School year

I am starting with my plans/goals for Travis. This is his fifth year following The Well Trained Mind. I plan to keep our school fun enjoyable for all of us this year. Demi will be joining Travis for a few more classes this year.

Math.

He is using Saxon 6/5 this year. To me this looks just like all the other Saxon books we have used before. Travis does well with it and finds it easy (a bit boring but simple). It always seems to have a LOT of review (Rob says that is needed to increase his speed) so I am glad we are using this for the year. It should be an easy class.

Our Math book has 120 lessons. I plan to do math 4 days a week and I hope to finish it in about 30-32 weeks. School is 36 weeks so we should not have a problem covering the book. On weeks Travis asks to do Math five or six days a week I will let him (he often asks to do extra classes in fun subjects) I will not require more than 4 a week. Math is a class Travis likes and he rarely needs me to help with lessons or worksheets. I plan to use most of his Math time playing with Demi and Zehira. I hope to keep the girls busy and quiet enough for Travis to stay focused on his math and for our school to keep moving along without many problems.

Reading
We will do lots of things for reading I will share all of that a bit later. As far as "grade level" reading and "vocabulary" (what I call read a loud for mom to hear class) we are using Mc Guffey's Fifth Eclectic reader.

It has 117 lessons so he will read about 3 lessons a week. If he does 3 a week they will be finished in 39 weeks. I know this will not take 39 weeks. I know that Travis will read a few extra lessons along the way and we will be done in under 36 weeks. If the title or picture looks interesting he often asks to read an extra lesson. For that reason I am keeping our goal a 3 a week because I don't feel the need to move up to 4 a week unless I see we are falling behind.

Spelling

He will be using Spelling Workout E. (Modern Curriculum Press). This is his fifth year using Spelling Workout Spelling books. This book has 36 lessons. He will do one a week (I hope). If we need to spend a few extra days or a week on a hard lesson we will and just run school a bit longer. Spelling lasted a couple weeks longer than other subjects last year because we did spend an extra week on a couple harder lessons.

Writing
We will be using Writing Strands level 3. We are at a lower level in this than other subjects but that is because we started "writing class" later than some of the other subjects. We plan to work slow and steady, have fun doing it, and finish by end of year. This book is harder to set a goal with. It is a very small book but it could take us a full school year to finish. We will just see how well we do with it. I know we will finish the book by the end of year.


I will write down what our plans are for other subjects over the next few days. I want to blog my plans for....
History
English
Reading (quiet reading)
Handwriting
Science
Music
Art
PE
Other languages
Logic
Health
Music Appreciation
Art Appreciation
Home Economics
Shop
and anything else I might have missed.

I hope to look back at this and see that I am on track all year.