What the Future Holds

We are plugging away at our schooling, making changes here and there. I am constantly tweaking our schedule and our materials, trying to find the right fit for our family. It has been a delicate balancing act for boy #1 to work a part time job along with completing his school work and he is looking forward to being completely done with high school. One item that we found last school year that has worked extremely well for us is the Notgrass history curriculum. Boy #1 is finishing up the Exploring America through history, literature and Bible and then we will start Exploring World History. I love the readability and thoroughness of this curriculum and it is laid out in a fashion that is so easy to use. At this point in our schooling, I am all about easy to use. We have also had success with Institute for Excellence in Writing materials and we started using Teaching Textbooks for Math, which has also been a blessing. Boy #1 is working through the geometry text and Boy #2 has started the Algebra I. I have been using Homeschool Tracker to keep us organized and that has also been a big help. Currently, I have been looking ahead to what we want to finish up with Boy #1 so that he can be graduated and next year looks to be mostly Life Skills and Language arts for him. Boy #2 starts high school next year and so I have been looking over what I did with our daughter and Boy #1 to see what I want to repeat with Boy #2 and what didn't work. I get a bit more organized with each child - so by the time Boy #3 hits high school, we should have everything down pat. This year Boys #2 & #3 and I were reading through This Country of Ours for American History. It was going slow and they wanted to study World War II, so I decided to jump ahead (we did a timeline from where we left off to about 1940). We are reading a text together and they are each reading a book set in the time period. We will spend the rest of this school year learning about the 1940s, the countries involved in the War and various other aspects of the war. This unit will be a bit free flowing as that is what seems to be needed at the moment. I will post more about how next year will look for us, as I pull it together.