Well, we have been homeschooling for two weeks already! It's great to see all the curriculum in use that I researched and purchased almost a year ago. Of course, I can always only estimate how long things will take when I put together a draft schedule for the year. So here is what I have had to change:
1st Grader - I haven't had to change anything with my first grader. Things are going great there!
6th Grader
The CLE Bible 6 curriculum is way more intense than I had anticipated. I knew that it looked thorough, but it requires a lot of brain power to get through. I just glanced at the second quiz and I'm amazed that my son will be able to answer those questions in a couple of days! With that said, I have decided to postpone our Catechism book by St. Philaret until next year because otherwise it would be too much. We have nearly completed the Short Catechism portion, and I'll still finish that, but I'll leave the rest until next year. At that point, my youngest will be about 7 anyway which is a better age for him to get something out of it. Everything else about Morning Time is the same though.
I purchased the Student Planners by Christian Light Education, which comes with its own Bible Memory Work program. I'm trying to get my kids into the habit of checking it every day. They also get Bible Memory from their reading program.
As much as I had envisioned family Norwegian lessons, this also will have to wait. We WILL get to it, but maybe next year. In the time it takes us to do CLE Bible 6 each day, we could do a number other things, but we can wait a year for that. The reason we did not do CLE Bible 5 is because the first part of the Old Testament is covered very thoroughly in Children's Bibles, so most of the information wouldn't be new to us. On the other hand, much of the second half of the Old Testament is not covered in such detail - we are getting a lot of detail, detail that I have not even had the opportunity to learn because its not easy to get through some of those books without a good guide. I think this curriculum could easily be used by a 7th, 8th or even 9th grader as well.
IEW - My son loves it, so we are doing it. I should be grateful right? It's just not my style of program. The clincher sentence requirement really gets to me. You can write an amazing essay without repeating "two or three words" from the first sentence of a paragraph, in the last sentence. But, I insist on checking all the boxes if we do use it! Usually, I check my son's paper and he has everything except the clincher sentences. With 14 weeks left in Year 2, I'm sure we'll finish if we do that program when we get to it, and during summer school if needed.
Lifepac Science 6 - I can't tell if I regret this science program or not. A few of the experiments have worked, and a few haven't. My son says the hands-on experiments help him learn...we'll see. We are probably switching to Shepherd Science next year....
CLE Language Arts, CLE Reading, Horizons Pre-Algebra, and Lifepac History and Geography are going fine.
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