I’ve spent some time today getting ready for our coming week. We’re beginning our first unit study of the school year on Monday with Time Travelers: New World Explorers from Homeschool in the Woods. As I was printing pages and ordering books from the library online, Ben was looking over my shoulder getting more and more excited. I think we’re going to have a wonderful 5-6 weeks with this unit!
We’re also using Amanda Bennett’s Oceans unit to go along with our studies. There’s some overlap with the explorers studied in both units, so it’s a nice way to combine the study of explorers with ocean animals. I don’t think we’ll use it this time around, since we’re doing more notebooking than lapbooking this year, but for those of you interested, Homeschool Share has a beautiful lapbook to go along with the Oceans unit!
In addition to the Explorers and Oceans units, Ben will be starting an online writing course with Time4Writing. We are very blessed to able to review this course with the TOS Crew, so watch for our upcoming review in a few weeks. Ben will be taking the Intermediate Elementary Paragraph course. I have actually been interested in these courses since I first became aware of them last year, so once again, the excitement is mounting in our homeschool! Another blessing through the TOS Crew is the opportunity for Ben to learn cursive with Peterson Directed Handwriting. Be watching for that review as well!
We’ll be getting back to our main language arts program with Total Language Plus, finishing up the Whipping Boy (we left off our last school year in the midst of this unit) and our math program with Teaching Textbooks 4, which we also started at the end of the last school year.
Over the next few weeks we’ll ease into some other subjects like Spanish, art, and music, but it usually takes us a few weeks at the start of the year to get into the groove of doing it all. Ben still has one more summer day camp week coming up soon as well. He’ll be attending a musical theatre camp at our local dinner theatre. This is his dream camp and I’m so happy we were able to provide that opportunity for him. I hope he loves it as much as I think he will!
I can’t wait to share our week with you all. I don’t believe Ben (or I) have ever looked more forward to the unit studies we’ve selected as we are this coming year. It’s going to be an awesome year of “exploring”!
