Well, it’s that time of year again. I have a month until school starts. This year all the kids will be in public school…sort of. The little three will be at the public alternative school which meets four days a week. It is expected that families are supplementing the basics and “specials” with home school options as well.
To make it easy on myself (I have a kindergartener, fourth grader, and eight grader) I am doing one combined curriculum for history/social studies/and ELA. The kids will be doing US history this year through novel studies, documentary series, and unit projects. They will also be doing daily math. School will cover the rest of the subjects.
“Specials” are taught by parents and teachers 1 1/2 days a week. Each family has to do 30 hours of volunteering per kiddo and each class counts as 30 hours. This fall I am teaching a Story Building class which covers about 19 weeks.
To be honest, I’m recycling content from a lot of my workshops so I didn’t think it was going to be too difficult to create my classes. Then I started putting together my slide show and activities. I’m certainly going to hit those 30 hours. Thankfully I love the topic.
Back to the homeschool curriculum; the hardest part is deciding which historical moments to cover. I could spend a year alone on Colonial History, but at that rate Linden would be the only one to get to the modern era by the time she graduates! I finally decided that this year we will do US history with big benchmark moments, and next year we will do world history in the same time period but through Art, music, and literary movements.
Once I had my scope and sequence down I had to choose novels for the novel studies. The big kids can read a novel in a couple days but Linden is still putting letters together so John will have to read aloud to her. I chose a lot of my picks from booklists highlighting ex-centric cultural groups and authors. I figure the kids are going to get plenty of white history in their lifetimes so I can push a more diverse selection of viewpoints here at home.
Wars are complex. How do you teach any war in a week or two? Ken Burns. I’ve managed to schedule the Revolutionary War while I’ll be away at my residency in October, and the Civil War over the Christmas holidays. A friend asked if I was going to take a break and just kept looking at me skeptically when I explained that watching documentaries is what we do for fun…my kids groan when I won’t let them watch a third episode of American Experience in a row.
I’ve only planned projects as far as Christmas….sorry huge number of sirens just sped by and knocked my thoughts off track…but I have other things on my plate as well.
I am leading a Daisy Girl Scout troop this fall—not for the first time—but the first time in a while. I spent a few hours on Pinterest and websites trying to put together ideas for the year. I need to have activity boxes put together for the first couple months at least so I’m not scrabbling week to week. My ADHD brain does best when I don’t have to juggle too many thought balls at once…
Speaking of 4H, we have fair coming up in a couple weeks and Violet is working hard on her quilt…and her fair notebook which I somehow missed the deadline on. We got it turned in, but not without some bumps in the road. Next year we’ll do better! We’re already starting to plan the upcoming year, though we won’t get too in depth until after fair is over.
This week we were expecting Pastor Ben to come over after his voice lesson and have a discussion about the future of Family ministries at church, but I forgot to reply after telling him I’d check my calendar. It was kind of nice to have a free morning, however, and I enjoyed my clean house and a slice of the coffee cake Violet made.
Over the next month I will keep chipping away at school prep but I probably won’t do another hyper focus on it. There are other things on the horizon to grab my attention…not least my own fair projects!
Happy Writing this week folks, or whatever else is pulling your attention.
Mamasquatch the Writer 
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