Our Homeschool Room

We use the home office for most of the day. School spills into other rooms for watching documentaries, reading, and labs. But, everything else happens in here. There’s indirect sunlight all day long, making it a very pleasant place to spend several hours a day. And, with all the workspace, bookcases, and officey stuff already in there, it was also the least expensive room to convert.

The School Day This Year

Many things about our school day worked great last year. The biggest thing was the lack of a specific schedule. I used a dry erase board to list the day’s activities, but they could happen at any time. Each day started with my son doing the same morning work: read for 30 minutes, copy the day’s plans into his agenda, watch CNN Student News and write a response to one of the stories.

When my son wanted to, he would have everything done with time to spare before his friends came home. When he was pokey, then he would still be working until bedtime. He learned a lot about time management and the downside of procrastination!

Here’s how the weekly plans look this year:

Getting Ready for 8th Grade

Overloaded! That’s how I felt when I started looking at curriculum for 8^th grade. Until I…

• Weeded out anything with an ultra-conservative religious slant
• Took out anything with outdated information
• Removed anything that had to be followed exactly

There was still a ton of options left, but it all still fell into place. I’ll detail the resources we’re using in posts by subject.  My next goal in pre-planning was to map out the timing of each subject for the year. I didn’t want to end up just to WWI in May for history! Naturally, I turned to my personal security blanket – Excel – to create a spreadsheet that would automatically enter start and end dates for each unit by subject.