It's that time again...

Planning for next year.

I'll admit that the planning is more fun than the actual teaching. I could very easily sit at this computer all day every day, checking out curriculum and making our plans for the fall.

Luckily, my children are not going to let that happen. Even though it feels like we are starting to wind down the year, we still have a couple of months left to power through. We need to stay focused now because soon the siren call of warm breezes will be beckoning us out the door and I know that getting these stir crazy boys outside will become more important than academics.

We are entering into uncharted territory this year with the beginning of junior high. We have two more years to get ourselves ready for high school (gulp).

Things tend to change between now and when I place the final order this summer, but I am feeling good about our plans so far. I am doing things a little differently this year and taking on a two-track history. James would study the Ancients every year so I am going to break our history studies into classical and modern studies, modeled largely after Highlands Latin School and with the help of some remarkable products and customer service over at Memoria Press.

For Christian studies, we'll be starting the quest level from Explorer's Bible Study and using The Book of the Ancient World by Dorothy Mills.

In classical studies, we'll be using another Dorothy Mills book, The Book of the Ancient Greeks, along with the Samuel Butler translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey. James has been looking forward to this for quite some time and I think he is finally ready.

Famous Men of Modern Times will be paired with The Story of the Thirteen Colonies by H.A. Guerber and Memoria's 200 Questions about American History for our modern history studies.

For English, I'm fairly positive that we'll continue on with Rod and Staff for grammar. I will be using Susan Wise Bauer's middle school writing and grammar for the younger boys, but James is ahead of their publishing schedule. I've decided to make the investment in IEW's TWSS and add to that the first volume of U.S. History Based Writing Lessons. We'll continue in the Vocabulary from Classical Roots series and I'm going to use Teaching the Classics and Figuratively Speaking to pull together our own literature studies.

We've been working through Saxon Math 7/6. (I never thought I would say that) with Art Reed's DVDs. We'll move into 8/7 sometime next year, hopefully in the first term, adding in the two new Life of Fred prealgebra books for some levity.

Science ...I have BJU 6 and all of the supples, so we'll be using the program next year. The more I see of BJU, the more I realize just how far their worldview is from my own, so despite their academic rigor, this will likely be the last BJU product we use.

Latin was a big decision this year. I have decided to switch over to First Form instead of Latin Alive! 1. The pronunciation is slightly different, though I don't think that matters much. We have enjoyed Latin for Children, but I think that First Form will be easier to use without the DVDs. James never wants to watch the ones that came with his LfC C, so I do not want to shell out for them next year only to have them sit unused. First Form will be all review, but I think it will be good for us before we forge ahead.

We will also begin a gentle introduction to French with First Start French I. I had really hoped James would choose Spanish, since his father and I at least have a basic understanding of the language, but he was adamant. This should be interesting.

Finally, we have logic. I am leaning toward Traditional Logic, but that is not a final decision, we may do something lighter for one more year.

I'll do a separate post for Sean. He is going to be a Kindergartner this year!