So Excited to Start School This Year

Well, my planning for this upcoming school year is almost done and I am excited to start. I've pretty much decided that every year we will take six weeks off of school during the summer (for planning) and another six weeks off during the Christmas season. Otherwise, we will be doing school year-round.

We are sticking with Horizon Charter School this year, but am thinking we will go totally independent next year. The reason? Too lengthy to discuss in this post, but call and ask if you really want to know.

Sammy has been really progressing without us doing much work with him, so I am thinking this year I might start doing some official "schoolwork" with him. I've noticed that he is very deliberate and focused when he tries to write or draw. So maybe we will work on writing and also learning the 70 phonograms for our Spell to Write and Read program for Language Arts.

For Cameron, we're sticking with the same math program we used last school year (Right Start Mathematics), but moving up one level. Language Arts will also be the same (Spell to Write and Read), but I am incorporating some other fun curriculum I have acquired that should help him with sentence structure and writing. He wants to learn Spanish and, after a terrific ordeal trying to choose a foreign language curriculum that Horizon will approve and purchase, I settled on Power-Glide Spanish and am hoping that he likes it and learns from it. I'm still not sure what we will be doing for science. I have a few science kits we will probably go through and I know we want to do a mini unit study on winter animals, but other than that I am stumped. One thing I am really looking forward to is our Lego unit study. I know Cameron will love it. It will take us 5 weeks and each week has a building challenge, along with information to look up on Legos and how they got their beginning. There are also activity pages to complete. Such a good unit study for a boy!

For now, we are loving summer and enjoying all that it has to offer. The boys are having a blast swimming at the community center pool about 3-4 days a week. We took them to the drive-in for the first time, visited family and friends in Oregon, went to a live concert-in-the-park at Cameron Park Lake, saw 2 movies at the free movie showing in El Dorado Hills, and still have planned a 2-night camping trip and week-long vacation in park City, UT. Good stuff to look forward to!