Managing Mondays: This Year's Homeschool Choices

I get a lot of questions about what curriculum we use in our homeschool. So, I thought I would give a brief run down of our choices and some of the reasons behind those choices.

Let's start with our core subjects:

Language Arts:

LLATL: The Grey Book (8th Grade)

We are returning to the series we love. We took a break from this series last year to focus more on creative writing. So, instead of skipping the 8th grade book we will be picking right up where we left off. There are only 2 High School level books in the series so it will still work out fine in the long run.

I really enjoy this series as the teachers guides are easy to use and they incorporate passages from actual books in all the lessons. The Book Studies this year are particularly interesting as two of the books deal with smuggling Bibles.


Science:

We will be using Apologia's Exploring Creation with Physical Science this year. I love this curriculum as it is written from a creationist view point. The Science is also very sound and the experiments are designed to use common household items to demonstrate the concepts being learned.







History:

Beautiful Feet Books Ancient History is our choice for this year in history. This will be our second time through this wonderful study, having completed The Junior High section of the guide we will now be starting the High School section. This study uses actual literature to teach history and has proven to be a favorite with my daughter, who is an avid reader.







Math:

Once again we will be utilizing a free resource for our math program. It is called MEP (Mathematics Enhancement Programme) and it was designed by the Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching at the University of Plymouth in the UK. All the books and Teaching materials are available for free to download. There is also a Yahoo Group called mep-homeschoolers that can help with additional support.

Bible:

This year for Bible we are finally trying out Balancing the Sword. If half of what I've read about this curriculum is true then I think we have found our Bible curriculum for the remainder of my daughter's high school years. I'll let you know how it turns out in a future review.







Foreign Language:


So we are ready to start French and this curriculum is a great place to start. It might be our first year of French (we dabbled a little last year with this but decided to take a break from foreign languages) but I already know this curriculum will be great. It is published by Memoria Press who are the same folks who designed the Latin curriculum we have been using since third grade. Why French? Because, a third of the English language is derived from French that's why.


So What About Electives?

The big one my daughter has requested is Art

I picked this curriculum up a few years ago at a convention and now we can finally use it. We have both Volumes I and II so it should cover us for all four years of high school. My daughter is insistent that we do art every day this year and from what I can see this curriculum will give us plenty to work with.








Well I hope you have enjoyed this listing of our choices for this year. I would love to hear wht choices you've made for this school year.