Living in a Van Down By the River?? NOT MY BOYS:)

OMG I love this skit;) Well I love this type of motivational speaker don't you?? As a homeschooling family, this is what some narrow minded people might think will become of my boys. I am here to tell you that every year we ramp up what we are doing both educational, within the community and as a family. This skit came to my mind as I sat down the other night and realized that I have almost everything that we needed for the next school year. (which for us usually starts in July) This year might be a little different as I am determined to get through some things that have been sitting on the shelf for the past year. We will ,like always, work on spelling and math over the summer but I am wanting to finish up the Story of the World that we bought over two years ago. We seemed to go spurts since we bought it. Along with some art, swimming, music and lots of field trips and get togethers with the kiddos' friends! Oh and summer camps, still working on adding more. Youngest right now is signed up for a free science class that the library has here in NC. Oldest is signed up for a zoo keeper's summer camp at a local zoo that has a lot of exotic animals that he will be able to interact with;0

So what are we doing next year you ask?? Well I am not telling...... OK stop twisting my arm  "UNCLE!UNCLE!"

For my soon to be 4th grader~

Very excited about trying out our newest curriculum -

Moving Beyond the Page (8-10 level)~it has science, social studies and literature (of course)

Time4Learning.com ~ our first and fav curriculum , we mostly use it for Language Arts and Math ( and will continue with that again this coming year)

Singapore math ~last year we tried something different so we are going to start with 3A and work thru quickly to 4A within a couple months

Spanish~ 

something that the three of us are going to be taking with a Spanish teacher/tutor

Music~

guitar lessons -once a week with practice daily for an hour

Swimming~ 

at least until he gives me something else he would rather do

Rock Climbing~ 

something he really likes to do and we are going to be doing it at the gym at least once a week

Computer~

programs like Scratch and Alice, with typing

For my soon to be 9th grader~

So a couple of things about his list, he will be capping out of Time4Learning (they go to 9th grade) but he will still be doing some algebra thru them. And we really narrowed down his list during our vacation in April! After a week of NO TV and NO video games he was able to talk to me about what he wanted to do for this year.

Literature~ 

we have a great resource for this ! He has been taking this for about half a year with a great ex-teacher friend who teaches a group of teens. We will be continuing this again this year, along with some daily grammar,spelling and some animal based literature to go with the science I am making up for him this year.

Math~ 

Time4learning.com pre-algebra, and two high school textbooks for pre-algebra(which one was given to me by a good friend and the other was picked up a local used curriculum sale) this is going to be work on both our parts as I will most likely piece together the lessons for him to do daily.

History~ 

again we will be continuing a World History class that we took all last year with a group of teens.

Science~ 

We are doing an Animal Biology/Zoology (from two books I picked up from Amazon - Animal behaviors(college edition) and Beastly Behaviors) Zoology and Biology coloring books(no they are not your grandma's coloring books they are detail drawings of animals/plants,etc that you color in different parts of the anatomy) I plan on letting my oldest take over on which animal/bird/reptile he wants to study after I plan out the first two. basically so he can see how far I want him to take it. I am also adding in some literature based stories and experiments that deal with each animal. (like for example, stories like Skellig along with owl anatomy and owl pellet dissection) Supercharged Science (online science program we love) will also be a part of his lessons, I will just have to go into the program and see what they have that is related to the animal lessons we are going to be doing.

Spanish 1~ 

he actually picked this one himself!! We are going to be having lessons with a Spanish teacher and then I picked up a high school level Spanish workbook that we will be going thru together. 

Music~ 

Violin ~ lessons once a week with daily practice

PE~ 

swimming lessons, possibly some soccer or martial arts again still working on that

Computer Sciences~

he is working with the UnReal engine to make video game levels at the moment and we will continue with that as well, along with typing and possibly some computer science online classes that I am still checking into;)

As for my part, it is back to scheduling and planning out for a week or two at a time, finding field trips and camps that will further the boys understanding on the subject we are studying, ordering books or finding books at the library on subjects coming up, finding science experiments to go along with our studies and so much more I don't even want to think about it right now!! Slow and steady wins the race! Just be sure that if you see someone living in a van down by the river that it won't be my boys! ME MAYBE;0)