Fall 2008 Schedule

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This weeks assignment at Homeschool Blog Awards is to write about our plans for this coming school year. If this would have been last weeks assignment I wouldn't have been able to tell you much because I hadn't yet fine tuned our schedule or curriculum. But this week I put my nose to the grindstone and really concentrated on this.

I have posted our curriculum on my left sidebar with links to all the subjects if you are interested. Last year I used mostly Abeka. This year I'm switching to BJU. I've always been partial to Bob Jones but I've never used it as fully as I am this year. One of the reasons I am going with it is because of their intense Reading program. Even though my daughter is going into 5Th grade she cannot read at that level efficiently. The public school would have her in the 6th grade. The state has her registered as 5th grade and I have her in basically 4th grade stuff. Im hoping that if I take one more year to reinforce this Reading that she will be on her way and we can get rid of the Phonics part of our curriculum once and for all. For those of you who are new readers, Tink has a Sensory Processing Disorder so school is very hard for her. I still have not figured out what Im doing for Math.

My son will be in second grade and he will be attending a charter school once again. Bearing that in mind, this is how our day will look this fall semester.

6:00 am Everyone up, Breakfast and Bible Memory
8:00 am Leave for bus

Monday
8:30- 10:00 Clay Creations
1:30 Afternoon co-op consisting of:
English Composition( how to write short stories, book reports, essays, etc. This class is taught by me)
Art
Educational Game Time
Book Club


Tuesday -Thursday
8:30 Back home where Tink and I will begin our day with our morning walk.
9:00 School subjects in this order with no particular times
Reading
Math (still to be determined)
Language Arts
Spelling
Geography (book still to be determined)
Band
Violin
Choir
PE

Friday
Life Skills (this will focus on everything needed to run a home efficiently)
Band

We will do History winter term and Science Spring term.

Our extra curricular classes are all in the afternoon save one. Clay Creations (Pottery) is Monday morning from 8:30 to 10:00 at an Art Studio two blocks from my sons bus stop. He catches the bus at 8:15 so that will work perfectly into our schedule.

The other electives this term are Band, Choir, PE and Violin. The first three are offered in the afternoons at our church school two miles south of me. For violin Tink takes private lessons at a little studio set among wild flowers and woodlands, in back of an adorable little cottage. Tink loves it. That is about five miles from our house. You can see we don't drive far for any of the classes.

On Monday afternoons I have started up a co-op with four other families. We rotate houses so as not to overload any moms. This has taken a huge amount of my time to get off the ground but Im excited about the possibilities and friendships that can come from it. The children in this co-op range from ages 5 to 12 so we have the classes divided into K-1 and 2-5.

It is very important to me that Tink takes a wide range of classes and that these classes be taught by people other then myself. This helps her in processing information from teachers who are not directly working with her from the sensory standpoint. In the real world Tink will have to be able to process instructions and information without compensation for her disability. This is part of what I do to prepare her for adulthood.

It also helps with her social inadequacies due to her disorder. It helps her learn what is acceptable behavior and what isnt. An interesting discovery was made about how children learn when a scientist, whose name alludes me right now, brought up his baby with a baby monkey to see what would happen. The gist of it was that the child's speech did not develop because he learned to bark and squeak like his sibling, the monkey. The scientist immediately stopped the experiment when he saw what was happening but this is the precise reason Peter attends a charter school for now. He needs to learn normal behaviors and not copy his sister who not only has sensory issues but has also been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder. This is also why Tink takes classes with other children and why it is high on my list of life skills for Tink. I will write more about this nature and nurture study another day. It is fascinating to say the least!

So that my friends is our schedule in a nutshell. If you all want to read more about home school schedules and how people are organizing their school day just click on the link in the first paragraph. There's some interesting stuff going on in homes all over this country.