Summer session, here we come!

I can't believe it's been so long since I last posted here. I know I had trouble figuring out how to use the space. I'd started out thinking it would allow family members to keep up with what Sarah was doing, homeschooling-wise, but I'm pretty sure none of them ever actually reads it. Then I'd shifted to using it mostly for myself, just to keep track of what we were doing and to reflect on how it was going, but I was self-conscious about what dry reading it must be, for those handful of folks who were reading along at home.

On top of that, I started to find my blogger reading list overwhelming -- I'd added too many political blogs, I think, and the reading list started turning into just one more Should -- so I started to avoid coming here at all. I think I'll put that on my task list for next week -- going through the reading list and culling it a bit.

Sarah and I had decided to take time off from structured learning for most of the Spring, because we were so busy with limited-time-only homeschooling opportunities like swimming and soccer, and we agreed to start back up the Monday after her birthday. I have to say, we've generally homeschooled all year long, but I can see the appeal of taking some time totally off, because I'm so excited about finally getting to use all the resources we've come across in the last couple months! I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to Monday!

I also recently refocused on my own homeschooling, and started a separate blog (What's Next?)for keeping track of that. It's great to see how all the enthusiasm I'm feeling about that project is bleeding over into this one, and vice versa.

The basic outline of our plan for Sarah's summer session is:
* Mosaic for history/world culture
* comparative religion/mythology through reading lots of myths
* Living Math
* Intellego Weather Unit
* spanish
* nature journaling, including the one hour nature journal challenge
* using a handful of Oak Meadow 3rd grade lessons on math, science, and maps
* using the documentary on NYC, watching approximately 1 DVD each week
* watching one other program each week
* hitting lots of science and NYC museums
* continuing to memorize poems and short stories
* continuing to
(I'll come back and add a resources side bar at some point soon, with links to what we've found useful)

Our afternoons will look like this:
M science experiments (with an emphasis on Chemistry)
T cooking and playing food detectives (that is, nutritional anthropology)
W research, garden, nature journal
R crafts and building
F family zine

Each of us will pick one evening a week to make some sort of presentation to the rest of the family on what we've researched that week.

Obviously it's going to wind up being a lot looser than it looks all written down, and we'll take many days off to have spontaneous summer fun.

This is the first time we'll have been this structured since we experimented with Oak Meadow first grade. I'm both excited and intimidated at the prospect. I've also got mixed feelings about this much structure, philosophically. But we seem to thrive with a fairly structured, predictable schedule, so I'm committed to jumping in with both feet this summer, paying lots of attention to what is and isn't working, and adjusting things as necessary in the upcoming seasons.