Planning and Evaluating

I spent the afternoon evaluating our progress this year, and then planning out the next quarter.  To my surprise, we are about 1 month away from completing all our work for the Kinder and 1st grade year of my boys!

I am slowly getting better at lesson planning - or really, my patience level and ability to not become overwhelmed at planning my children's education is getting better.  I was able to wade through the TEKS (Texas' education standards) and see how our studies were lining up with the public school Kinder and 1st grades.  In Texas we are not obligated to follow their guidelines as homeschoolers, but I like to benchmark our studies with what others are doing in school.  I think it's also good to have them ready to seamlessly slide back into school if something happened where I could not continue homeschooling.  Those things do happen, and it's good to be prepared!

Our studies covered all of their standards and more, so I feel confident ending our first year of homeschooling!  In some areas, they are even above grade level - which always makes you feel good, haha.  Our History studies are different since we chose to start with early civilizations through middle ages, but this coming year (starting in May!) we are doing American History in tandem with Texas History, so they should catch up nicely as the next grade just reviews and builds on the same things.

I was very happy with Saxon Math - it put both boys above grade level for Texas standards - so we will be using it again next year for both boys.

Corbin's reading is coming along well - he is right at grade level.  Hayden, of course, is zooming along he's at a 3rd grade level and getting better every day.  Next year will have lots of "free reading" time built in.

I would like to spend more time in science and nature study next year.  We covered plenty, but it wasn't as much of a focus as I'd like it to be, and I know the boys would love to learn more.

Corbin has requested more crafts - so I will have to work on building more of that into our studies - he loves coloring, painting, gluing and the like.

We ended up spending all year on our artist - Joseph Turner.  I'd like to increase that and work through at least 2, if not 3 artists this year.  However, I haven't decided which ones yet.

We are also adding in Spanish to our year, so I'm dusting off my old college Spanish for now and giving them some basics (numbers, colors, questions, expressions, household vocabulary, songs, etc).  I may check out some of the local Spanish homeschool class offerings when we get past my limits there - probably in a couple years.

There's much more we did and are planning to do, but it's getting late and this post is long enough already!  Needless to say, I'm exploding with ideas and I am having a blast planning the next year. :)