Our "Normal" Homeschooling Schedule

When we first started homeschooling, we followed the traditional school year and week; we schooled from late August/September through May or June...and Monday through Friday. A few years later, we tweaked it slightly to sort of mimic the year-round track of some really good friends of ours, so the kids could get together and have the same time off. I really like that schedule because that's where I got the idea of taking off from before Thanksgiving through New Year's. I didn't have to try to squeeze school in around dealing with the hectic schedule of the holidays.

A few years into that schedule, the kids joined a homeschool bowling league on Mondays. It met at noon. Since we're all pretty much night owls, it was very difficult to get any schooling in before bowling...let alone after it. We adjusted our school week to be Tuesday through Saturday.

Shortly thereafter, I also realized that a big 6-8 week break during the holidays was great for everything but academics. We shifted our school year to begin mid-January and end the first week of November. (Some years we've schooled through November, but we aim to be done the first week.) No, we don't take the summers off because it's generally too hot here to do anything. So why not school then anyway? We're already staying inside.

There ya have it. We school mid-January through around November and Tuesday through Saturday. Oh! We also don't start school until after lunch. Talk about being rebels! None of the kids are in the bowling league anymore. (Two are graduated.) We do still meet one of the families we met on the league for lunch and talking every Monday instead. It's our crazy, mixed-up homeschooling life, and it works wonderfully for us!

Our LLATL Tweaks

I think during our homeschool journey we have tried LLATL about three previous times...which shot a hole in the theory of  "third times a charm". lol I think the first time we tried it many moons ago I didn't have my kids placed in the right book. (Let me just tell you that correct placement solves A LOT of issues with just about any curriculum you're using.) One time I tried the older, spiral-bound versions which I personally liked because they didn't have any "fluff" in them. I was trying to cut corners on a super-tight budget, so I was trying to force them to work. Needless to say, it didn't. Between all the times we've come back to LLATL, I've used the Red through the Gold American Literature books. Three years ago, while I was still homeschooling my daughter in her senior year, we decided to give it another chance, and I'm SO glad we did.

For these last three years, I found a "tweak" that has worked really well in helping R retain a lot of the grammar and other "annoyances" of English. R is a VERY reluctant writer and really dislikes any English/language arts pretty strongly. With other programs (and even previous uses of LLATL), he only remembered things long enough to pass some test or assessment. He is a hands-on, visual learner. When I took that into account, it made a HUGE difference. It's still not his favorite subject by any stretch of the imagination, but he's remembering things. Woo hoo!!!

What did I tweak it to make such a difference? Very rarely does he do any type of underlining, circling, etc. which is what the instructions usually say. Instead, I bought a package of ten different colored highlighters from our local office supply store, and we assigned each part of speech its own color of highlighter. When the instructions say to underline the nouns/subjects once and the verbs/predicates twice, he highlights them in different colors. They are MUCH easier to differentiate then...especially if you need to go back and do something else with them later in the week. He still might not remember the names of them, but he can tell you which color they should be. I'm just a happy camper that he knows they're supposed to be different colors...if ya know what I mean. I will have him use the highlighters to go back over his own writing to make sure there's a wide variety of details and correct parts of speech used.

Over the years, I have supplemented LLATL with other things depending on what the needs have been for a particular child in a specific year. At some point, I have supplemented with Winston Grammar...which I'm not sure would've been necessary if I had used the highlighter method then. I've also added in the Wordsmith series over the years...from the same publisher as LLATL. R is using the Wordsmith level now. I basically decide kind of on-the-fly if we'll use the writing assignment in LLATL or substitute with one in Wordsmith.

I hope these tweaks of mine can help you, too. (I will post pictures later. We lost our internet last night...and just got it back before I left to homeschool. Stay tuned for the pics.)

Current Curricula

I am down to homeschooling my last child who has the NERVE to be in high school. Technically, R is 18 years old, but he chose over a year ago to take his time to actually learn everything we have chosen together. So without further ado, here are the choices we made for him:

We returned to LLATL about three years ago during my daughter's senior year. We are using it with Wordsmith also from Common Sense Press.

For geometry, we switched from Teaching Textbooks to AO Lifepacs. The first couple of Lifepacs were a bit of a transition period, but it's now going really well.

Science was a tough choice this year because we started out trying ACE Physical Science, but it was very difficult. That surprised us because we have been using ACE for science for many years. As surprising as it was to me, we've gone with Lifepac science as well. We are using a combination of the 8th and 9th grade years which cover the same topics as the ACE Physical Science. SHOCKING!

At least, we remained with our tried and true favorite for American History...ACE!!! We've used ACE history for many years. All of my kids have remembered more using ACE than anything we've previously used. (That topic will be coming later. Trust me.) 

R wants to be a game programmer, so this year for his electives he's using the TeenCoder Windows Programming and Game Programming books.  

Well, there ya have it. The choices that work best for JR for this year. I will try to post more specific information on all of these at a later time. I hope you've been able to find what works for you and your family.