First Year of Homeschooling

My first year of homeschooling is sort of over.  I plan on continuing thru the summer at roughly this same pace – it’s more relaxed, and there’s a huge focus for me on getting him healthy and out of the house.  We covered a LOT this year.  I started his math curriculum from scratch, and we went thru the first seven and half books in the Life of Fred series.  I’m planning on spending the next six months on getting him thru the next five books, and then we’ll dive into the middle school curriculum.  We spent the fall on electoral politics, exploring the history of elections in the United States and the women’s right to vote history.  Then we started at the very beginning, and completed the first book of Story of the World (ancient history) and are mid-way thru the second book (up to the Middle Ages).  Science – we did mostly biology, exploring biomes and different animals that live in them.  We did most of one biology textbook and then switched to a living book on Zoology that he LOVES.  In terms of ELA – he read (or listened to) close to 100 audiobooks.  We did all of the Rick Riordan series (a couple of times) which dovetailed perfectly with the ancient history curriculum, and then he listened to a whole bunch of other authors as well.   We studied parts of speech with a formal ELA textbook, as well as madlibs.

My plans for next year are to continue with both the science, history and math curriculum.  I’m going to add in keyboarding and spelling next year, as well as more formal writing.  He’d also like to add in cooking classes, with the goal to start making Shabbat dinner every week for us.