Planning for the Future: Laying Out Our Next School Year

In the middle of all of the other things going on right now, March is generally the point in the year where I sit down and plan out the next school years plans and curriculum. Since we do at least some school year round, ending each academic year at the end of May and then immediately starting again, March is a month where I can gauge fairly accurately what will be finished and what won't. It is also a period of time that allows us to fairly try something out and then decide whether it is working or not.

When our oldest started working on her high school credits last year, I made a decision, in a moment of panic and ignorance, to sign her up for an online academy, a curriculum that was already put together and use that as our template for high school. In a moment of further insanity, I signed the younger two up as well. We have been using Monarch for just about a year now. Honestly, I'm sure it works great for some, but my kids have hated it. It has a LOT of writing and general busy work and they don't feel like they walked away from the lessons any wiser. So we will not be doing that again next year.

Knowing that we would be moving away from this, I asked a sweet friend, who is a few years further down the home school journey, to talk me through her kids high school journey's. I am so thankful that she was willing to take time out of her day to do this. It changed the way we will home school high school. What we were doing was WAY overkill. Our poor oldest... she is always my guinea pig. For those in a similar spot, I would highly recommend The High School Handbook. It gives great information and detail on exactly how to walk forward with home schooling high school in a way that makes sense.

In general, I usually start the planning with the oldest child and work down. The little ones are far more flexible and we

have found that doing things together greatly reduces the load and stress level for everyone. The other big discovery, in 9 years of homeschooling, is that combining subjects is a huge relief to everyone. Often, a unit study or single text book, with supplements is more than enough work to cover multiple subjects. We have quickly gotten overwhelmed by work when we haven't done this.

With all of this in mind, I printed out the Curriculum Planner (well a few copies) and sat down to plan our next year.

Oldest:
English, World History and Bible combined to use the Mystery of History Vol 4 as the base. We will supplement with Modern Classics and Faith works to round out these subjects. Don't get me wrong, she will still do enough work to earn all 3 credits, but having it all emcompassed in one topic makes the most sense for all of us.

Spanish 2 will be done with the Monarch course that I already purchased last year.

Economics and Personal Finance will be done over the summer with Dave Ramsey's Foundations In Personal Finance. 

Geometry will be done with Teaching Textbooks. We are going to do a trial of the online option with her current class and see if we like it. Otherwise, we will just buy the text.

Youngers:

Will do Mystery Of History alongside the oldest.

A variety of science related unit studies from the Konos Curriculum . Konos is the first curriculum I bought when our oldest was just starting out. It is a complete (with the exception of Math) curriculum for k-8. We have used it on and off over the years and are going to give it a try again next year.

Complete Curriculum of Basic Skills at the appropriate grade level to hit things like grammar, math and Spelling.