A little update about where we've been this year...

Before I start posting heavy about next year. We've already had lots of tweaks to this year; Ms. Artsy is in 8th, and I gave her the choice of "sticking to the typical order of things", or taking a different approach on this, her last year before high school. Now, for those of you who don't know, I attempt to follow a classical schedule for our homeschooling, meaning we are centered around history and we follow a 4-year cycle. This is ala The Well Trained Mind, and there are other systems out there that are classical in origin, as well, but for the most part nearly impossible to apply secularly. So, the typical schedule goes, History/Science; Ancients/Biology, Middle Ages/Astronomy; Early Modern/Chemistry; Late Modern/Physics. Because we haven't homeschooled since the beginning, we've always been a little off on our scheduling. For the most part, I've kept Ms. Artsy and Mr. Scarecrow together in history and science, to make things easier/more manageable for me. This year, since she's in 8th, Ms. Artsy is supposed to be in Late Modern/physics. They are both actually in Early Modern this year, with a fairly strong significance on American History, and a planned unit on Texas History at the end of the school year. So, I gave Ms. Artsy the option of doing either the same science as Mr. Scarecrow, which actually was going to be Earth Science/Astronomy (told you our schedule was pretty messed up already) OR she could take an "all inclusive" science class that sort of did a refresher of all 4 sciences before hitting it hard and starting over in 9th. I even gave her the option to not start over in history in 9th; I let her decide. She wants to start over, so in 9th we will begin fresh with Ancients/Biology. Anyway, we're using The Teaching Company's DVD lecture series, the Joy of Science, and the book that goes along with that, The Sciences, an integrated approach, for her science this year. History was changed from our usual History Odyssey, because I felt that this along with the writing program we were going to be using was overkill, to reading along in The Human Odyssey. We're on volume 2, and we're also following along in The American Odyssey for additional American History. Latin is Visual Latin. Vocabulary with English from the Roots up. Writing with Writing with Skill. Grammar with Analytical Grammar. Math with Saxon. And a little bit of art/music study of artists and composers of the time period they are studying. Mr. Scarecrow's is a bit different; with Story of the World for history reading instead of the Human Odyssey. He's doing Math Mammoth for math, and Elemental Science for science. Also, the Jr. version of Analytical Grammar.
Whew. I think that's gotten this year out of the way.
For Little Miss Priss (I swear, I'll come up with a better nickname for her. It's got to have the right kick to it though), I started off slow last year, at the "beginning" of the school year, but I didn't want to push her. She didn't turn 5 until January, and I wasn't completely sure she was ready for K. we took it slow; she got frustrated a lot and gave up, and I let it go. We read, she watches a lot of videos, she plays a lot of interactive online games, and she practices writing through dictation. We've actually hit it harder since her birthday, I'm feeling pretty confident that she's ready now. She's totally on the cusp of that reading breakthrough; she can sound it all out but can't quite put it together yet. Any day now, she'll be reading off whole books to me. She also loves to work on her writing, even doing it when we're not "doing school", although she's a hard taskmistress, that one. She loves her school work. For Reading, we're focusing on a lot of different phonics books, Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, Explode the Code, and a new one I just found out about, Reading through Literature. I'm very excited about this last one. She also has a writing program, Writing through Literature, I'm contemplating. I'm waiting on a few books to come in to start working math with her, namely Life of Fred and Saxon K and then I think I'll slowly add in history with a little Adventures in America and some science with Intro to Science. She should be set at least until next January, when her birthday hits, and then we'll move on to first grade work. but only if she's ready.