Homeschooling Curriculum

As mentioned before my grandmother sold her home which was just across the street and up a ways from me.  It was a lot harder on us than I had anticipated, all the memories and the great times we shared in that house.  The fact that my little peeps won't be able to just walk over to grandma's anymore is sad!  It was the one thing left that was filled with the memories of my grandpa, I miss that MAN! The new people are very kind but it's so weird to not have that be her house.  I guess we will get use to it as time goes by.  We moved her out (did I mention that 78 year old women have a lot of stuff?!) the weekend of the homeschool convention so we didn't get to go this year!  I was super bummed, but I know what we did was much more important and necessary.  My mom and I and the kids did get to go down to the curriculum part of the convention for a few hours though.  And I purchased my FIRST EVER curriculum!  Hallelujah!!!! I am ELATED to start using this curriculum next year.

WHOA, let me back track for a moment.  We were enrolled in Washington Online's school last year and it was great, the staff was fabulous!! However I wasn't in love with the curriculum (well parts of it) I loved the sign language stuff and I loved the math.  So we decided to enroll in Harmony this year, I have a few friends that used it and liked it a lot.  They offer an options day program where you go to the actual school once a week for classes, but with the changes they made to the program and my busy schedule we decided to just do the independent study.  Check them out! They offer the independent study student's an educational allowance each year so that is why we bought curriculum this year.  FABULOUS PERK! But the besides that perk the curriculum they offer seems outstanding!  We will be able to use Rosetta Stone, and other top notch learning tools.  I am so excited for this year!!

Okay, back to the curriculum that we purchased!  There is a private school (of our same faith) that is relatively close to us that put together a homeschool curriculum.  It's called The Family School,

the concept is to teach like they did long ago, in a one room school house, where all ages learn the same material and each student helped one another.  Last year I struggled with how I was to teach all these differing ages at the same time, in fact it was one of my MAJOR complaints of the whole homeschooling process.  But after running across this and trying a lesson or two I fell in love with what they had to offer.  Of course we will still do our Language Arts and Math and those things that are leveled separately, but we will be able to incorporate a lot more "Family" learning which makes my heart SING la la la!!! We will be using journals and using their system of 4R's research, reason, relate and record. For more about this curriculum you can visit their link above or my Pinterest board.  

So that is our plan for this upcoming school year!  We will use Harmony's math and language arts courses and their Rosetta Stone Spanish course.  We will use Family School for most everything else.  The educational allowance will not only be used for the Family School curriculum but perhaps we will buy an I-Pad or some really neat educational toys, a nice globe, or some of the fabulous books I've wanted to read to them.  The possibilities are endless and the educational allowance is a pretty nice chunk of change so I am thrilled to be getting to use it towards my kids education! 

All you homeschoolers out there, what are you doing differently this year?  What curriculum's are you using? What are you LOVING what are you NOT loving?