In my post Spring Forward: 2016-17 I wrote about looking forward to a new school year. However, before I can do that I need to look back at this year’s curriculum choices to see what did or did not work. This was step one in the Planning Process. I wrote about our 2015-16 choices for curriculum here and here. And as I look at my lists, I am very surprised at how many things we kind of ditched along the way, some intentionally and some not so intentionally.
For my son:
We ended up switching from our from Essentials in Writing back to Writeshop. I don’t remember when I made the switch but I know we only did a handful of lessons. For the past three years we have done Writeshop and I felt I needed something hands off. I thought the video series would provide that. Since my son has dyslexia, I ended up needing to be involved. He tolerated Writeshop so I went back. I found something that has really helped, though, a website that provides online videos to teach Writeshop. It is not free, but fairly inexpensive. Here is the link: Play With Education.
We also dropped Apologia’s Who is God? It was in no way a reflection of the curriculum. We returned to CBS and decided to do that again so it was nearly impossible to do two Bible curriculums.
Finally, the big change, was I decided to delay his entry into online learning and dropped both of his online course with Landry. I feel I made the right choice. He would have been overwhelmed. So we are planning to do some next year, but more on that later.
So what are our keepers?
Definitely, will continue with Teaching Textbooks, Hewitt Lightning Literature, Barton Reading and Spelling, Apologia and Writeshop.
For my daughter:
Her big change was we did not stick to Jensen’s Grammar. I don’t know what is up with her and grammar! This is curriculum number 3. We discussed it at length and decided we might do an online college class for grammar. She really needs it if she plans to be an editor. Yikes!
For her that was really the only change.
What we are keeping?
For next year she will be doing completely different curriculum only because her classes are mostly on Landry Academy and co-op classes. At this point, the only thing I am still “teacher” is math. She will do Math U See Geometry. Everything else that I do is elective type like Home Ec, PE, and her Clep studies.
More on that next time.
Ligia
