Thursday, April 30, 2009

Getting Ready For the Next School Year

Preparing For Next School Year
Many of you aren’t done for this school year. You are just finishing up your state testing and feel the weight of another month or so of school. We, however, finished about two weeks ago. 960 hours and 218 days of school and we are starting to look ahead to next year.
My eldest two children, Nacho and Lola, have decided they would like to try OHVA in lieu of traditional homeschooling. I’m hoping this works well for them. At the same time, I have some smaller activities and lessons planned for them.
Nacho, starting 9th grade will be taking Algebra, Physical Science, Modern World Studies, Computer Literacy and Literacy Analysis with OHVA. Together he and I also created a Required Reading List and daily, weekly and monthly goals charts. I felt making these with him will help keep him interested and accountable for his schooling. I will post links to them, when I figure out how to use adobe.
Lola, starting 7th grade will be taking Health 7, Intermediate Art, World History, French 1, Life Science, Pre-Algebra, and Technology. She made a goal of studying in Paris her freshman year of college, so she will be taking French instead of Spanish. She is also not taking ASL this year. She and I created a Required Reading List and her goal charts as well. Lola is not very interested in homeschooling this year. She feels she’s missing out on important social opportunities. We created a day planner to show her how much time she spends with friends and how many outside activities she is involved in. Granted we are taking the summer off from theater, cheerleading and music lesson, she still has skating, swimming, play group and Tween Movie Nights.
Coco will be starting 4th grade with traditional homeschool. I have already bought my Comprehensive Curriculum Grade 4. Over the past school year I fell in love with the Scholastic Workbooks. They have individual workbooks for vocabulary, grammar, math, social studies and science. We also got the ones for telling time, geography and health and safety. Here is an Amazon link to Coco’s 4th grade writing practice book. We are also working more on chore charts with Coco then daily goals. I hate hate hate repeating myself to her about picking up her clothes. This way she has, in writing, what she needs to do before she can go outside or play with the Wii.
Fifi is very excited to be starting the 1st grade. In the state of Ohio she would just now be allowed to start Kindergarten but, we did all of that work last year. Her Comprehensive Curriculum Grade 1 has been ordered as well as her Scholastic Workbooks. We also renewed our memberships to www.enchantedlearning.com, www.teachervision.com, and www.instructorweb.com I love these sites and their printables! At only $20 a year, they are totally worth it.
Our summer plans, while slowed down from the rest of the year are chock full of field trips, group activities and a few vacations. Keep an eye out for those updates!

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