Sean's Curriculum

Well, I did it.  I ordered all the stuff I've been exploring for Sean.  We are going way more schoolish with him next year because:

1.  He got lost and bored this year without more structure
2.  He realized he actually likes doing 'school.'  He enjoyed studying math and Latin as long as it wasn't too much.
3.  Next year, he'll be dragged to Josh and my Latin class twice a week, needing something quiet to do during that time and he'll also be dragged to Becky's all day co-op where he'll need something quiet to do for 6.5 hours.

Ours doesn't actually look like this.  We are using a hand me down 2nd ed.

All indicators seemed to point to being more schooly.  So we were already planning on doing Religion for Confirmation Prep. math and Latin:

Religion - Youcat with Mom plus any other books, movies, etc that we find that furthers his study.

Math - Saxon 8/7.  I also got him the DIVE cd so he can use my laptop with earphones instead of relying on my to read the lessons with him.
Latin - Latin for Children B with DVD

Stuff we've added:

Doing formal science - Rainbow Science looks good.  A friend of mine uses this curriculum and raved about it.  It looks solid and not dumbed down but is written directly to the student.  We are going to do our labs on Friday mornings.  I love that it comes with a kit for all the experiments.  The only thing you have to buy separately is distilled water.  Josh will be taking a Chemistry class next year and Becky will be studying Chemistry in her co-op, so the fact that the first year of this curriculum studies Chemistry and Physics, is a good fit for us.  We all be experiencing the same thing at the same time.  To get myself prepped for this I'm going to read the Tiner book The World of Chemistry.

I love this book!

Doing formal Language Arts - before this, Sean did copy work from either a handwriting book or from Writing with Ease and then occasionally I would assign/strongly encourage  toread a particular book.  But I've decided that he really is a wordsmith in the raw and maybe this is a good time to help him delve deeper with things like vocabulary and grammar.  I got the Michael Clay Thompson language arts program from Royal Fireworks Press.  We received it yesterday.  It looks absolutely phenomenal.  Better than any other program I've ever used/looked at.  I'm thinking we'll start off with Poetry and Humanity for the fall semester and then do Essay Voyage for the winter/spring.  And he can work on Word within the Word (vocabulary and roots) and Magic Lens (grammar) throughout the year.  Very challenging and thought provoking stuff presented so differently from any other program I've seen.  I'm pretty much bowled over by it!

Doing formal Logic - I ordered two texts from Angelicum, Harry Stottlemeier (just the student book; the TM was incredibly expensive!) and I also ordered their Critical Thinking books and lesson plans.  Sean has been interested in that Critical Thinking book for a while.

We may do some formal book studies - I'm planning on Journey to the Center of the Earth, Comedy of Errors and The Screwtape Letters.  I was inspired by the Angelicum list.  We might listen to these on audio together or read aloud or read  independently.  I haven't thought it through.  I think I'll take my cues from

Sean.



History is going to be informal.  We are going to do This Week in History.  I found out about this from the Thomas Jefferson Education site. We are going to watch movies based in history as well as Professor Carol's Exploring America's Musical Heritage during movie night.  Also he'll be around listening in on Becky's history stuff with her co-op.