This year, our kids were in 3rd, 7th, 8th and 11th grades. Our curriculum isn’t determined by those grade levels, but I list them here so you have a rough idea of who the audience is. We have 4 days/week at home, and one day in class at a homeschool school sponsored by a local charter school. My kids take mostly enrichment classes there (think Art, Music, Drama) with a few academic exceptions, but I don’t rely on it for our core subjects (reading, writing, math, history, science).
History:
Spines:
- Genevieve Foster: The World of Columbus and Sons
- Genevieve Foster: The World of Captain John Smith
This is the first year we’ve made it through two entire Foster books in one school year. I chalk that up to age (the children’s, not mine) and consistency. It’s amazing how much more we can get through at 16, 14, 12 and 9 than we could at 8, 6, 4 and 2. That said, I wish I had emphasized regular narrations (written) for retention.
Additional history read-alouds:
- Castle (Macauley)
- Who Was Ferdinand Magellan? (Kramer)
- Mansa Musa (Burns)
- Longitude (Sobel)- (this one was a hit with 8th and 11th grades and NOT a hit with 3rd and 7th grades)
- The Queen’s Promise: An Elizabethan Alphabet (Davidson Mannis)
- The Pirate Meets the Queen: an Illustrated Tale (Faulkner)
- Johann Gutenberg and the Amazing Printing Press (Koscielniak)
- Seeds of Freedom: The Peaceful Integration of Huntsville, Alabama (Bass)
3rd, 7th and 8th also did two biographies on historical persons of their choice. (3rd: Aaron Burr and Hillary Clinton, 7th: Isabella of Castille and Mozart, 8th: Einstein and Abraham Lincoln). 11th grade participated in National History Day through his school.
The election
2016 was a fascinating year to learn about our electoral system. We used CNN10 (formerly CNN Student News) and Syd Sobel’s Presidential Elections and Other Cool Facts, and we mapped the electoral college on election night.
Geography
We study and color maps and talk about historical changes between political boundaries in the history we study vs. how countries are now.
Areas we studied: England, UK, Europe, North Africa, Central America and the Caribbean
We also kept a globe in the living room and hung a world map in the kitchen. We referred to them all the time, which was a vast improvement over our geography study in previous years.
Literature:
Read-Alouds:
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)- we assigned parts and read it aloud together
- The Mysterious Benedict Society (Trenton Lee Stewart)
- Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)
- Greenglass House (Kate Mitford)
- Raymie Nightengale (diCamillo)
- daVinci and Michaelangelo (Mike Venezia)
- Flush (Hiaasen)
- Kira-Kira (Kadohata)
- Echo (Munoz Ryan)
- The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (Robinson)
- Unfinished Angel (Creech)
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)- we read this in parts, and each of us memorized a speech made by a character we read.
- lots of older picture books (think Bill Peet, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, Mary Ann Hoberman, Cynthia Rylant and others) and new picture books we enjoyed, including the Zorro series by Goodrich
Everyone read other books independently every day. I’ll post on some of their favorites in a separate post.
Poetry
Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, Maggie Dietz’s Pluto, Lewis Carrol’s Jaberwocky, GK Chesterton’s The Donkey, Rachel Field’s Something Told the Wild Geese, Carl Sandberg’s Fog
I feel like we started strong with poetry and then fell off the wagon in the second semester (with a slight boost during April, National Poetry Month.)
Bible:
1 Timothy, James, 1 Peter, Ann Voskamp’s Jesse Tree (now available as Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas), The Gospel of Mark.
Picture Study:
Picture Study is a Charlotte Mason subject. In the past we’ve been more thorough in our study, but this year we looked at the paintings 1-2 days a week, we played I Spy with them, and we reproduced a few of them. I saw it mostly as a way to familiarize the children with styles of art, and to enjoy the individual painting themselves. We didn’t put a lot of effort on this subject, but we got a big bang for our buck. I bought our post-cards from Memoria Press. We have their Kindergarten, First and Second Grade sets of postcards. I pulled these paintings from all three sets.
Titus as a Monk (Rembrandt), Five o’clock Tea (Mary Cassatt), The Stone Breakers (Courbet), Paris Street: Rainy Day (Caillebotte), Still Life with Apples and Oranges (Cezanne), Three Musicians (Picasso), The Goldfish (Matisse), A Girl with a Watering Can (Renoir), The Fighting Temeraire (Turner), Rain, Steel and Speed: The Great Western Railway (Turner), Golden Eagle (Audubon), Starry Night over Rhone (Van Gogh), God Creates Adam from the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel (Michelangelo), The Last Supper (da Vinci), View of Paris from Montmartre (Dufy), The Thinker (Rodin), The Peaceable Kingdom (Hicks), Tree of Life (Tiffany), Umbrellas in the Rain (Prendergast), The Little Owl and (Durer).
A special day of Picture Study was when we visited the Masterworks Exhibit at the medical school- a collection of amazing paintings and sculptures collected by some physicians on the faculty. It was a great exhibit in a very intimate setting.
Field Trips:
Reykjavik, Iceland
London: The British Museum, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, The Tower of London, Greenwich including the Cutty Sark museum, Harry Potter’s World, Iceland’s harbor
Concerts and Plays- In the Heights, Wicked, The Proms (Mozart and Bruckner)
Other field trips: skiing, the DAM (The Art of Venice, and Star Wars Costumes), Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Kindness
- the constant sand paper of living together day by day
- the 30 hour famine
- working with our refugee friends
Videos
- Nature’s The World Without Amphibians
- CNN10 (10 minutes of non-partisan middle-school appropriate news)
- This Day in History
- Crash Course History with John Green
Math:
- 3rd grade: Singapore Primary 3A/3B
- 7th Grade: Singapore NEM 1
- 8th Grade: Singapore NEM 2
- 11th grade: AP Calculus BC through Pennsylvania Homeschoolers
Foreign Language:
- 7th grade French:
- 7th/8th grades: Spanish through our once a week school
- 11th grade: Latin: translating Julius Caesar through Memoria Press’s Online Academy, and the National Latin Exam
- 11th Grade: Biblical Greek 1 through Memoria Press’s Online Academy
Science:
- 7th and 11th grades: Environmental Science through our once a week school
- 7th and 8th grades: Focus on Middle School Physics (Keller)
- 3rd Grade: Real Science-4-Kids Physics (Keller)
Additional classes for our 11th grader:
US Government (fall semester): de Toqueville: Democracy in America; Hamilton, Madison and Jay: The Federalist Papers. Various: The U.S. Constitution, readings drawn from The Washington Post and The Economist, satire from Stephen Colbert, SNL, Trevor Noah and Seth Meyers.
This class focused on the set-up of the US government and the checks and balances put in place. Additionally, we spent a lot of time talking about the tensions between states’ rights and a strong federal government.
AP Comparative Governments and Politics (spring semester):
For this class, I combined several of the online class syllabi available at the College Board. His spine was Introduction to Comparative Politics: Political Challenges and Changing Agendas (Kesselman, Krieger and Joseph). (They’re changing the class for 2018, so make sure to check in before you design your curriculum.)
Other readings included:
- Baer: The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower
- Schell: Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century
- Fukuyama: Women and the Evolution of World Politics
- Friedman: The Lexus and the Olive Tree
- Marx: The Communist Manifesto
- Machiavelli: The Prince
- Dahl: On Democracy
- Economist special editions on Russia, Nigeria, Mexico, China, UK, Brexit, and Iran
- Preston and Dillon: Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy
- Breaking the Cycle of Electoral Violence in Nigeria (pdf)
- Special Hearing on instability in Nigeria (pdf)
- Zakaria: The Rise of Illiberal Democracy (from Foreign Affairs, pdf)
- Lots of news online (esp. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC)
I think this was his favorite class, despite (or because of?) the heavy reading load. The readings (I got all of them from the AP site and my amazing dad) were excellent, and with the unfortunate instability in many parts of the world, it made for a fascinating class.
Introduction to Grant Writing
He had an opportunity to be work on writing grants for a non-profit run by friends of ours. We used two books as introductory spines:
- O’Neal-McElrath: Winning Grants Step by Step: The Complete Workbook for Planning, Developing and Writing Successful Proposals
- Karsh: The Only Grant-Writing Book You’ll Ever Need
We also reviewed other grant applications from a variety of sources.
This class was a huge stretch for him and not an unqualified success. By no means did his drafts of the grant proposals go in without major editing, but it was a great opportunity for him to have to think about writing within very specific constraints.
His (and my) favorite part of the class with the non-profit he worked with, Foster Source, which provides support, practical help, and education for local foster families. He had an opportunity to provide child care, meet amazing foster families, and learn about the incredible (and often invisible) needs right in front of us. We will continue to be involved with this great organization even after his class is done.
Other writing for him this year included a major paper for National History Day, and completing NaNoWriMo in November.
All right, that’s all for this year. Onward, friends!
Learning As We Go 