics)
Benjamin Franklin’s Adventures With Electricity, Birch
If You Lived at the Time of the American Revolution
Keeping Room, Myers
Ultimate Field Trip: A Week in the 1800s
Sleepy Hollow / Rip Van Winkle, Irving
Day That Changed America: The Alamo, Tanaka
"Emperor’s New Clothes," Anderson *
"Tell-Tale Heart," Poe
Charles Dickens, Stanley
If You Traveled West in a Covered Wagon
David Copperfield (abridged by Dickens for public readings), Dickens
Great Expectations, Dickens (Aloud)
Rifles for Watie, Keith
Red Cap, Wisler
Red Badge of Courage, Crane
Day That Changed America: Gettysburg, Tanaka
Alice Rose & Sam, Lasky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carrol
Dragon’s Gate, Yep
Around the World in 80 Days, Verne (Aloud)
Tom Sawyer, Twain
Last Princess, Stanley
Treasure Island, Stevenson *
Sherlock Holmes stories
Immigrant Kids, Freedman
Jungle Book, Kipling
Day That Changed America: Earthquake, Tanaka
Trapped by the Ice, McCurdy
History Channel Guide: Anastasia
Gandhi, Pastan
Cheaper by the Dozen, Gilbreth
Dave at Night, Levine
Daily Life: The Great Depression, Parks
Franklin & Eleanor, Harness
My Family and Other Animals, Durrel (Aloud)
I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Volovkova *
Day That Changed America: D-Day, Tanaka
Mieko and the Fifth Treasure, Coerr
So Far From the Bamboo Grove, Watkins
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis *
Malcolm X: Fire Burning Brightly, Meyers
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl *
My Name Is America: Journal of Seamus Flaherty
Journey to Jo’burg, Naidoo
Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li Jiang

(Selections marked with an asterisk have adaptations being performed on-stage locally this year. So, I’m moving them around in the schedule to make sure that RobotBoy reads them just before we go see each show.)

I also have the following audio books, which we’ll listen to while on our way to all those afternoon activities:

Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny, Hawthorne
Time Machine, Wells
Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack, Osgood

And we’re going to include some poetry, too:

Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge
Lady of Shallott, Tennyson
Pied Piper of, Browning
The Raven, Poe
Charge / Light Brigade, Tennyson
Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow
Goblin Market. Rossetti
Owl and the Pussycat, Lear
Jabberwocky, Carroll
If, Kipling
I’ve Known Rivers, Langston Hughes
In Just, cummings

In order to give the whole thing some structure and context, he’ll work his way through most of these as appropriate during the year:

Child’s History of the World CD (19 sections)
Time for Learning: Presidents
History of the World: Revolution & Conflict
Revolution News
Learning Through History: Tzarist Russia
Learning Through History: Victorian Era
Learning Through History: French Revolution
Learning Through History: Great War

Well, since this is already longer than I intended, I’ll stop there for today. Tune in tomorrow (or sometime in the next few days, anyway) for samples of my lesson plans for the year!