2012-2013 Curriculum for sixth grade!

Wow! I don't think I've ever taken such an extended blog break since I started this blog but, thankfully, it's just because we've been busy having a great summer! I hope all of you have enjoyed this beautiful summer as much as our family has.

I'll try to post some of our summer fun pictures soon, but today I want to talk about our plans for the upcoming school year, since I'm knee-deep in planning, as I'm sure many of you are.

Z-Man will be entering sixth grade. I know I talked last year about how much we love TruthQuest History. It's simple, uses living books and points out God's hand in history. Well, listen to this: about three weeks ago, Z-Man asked me if we could start our history reading early. Start a "school" subject early. Like, in the middle of summer. Just because he likes it! Isn't that the best thing you've ever heard?!

"Yes, Honey, if you're very, very good and do all your chores without complaining, I guess we can start history early." Oh my goodness.

History:
So we've been reading pioneer stories and will be moving on to the Wild West soon with TruthQuest American History for Young Students III, which goes from the end of the Civil War to 2000.

Bible:
We will also, in our Bible time, start TruthQuest Beginnings and go through that very slowly. If we don't finish this year, no big deal.

We'll continue to work on character using a lot of resources. That might have to be a separate post.

Science:
Creation or Evolution: A Home Study Curriculum. Very excited to start this!
The Earth: Its Structure and Its Changes. We did Forces and Motion last year and I really like this series. Very hands-on.

Art:
Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes

 Draw and Write Through History: The 20th Century
Artist Study - Frederick Remington, Winslow Homer, John James Audubon and several others.

Language Arts:
Rockets, Radar and Robotics: Technology-Based Writing Lessons from IEW. Somebody gets it at IEW, that's all I can say.
Take Five Minutes: A History Fact a Day for Editing. A cool fact every single day, written by some poor soul who can't spell, punctuate or capitalize. I do believe we can help them.

Geography:
Map Skills. A very simple workbook that gets the job done.

Math:
Saxon. It works for Z-Man and we're sticking with it. There were no tears over math last year. Could just be his age but I'm not taking any chances.

Music:
Composer studies, starting with Haydn so we can listen to "Creation" while we're studying creation. I love it when things go together.
In what I'm hoping was NOT a super-collosal mistake, I bought all of us soprano recorders. We'll see how that goes. I can always put my hair over my ears to hide those little squishy earplugs.


Stay tuned for Little Man's First Grade curriculum choices very soon!