Curriculum for the 2016-2017 School Year

Here is our curriculum for the 2016-2017 school year. . .

For Bible we will be finishing up Kay Arthur's Inductive Studies for kids. And will likely have time to do Apologia's "Who is God?" study.

For history we are using Notgrass' America the Beautiful Part 1. Our principal (my hubby the social science teacher) said we could stop at the Civil War since they will cover the later part of American history in their junior year. I also purchased the Lesson Review book, Map book as well as the Student Workbook. I really enjoyed Mystery of History, so we'll see how we do with something totally new.

Continuing with IEW by using the U.S. History-Based Writing Lessons to go along with our American history studies.

We will continue with Learning Language Arts Through Literature.

Saxon math for another year. 

I am having each of the kids do their own science this year. They will do it independently instead of us doing it together. This will be a change for them, so we'll see how it goes! 

And finally, we'll continue to work thorough Sequential Spelling.

First Week of the 2016-2017 School Year

We were not really ready to begin school this year. After a tumultous summer dealing with the death of my mother-in-law, we didn't really feel rested mentally or emotionally. And on top of that, I got started late on repainting the office. But, Dennis was going back to school and I knew we needed to just dive in and get things going. 

Looking at all this curriculum was a bit daunting. Two different science curriculums this year as well as more IEW and Pre Algebra along with teaching Friday school every week, made me wonder how we were going to fit it all in.

I had to work wall by wall first moving furniture and then the wallpaper border. (If you ever hear me talk about any kind of wallpaper again - kick me!) Then of course there is the whole patching, taping off and laying down dropcloths. And finally, the paint! 

This is how we started the school year. . .

So school took place in the living room. . .

I totally forgot about first day of school pictures, so these were snapped before dinner. . . 

Our 6th grader

Our 8th grader

We started out the week with some cool science experiments. Here we looked at density and saw how different items floated in different kinds of liquids.

Here we learned about atomic motion. We saw how water temperature helped things dissovle more slowly or quickly.

After stumbling along for a couple of weeks, we eventually got our groove going. Will be an interesting year.