Extracurricular schedule:
Mondays: Homeschool Gym and Swim at the Y 1-3, Madison cooking 4:30-5:30, horseback riding 6:30-8. Monday is busy!
Tuesdays: Drama for Madison 4-5, karate 6-6:45.
Wednesdays: Piano lessons at our house 11-12.
Thursdays: Drama for Madison 4-5, karate 6:30-7:15.
Fridays: Irish Dancing (hs class) 10-11.
Saturdays: Bach Children's Chorus for Madison, Mozart Children's Chorus for Ella
Brownies are every other Tuesday evening at 6:30 (those weeks they'll do the 3:45 Wed karate class). Cooking, drama, and horseback riding are 5-week programs ending the last week of October. When that ends, we'll switch to Monday & Wednesday karate instead of Tuesday-Thursday, which will leave Tuesdays and Thursdays completely free.
Am I ever glad they have similar interests, and that everything is on the East side of Rochester. Otherwise I'd be running all over creation.
I've been using Airset.com to manage my schedule, since spring. That has worked out extremely well. I truly recommend it.
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Daily Schedule:
We're going to try not to linger over breakfast (the earlier David gets out, the more we get done...the school day never seems to begin while he's still there). We'll end breakfast with the Birthday of the Day and getting the Birthday's photo up on the timeline downstairs.
Each morning after breakfast, we'll start with a 15-minute karate practice. That was an effective invention of mine this spring; it gets their blood running and also focuses them, plus gives them what they need to get their red stripes (every 3 practices, a red stripe) on their karate belt.
Then, one will practice piano while the other does work that needs to be done focused, with me. For Ella, this will be reading.
Three subjects will be done every day: Handwriting, spelling, and math. For Ella, also reading.
Man, Madison needs help on handwriting. I've decided to have her use graph paper for her math this year to help her keep things neater and in columns -- it was so hard for her to do multiple-digit multiplication and long division because she couldn't keep numbers the same size and in columns. We'll be using Handwriting Without Tears and also a handwriting book Laura gave us. For spelling, Madison will use AVKO and Ella will use...some other first-grade spelling book I have, I forget the name.
I'm seriously considering (and I think Laura will really cheer me on here) using Writing Road to Reading with both of them, even though Madison just already reads. She's bad at spelling and writing, though, and I think that this will really help, and I'm going to want something for Ella if reading doesn't just click in naturally soon. The unschoolers would tell me just to leave it be and read, read, read to her. I'll read, read, read...but leaving things be just isn't in my nature, when if she works at it, it's something she could get. The child can read, she just needs practice so that she reads automatically, and damn it, the more practice she gets, the sooner she'll be able to experience the joy that is reading.
For math, Ella will use Math-U-See Beta level and Madison will use the Deb Ross curriculum. Among the goals for Madison are to have her absolutely rock-solid in the mechanics of multiplication, long division, fractions by year's end. We'll do as much "really interesting" math as she can handle this year (applications in geometry, among them), and sail on with that next year. Among the goals for Ella will be to have her rock-solid in multiple-digit addition and subtraction, and much of the multiplication tables memorized, by next spring.
We're using History Odyssey as a general history curriculum this year, which includes a book that the girls have come to love this summer, the Usborne Internet-linked Book of World History. I got some great supplemental project books on ancient history: Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Chinese, and Romans.
For science, I got the R.E.A.L. science curriculum in May, and this still looks pretty good. But for September (the weeks we'll be there, anyway), we'll be focusing on the human body because the RMSC is starting a whole exhibit on it, plus the planetarium will be showing a big-screen movie on it. And this summer I got one of those models where you can take out the organs and put them back in again. Madison had gotten a chemistry set at her birthday party that she used with David all last week, and she wants to keep on with chemistry. So right after the human body, I'll do atomic and molecular structure with them, and then a chemistry unit, before going into REAL science. They both really love science.
I got a really interesting grammar book from Jessie Wise, one of the ladies who brought us The Well-Trained Mind, First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind. It will do for both of them, as it's level 1 and 2. We'll start Madison on level 1, though, and let her move ahead if she goes fast.
We'll keep on with logic, of course. Probably not every day.
I will also review Spanish words with them a few times per week, which I didn't do last year (I just let their little Spanish group with Monica take care of that), and on the days we don't do Spanish words, we'll do sign language. This will be only a little 10-minute exercise each day.
I plan to have Poetry Friday on Friday mornings before Irish dancing, which is at 10am so there's not much time for something beforehand. I figure that reading a poem, talking about it, and then either making artwork to go along with it or creating a short poem of one's own would be a good, time-limited, thing to do before dancing.
For writing, we are definitely going to pick up where we left off with the Frontier Team book with Madison. And Ella and I are going to start writing, as well...we have a book plot scoped out. We'll start off low-key with this; I think we'll do it while the other child has piano lessons, and we'll see where it takes us.
I've abandoned my desire to start Latin this year. We have too much going, and I think maybe I'll start next year, after Ella has mastered reading.
I am going to organize as much of this into lessons ahead of time as I can, so that the subjects can have the lists of lessons spelled out, each on their own sheet. Then we'll put a sticker and date of when each was completed, and every so often we'll celebrate the completion of a set or milestone in spelling, history, science, reading, etc. My girls are definitely motivated by stickers. I plan to do the same for each day their rooms are organized.
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Obviously, we'll weave in nature hikes, maps (I realized last week that the girls are NOT good at knowing where they live in the country, in the world, etc), general cultural literacy in with all of this. We'll be filling in the timeline in our basement (Western culture, 1450-present) with the Birthday of the Day and also with some invention history and art history.
Stepping back and looking at this, I'm pretty satisfied. We're heavy on music (piano, choir, dance) and phys ed (gym & swim, karate, dance, horseback riding). It seems we have a gap in arts-and-crafts, but History Odyssey includes a number of projects, so it's not so bad.
My own work: There will be some mornings I'll need to work while they're working, but I'm going to do my best to reserve this for afternoons.
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