Summer Curriculum

I've started contributing to a homeschooling blog, Home Schoolin' Mamas. The following is posted over there, but my personal blog includes my homeschooling journey, so you can read it here as well. If you want to get a broader perspective of the subject, however, I recommend taking a gander over at HSM (and I don't mean High School Musical, like every other HSM-initialed entity in this household).

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I meant to post this quite a while ago. Like, back when Megan asked me to contribute to the blog. And back when it was actually Summer and not pre-Fall. Oh well.

So anyhoo, this is our summer curriculum. We are not finished with it yet. More on that later, but most likely we won't be finished until it literally is Fall. Thank goodness for flexible homeschooling schedules!

Curriculum-wise, Summer around here is purely for Science, History (both of which we do not do during the "school year"), catching up on other stuff, and fun subjects of the kids' choosing. Of course, we have just completed our first year (July 07 - July 08) of homeschooling, so I reserve the right to completely change my summer standards in the future ;-)

So here's what we're working on:



Science
Weather Unit Study
Plants Unit Study
Gardening
Nature Walks
Space (this came up unplanned due to looking at Jupiter in a friend's telescope one night)

History
Native Americans
Slavery (again, unplanned)*
American Girl corresponding books

Poetry
Robert Louis Stevenson
Shel Silverstein

Catching up
on other stuff and more practice:

Hannah—place value, telling time, subtraction
Emme—counting, writing letters and numbers, letter sounds

As always, plenty of reading aloud, reading on her own, (Hannah) and looking at books on their own (Emme and Max).

*A note about the slavery thing. Personally I believe it is probably too early for them to be learning about slavery. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) we began reading about Addy, one of the American Girls, and they became extremely curious about the subject. I’m a firm believer in meeting them wherever and whenever their interests lie (even while it’s making me cringe inside), so on to Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, etc. we went.