Hello! I have been a blogging-slacker. I know it. This year has not exactly gone according to plan for any of us and the one thing that has continually fallen off my “to do” list has been writing the next blog post. But I don’t want it to be that way. I’m sorry for being such a slacker.
As our school year winds down (we are on week 13 in Challenge and week 22 in Foundations/Essentials), I always take this time of year to assess what went well, what flopped, and what I want the upcoming year to look like. Next year, I will be directing Challenge II and taking my first class towards my Master’s in Classical Studies (yup!). My big kids will be in Challenge A and II, so most of their curriculum choices are made for them. Pressure is OFF me! Woohoo!
That means all my attention in curriculum planning is on my little guy for next year. And this is the perfect time to get my plan together and do all the prep work–it’s not like we can leave the house during the great Quarantine of 2020. I try to do all my prep work for the upcoming school year in April. Why? First of all, the current school year is still happening and the realities of what worked and what did not are fresh in mind. By August, I’ll probably be in a sunburned haze and not really recall as well. Second, Challenge starts three weeks earlier than Foundations, so having everything planned lets me smoothly jump into Challenge without a worry. Third, it’s a lot easier to enjoy summer if all my prep work is already done for fall!
And so, I’ve been in full blown prep mode. Thanks to my beast of a printer, the Epson EcoTank, I can print and print and print and never run out of ink. Seriously, if you are still paying for cartridges that have barely any ink in them, you need to make the switch to an EcoTank. I have printed 2.5 reams of paper this week. That is A LOT of printing. You know how much my ink tank has dropped so far? Almost 1/4 of a tank. Almost. You can literally print forever… Anyway… I buy all my curriculum in PDF format and print it myself. I laminate the covers and use my handy dandy comb binding machine to make books. Three tools save me a LOT of money. Besides all the printing, there has been lots of research into what to choose for this year. I want to follow the seven subjects of memory work as best I can for second grade, and this fall will be cycle 3, which is US History and science is anatomy.
Here’s what I came up with for each subject and why I chose it.