Upcoming School Year

I decided to make a few changes for this school year. We've used Tapestry of Grace for the past six years and have loved it. I think it was more me, but I've been amazed at the nuggets of history that Samantha has remembered. Since we just bought a farm and will be learning how to garden, preserve our harvest, keep chickens, own horses and possibly keep a cow, I decided to do something different and hopefully more in line with our new lifestyle. The most important focus for next year, however, is character training and everything else will take a backseat as necessary.

I searched around and found a unit study on Anne of Green Gables called Where the Brook and River Meet. The same publisher, Cadron Creek, puts out an elementary unit study on Little House on the Prairie and a middle school one on the Narnia series. The curriculum covers history (from a Canadian perspective), Bible, literature, writing, fine arts, occupational education, physical education, health and economics. I'm supplementing with several books throughout the year for history, literature and Bible and we'll use the methods presented in Teaching the Classics to discuss them.

I also bit the bullet and purchased Teaching Writing: Structure and Style and Student Writing Intensive Level C from IEW. I've been looking at IEW for several years, but have been very intimidated by it. I haven't been able to find another writing curriculum that I actually liked, so I figured I'd go for it. It seems easy enough once I actually got it and looked through it. Samantha didn't do too well with algebra last year so we're starting over with Video Text. We'll use Apologia Biology for science and Analytical Grammar for grammar.


I'm trying to get a service-oriented group for middle and high school students started through one of the local Christian homeschooling groups. We'll partially model it after the concepts in Do Hard Things by Alex and Brett Harris. I'm hoping we'll get enough interest and can really make an impact not only in the community, but in the lives of our teenagers.


And to round out our year, Samantha will be joining the IEA team this fall for competitive horse riding. This is a group in which the kids are ranked by levels and then are given a horse at random on competition day. They're given a certain amount of time to work with the horse, but must then ride to the best of their ability. This helps separate the truly good riders from the riders who just have rich parents and fancy horses.