Curriculum plan 2014-15 school year

A lovely lady I know is doing a "let's share our 2014-15 curriculum" link up and I decided to try joining in on this one.  I was working just last week on my notification for the school year, so I do actually have some clue what I'm going to be doing this year (for once!).

A little background if you are coming here from the link up.  I have 6 kids and this is our 7th year homeschooling.  This fall I will have 4 that I'm teaching (ages 11, 10, 8, and almost 7) along with a two-year-old tornado and our newest who is just 6 weeks old right now.  In the past, we've pretty much always used Sonlight because I like having everything laid out for me so I can just open and go with things, no thinking required.  However, the last 2 years we've used other materials and ventured away from pre-packaged stuff.  I've started to embrace and enjoy doing our own thing that isn't dictated at all by someone else's opinion of what should be taught and when.

***** WARNING: this could get a little bit long, I ramble at times.  I'll try to control this though. *****

As a group, we have plans to study American and Native American history.  This means we will be definitely studying the less pleasant parts of our nation's history, and I don't sugar-coat things so they are going to learn a lot of things that likely are no longer taught in public schools.  I don't have an actual curriculum for this.  Instead, I will be heavily depending on the local public library, purchasing books on my Kindle Fire, and using online resources as the majority of our curriculum.  I do have a few unit studies that I'll incorporate into history, and we'll be putting a timeline up on the wall for important dates.  I plan to incorporate our music and art into this year's history.  We'll do projects such as weaving, making pottery, building models of different things, sewing costumes, etc. along with learning songs about our nation and learning traditional dances and such.  I have a lot knocking around in my mind with this, and it will likely take a couple years to really finish up all of it.

We also have science planned as a family study.  If I have the financial excess, my plan is to purchase Winter Promise's equine science curriculum for the girls.  They are all horse-crazy and would LOVE this.  It also will go well with our history studies since horses were a primary means of transportation in early America.  If we cannot purchase this curriculum for science, my backup plan is to do Apologia elementary astronomy.  I already have that textbook on my shelf, so it won't cost us anything.  Apologia isn't my favorite though, as I am not a young-earth believer.  I have a child who is, but I am most definitely NOT. (not looking to open a debate here, so just leave it be as it is).

Individually the girls will read good books, write stories, learn cursive, and all sorts of little things.  Then there is math.

In math, I have 3 different curricula going on based on individual needs.

Melissa is doing Math-U-See.  It works very well for her and I have no plans to change it.  She's been working slowly through Gamma this last year and a half, and should be finishing it sometime this fall.  FINALLY.  I didn't expect Gamma to be such a struggle for her; this book caused us both a lot of headaches as she slowly worked to master the material.  I have Delta waiting for her already so the plan is that she'll finish the current level and then go straight into the next one.

Lydia is doing Saxon math.  She's not too terribly math-minded, but she learns fast and independently for the most part.  I'm guessing we have about a year and a half left before she hits algebra 1 with the pace that she's currently going in math.  She'll be starting 6/5 this fall at some point.

Kimberly and Jordan are doing Horizons math.  This is a no-brainer for me, we just work in the book and buy the next one when they are almost finished.  Right now Kim is in book 2.2 and Jo is in book 1.1 and they both are progressing nicely.  This is one of those more accelerated math curricula, so I'm not too concerned about them being a bit "behind" in math right now.

For English/Language Arts we are going to focus on grammar.  I have made some mini-posters already for the parts of speech (this is where we are starting) and then we'll go into punctuation and capitalization rules and eventually by the end of the year we'll dabble a little into diagramming sentences.  This subject is obviously aimed at the oldest kids, I don't expect Jordan to actually pick it all up with mastery (nor any of them really, I plan to do a couple sentences daily with them together as a group for a LONG time to help them master all that I'm introducing this year).

Miscellaneous resources I'm *planning* to use with these kids are:

Handwriting Without Tears to teach cursive
The Writer's Jungle to help guide me through teaching them writing
a couple units from the 3 volumes of KONOS curriculum sitting on my shelf
crap-tons of art and craft supplie

Oh, and I almost forgot.  The dreaded OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES.  This year we are looking at Upward cheer for the girls during basketball season.  That's going to be the big thing.  I also am going to take advantage of where I live to plan a few field trips, as we live within an hour of a lot of great places to visit.  The only limit to where all we can go for field trips would be the fact that I drive the biggest SUV in the universe and it gets like 6mpg right now (I have to rebuild the rear passenger brake system, it is locked up engaged slightly, good thing I am really handy with vehicles so I'm going to save some money right there)