Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Homeschool 2011-2012


Ready or NOT we begin our academic year very soon.  I attended the Southeast Homeschool Expo this past Friday. It was quite a good day!  It's a huge convention in Atlanta at the Cobb Galleria.  There is a gigantic vendors hall with hundreds of curriculum, extra-carricular and and pretty much anything you can think of to help with homeschool on site with ailes of booths.  One of my favorite vendors, Memoria Press, was not present this year.  However, other discount vendors were carrying some of their products and I picked up most of the items I needed.  I saved quite a bit of money and more than made up for the cost of admission which was $20.  I attended a couple of workshops as well and next year I might go to more.
I went with lists in hand of exactly what I needed and how much it costs on-line + shipping. Even with this it was tempting to buy more because you will just flip out with 1000's of beautiful books at your fingertips.  (I told Brendon I was scared to take him because he loves books so much!)  Several times I picked up an armful of books and then went through them and set down seventy-five percent of them.  That was great because I did not come home with anything I didn't need.  I went by the Real Science 4 Kids booth and looked through their curriculum.  I have been curious about this science curriculum provider and I did like what I saw.  I brought home a brochure and I will proably get their Chemistry I in the new year when we start studying that.

Our curriculum this year so far includes:

Isabelle:  Horizons Math 6,  Map Skills for 6th grade, Think a Minute Critical Thinking,  Prima Latina Copy book for handwriting,

Joseph:  Horizons Math 4, Map Skills for 4th grade, Handwriting Without Tears (2nd year of cursive), Critical Thinking

Both:  Rod and Staff Grammar and Writing Grade 5, First Form Latin, Rosetta Stone German, Lyrical Language Anatomy used together with books from Sonlight's Anatomy,  US History using books from Memoria Press and US Geography (memorizing states and capitals + some geographic features), numerous biography and historical fiction readers about various Americans, daily bible reading as a family..we are reading through Ergemeirer's Bible Story book.  It is thourough and has all the major bible plots, but not the x-rated bits.  We once started reading through the bible and wow..yeah I forgot about all the "stuff" and the kids would ask us why we were having these long pauses. LOL  So I found this Bible and it works very well!

We attend a couple of co-op classes each week and they will do soccer on Tuesdays. We would love to add back in piano lessons.