Well, a new year is lurk­ing on the hori­zon, and I’m in the mid­dle of get­ting cur­ricu­lum 2011 underway.

This year feels dif­fer­ent already, given the fact that it’s the first time in 4 years that I’m only cre­at­ing cur­ricu­lum for two. *Sniff*

#1 son is now grad­u­ated, work­ing, and a full-time vol­un­teer min­is­ter! *sniff again* Time just flew by…

But I digress. On to this year’s curriculum.

There will be some old famil­iar faces rejoin­ing us, and some that are brand spank­ing new!

First, I wanted to share some­thing that was brought to my atten­tion this past spring. For all intents and pur­poses, I’m an unschooler! I didn’t know that! I thought ‘eclec­tic’, sure, but an unschooler? Me?!

It was such a free­ing term to hear! Since I began work­ing full-time ish, I was feel­ing like I couldn’t con­tinue home­school­ing. And that scared me! I was incor­po­rat­ing school into the busi­ness I’m run­ning. The girls loved it, but I still felt like this wasn’t really school. Again, me?! Really?!!

A won­der­fully sweet man, who’s an unschool­ing, work-at-home dad, explained to me, in no uncer­tain terms, that what I’d been doing is pretty much unschool­ing! Wow.

So’s any­way, I just wanted to share that.

We will have a 4-day school week, even though our ‘unschool­ing’ por­tions carry over the week­end. One day a week is set aside for vol­un­teer service.

Bible Study: We do a com­bi­na­tion of Daily Scrip­tures (as copy­work), and then read a bible-based arti­cle or bible story, and note­book what we discussed.

Nature Study: Bar­bara has done such an awe­some job with the Hand­book of Nature Study blog, that we can’t not con­tinue using it.

Art: We are also con­tin­u­ing the Sketch Tues­day, which is also hosted by Bar­bara. The girls eagerly look for­ward to the weekly sketches!

Math: We’re going to start Your Busi­ness again. Last year, I kinda dropped the ball with this one, and we shifted mid-stream to MEP. While I loved both maths, I felt that the girls weren’t quite ready for Your Busi­ness cur­ricu­lum as-is. There will still be some tweak­ing, so that we can get the most out of it.

Geog­ra­phy: We’re tak­ing a trip around the world! Well, vir­tu­ally, any­way. I’m mak­ing up plane tick­ets and pass­ports and every­thing! The girls have cho­sen the coun­tries they wish to visit, and I’m the travel agent! I looked at  a few ready-made things for this but I’m just not an out-of-the-box kinda girl, so I’m piec­ing things together. We’ll be note­book­ing our trav­els.  Because this will be cov­ered daily, I’m incor­po­rat­ing our Musi­cian and Artist study with it.

Gram­mar & Spelling: I’m dig­ging out our old McGuf­fey read­ers! I missed them last year! I just pur­chased a copy of Sim­ply Gram­mar, but  it hasn’t arrived yet. We were using Grow­ing with Gram­mar, and while I still like it, I think the work­books are too easy! Nan and Flossie both seem to fly through the lessons. This one may need to be adjusted again.

Lit­er­a­ture: We’ll be con­tin­u­ing Beau­ti­ful Sto­ries from Shake­speare for Chil­dren as our read aloud for the first half of the year. Inde­pen­dent read­ing for the lat­ter part. We pur­chased each of the girls a Kin­dle. They didn’t enjoy read­ing books that I had printed off the com­puter, and since most of the read­ing mate­r­ial we use are avail­able for free elec­tron­i­cally, this was a per­fect fit!

Life Skills: Mary Frances to the res­cue! We’ve enjoyed the books so far, and I see no rea­son to stop. We fin­ished the cook book last year, and started the knit­ting and cro­chet book. The girls already know how to cro­chet, and since the doll pat­terns that are included won’t fit their dolls, they quickly lost inter­est. This year, we’ll be read­ing, “The Mary Frances Sewing Book.

Amer­i­can His­tory: I’ve ordered “Amer­ica: The Story of Us” DVD set AND book (the book was free, just pay ship­ping) and down­loaded the les­son plans! Once our Geog­ra­phy tour gets us back to the United States, that where we start Amer­i­can His­tory.  I just found this post at Jour­ney to Excel­lence!! This is so awe­some! She has done a fantab­u­lous job of help­ing any­one, ahem, me, put together a won­der­ful Amer­i­can His­tory les­son plan. This will more than likely be our his­tory for next year, but I like hav­ing an ace-in-the-hole!

Sci­ence: I’m still work­ing on this one. Flossie has shown extreme inter­est in learn­ing all about the human body. I’m cre­at­ing a cur­ricu­lum for this one — a com­bi­na­tion of Note­book­ing and Lap­book­ing… Nap­book­ing? Lope­book­ing? No-lapbooking? ROFL — that’s kinda fun!!