Such Treasures

Part of the reason why I haven’t been posting as actively is because I am getting ready for the coming school year. I ordered all our books, and they’ve been trickling in. They’re all here now.

I sold many of our old school books, either locally or through the Sonlight message board. In addition to that, I sold bunches of unneeded household items through ebay. It takes an enormous amount of time to photograph, post, answer questions, track payments, pack and ship items. But it is nice to put money back into our education fund. I cleaned some more things out yesterday and have another pile of unneeded books to pass on. I think I will try Craig’s list this time to see if I can sell them locally without any fees. I’ll also post the information on our local homeschool Yahoo! group.

For the 6th year of our homeschooling adventure, we will be primarily using Sonlight’s awesome curriculum. This year, we’ll be studying the Eastern Hemisphere (Core 5). I personally am terribly excited about the subject matter. In the evenings and afternoons, I have been pre-reading Haniya’s readers and enjoying every minute. Last night I read Call it Courage by Armstrong Sperry. I am eager to discuss that book with Haniya.

Instead of having Haniya studying a separate Core from Naomi & Mikah (as we did last year), I am going to try to have all of us studying the Eastern Hemisphere together. On the Sonlight message board yesterday, I found extensive Core 5 resource lists of supplemental books and movies. Many of the books are picture books for younger children. I am so excited about this! I found it very difficult to keep up with 2 cores last year and wish to simplify our studies this year. I’ll give it a good shot — and I have high hopes that it will work.

However, while Haniya will be doing Bible, History/Geography, Readers, Read-Alouds and Language Arts from Core 5, Naomi and Mikah will only share the history and read-aloud portion of it. Their language arts & reading will be at their appropriate Sonlight language arts level (2 for Mikah and 3 for Naomi). Their Bible curriculum is something new to us this year: Christian Liberty Press. We will start with Studying God’s Word C — OT Stories & Events and then move on to Studying God’s Word D — Ministry of Christ.

For science, we’ll continue with God’s Design Science by Richard & Debbie Lawrence. This year the focus will be God’s Design for Heaven & Earth — Earth, the Universe, and Weather & Water.

To simplify the Core studies means that we can also add in some writing lessons (Writing Strands) and a Latin/Greek word roots study (English from the Roots Up). I also want to add simple art lessons once per week to introduce the kids to shading, perspective and other basic art principles.

I am working on our daily schedule and a master curriculum list. I can hardly wait to start! Nor can the kids. Within the next few weeks, our regular school year will commence.