Recently I visited the homeschool bookfair, to buy supplements, attend interesting speakers, and get reinspired.
I’m happy to report I like most of our curricula.
Sadly the classical history curriculum created more work for me than solutions.
I spent the year recreating the book list, since there were too many books assigned and some were of poor quality.
Also I had to redo all the Q&As since the questions aren’t always covered in the assigned books
Below are the curricula I was quite happy with, so we’ll keep for the upcoming school year, too.
I visited each of the booths of the curricula we were happily using, just to chat and share our progress and see if there were any new ideas.
LATIN
Latin Road to English Grammar was well laid out, providing access to the author to ask questions as needed.
While my daughter worked at her own pace, I attempted to keep ahead.
Although we weren’t powerfully conquering, we were consistently learning vocabulary, declensions, conjugations, and learning to translate.
Meanwhile my son was using the Bridge to the Latin Road which uses a metaphor of building construction that he enjoyed.
As my son learned, I learned some new things as well.
WRITING/SPELLING
Institute for Excellence in Writing incredibly taught my kids how to write with both structure and style, as promised.
Anytime I have a question, the IEW yahoo groups guides moms like me with guidance that is encouraging and polite.
IEW also helped us with spelling through their genius approach.
This next school year we will add Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization which comes with an audio CD, so we can learn poetry while driving around town.
LITERATURE
After we read our literature books based on the historical era we were studying, we used Teaching the Classics by Adam Andrews to teach and analyze the structure of literature.
BIBLE
Bible will continue to be first thing in the morning, character studies and exhortations from Paul are some examples of what we’ll study.
They are also involved in Awana Club which is great for apologetics due to all the Scripture memory.
SCIENCE
CLASSICAL HISTORY STUDIES
My kids and I, as well as our extended family, are quite impressed with their dialectic classical integrated studies last year, that were based in logic and grounded with the Bible.
Classical history, literature, art, and other integrated topics will continue to be researched as I go (evaluating each book option to find a few of the best for our studies and redo the Q&As), discussed with logic, and reinforced through writing (with IEW).
