Thankfully, we are finally done moving (for the time being) and I can get back into the school routine, which includes blogging time! Yay!
Well, there have been some big changes to our homeschooling life. I was trying to plan an art unit study in which we would learn about da Vinci, Monet and Picasso over a three week period. But two things were causing me a lot of headache. The local library is TERRIBLE! They didn’t have a single children’s book on any of the painters or on art in general! So I was facing the prospect of having to pay $80 a year and travel about an hour every few weeks to use the Salt Lake County library. Then there was the aspect of trying to incorporate age appropriate science into the unit study. Add that to the stress I was already experiencing due to living with family and my husband still trying to find work, and I was ready to come unglued.
Thankfully, my sister-in-law is also homeschooling. But she’s doing it through the state’s online school. She gave me all the information and I checked into it. What a relief for my first year of school! Now I’m assured that the girls will not fall behind!
So here’s the new plan. The girls are part of the Utah K12 program, Washington Online School Utah. They will start out with language arts and science. Throughout the year, we have the option of adding up to five courses per girl in history, art, music and some languages. The K12 program does have a math program, but we’ve decided to keep the girls in the Saxon math program (for which we had already bought curriculums earlier this year).
We'll still do our school journals and family reading, in addition to the regular subjects. And we still have the flexibility of being able to travel or have field trip days when we need them.
And we haven’t given up on unit studies, either. But instead of that being the basis of our homeschool, it will be a supplemental. We’ll do mini-unit studies for holidays and special occasions. We’ll do full unit studies (like the art study I’ve already put together) during the summer. Then, if a unit study that we’re really interested in doesn’t lend itself well to certain subjects, we won’t feel guilty leaving them out.
This has taken an immense amount of stress off of me for the time being. If the girls do not respond well to their curriculum, we’ll check into others for next year. We’re starting with K12 because it’s free. But if it doesn’t work, we’ll start looking into more purchased curriculums.
