Revamping the Blog

I have officially REVAMPED my blog.  Here's a small list of the things that have happened.

• Baby #4 was born January 10th, 2016
• We haven't homeschooled hardly at all since November.
• Our horsey died.  :(  
• We got a new puppy named Bruce.  He's a lab/Austrailian shepherd, rottweiller mix.  Such a GOOD dog and very obedient and loyal.
• We moved into our house and are continuing to work on it.  Hopefully we'll have a private fence up soon.

Life has been SUPER crazy.  And I will honestly try to post some more with pictures.

Right now, I'm putting together next years curriculum.  Here's the plan.

Math:  Math-U-See, super excited about this.  Saxon was getting a little boring for Curly Girly and it would take her over an hour to do her assignments, so we're gonna try this out.  Very simple outline, doesn't take nearly as much time and the manipulatives are fun!!!

Reading/Language Arts:  All About Reading.  Once again, we are so excited about this one.  We're already almost done with level one and will be starting level two in the fall.  Curly girly is already flying through it.  Right now, it's mostly just learning and remember the rules.  Ferdinand the Bull will probably start level one in the fall only for letter recognition.  If he's ready, we'll start doing the sounds.

History: This has been a fun little series that comes from The Well-Trained Mind.  It's supposed to be read aloud and about 1st-2nd grade level.  Curly Girly has really liked it so far and it comes with an activity book.  We'll be learning about the early Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, etc.  Pretty excited about this.

Science: This is a little something I kind of put together myself.  We bought this science animal book and will choose a group of pages to learn about that week.  It's got a wide selection of mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, and fish.  We'll do that for about 20 weeks of the school year.

Then we'll start learning about the human body.  Still not sure which book to do because I am not too thrilled about some of the pages in this one.  But, it's what we have right now, so it may just have to be the one we use this year.

After that we'll do about 6 weeks of gardening and learning about plants.  I got an Eyewitness book from the thrift store that I really like.  Pretty excited to do that with Curly girly and Ferdinand the Bull in the Spring of 2017.

Music and Art:  I will start piano lessons with Curly Girly.  I keep putting it off and I really don't want to do that anymore.  Her motor skills have developed more and she's gotten her alphabet down and is reading more fluently so I believe that she is ready.  We'll use Faber.  I've used this for years and years and it's what we have on hand, so hopefully it'll work and be fun for her.  Ferdinand isn't quite ready to do any music lessons so we'll wait a few more years probably.

Art isn't something I'm really familiar with.  Curly Girly is an avid drawer.  We'll be satisfied with crayons, markers, pencils, paints and pastels.  Fridays are going to be our art project days.  I plan on getting some rope and clothes pins to display their art in the kitchen.  Super excited!