A Little Rebellion Every Now & Then

I sketched out more details for our summer of history tonight, and it appears that we will finish SOTW2 by or on Thursday, July 10. This is a good spacing; if we have supplemental reading, it can be available for the remainder of July and all of August, and there will be almost two months without SOTW to whet her appetite for more come autumn!

I don’t have history planned out well for third grade. I know that I want to continue doing SOTW and covering world history, but I also know that she needs to have more in-depth study of her own country’s history. Not because I’m particularly USA-is-better-than-everyone-rah-rah, though I do have a healthy dose of patriotism at times, but because I know that the standards for testing and what people are ‘expected’ to know do contain a lot of American history. I also feel that being informed about your country’s history and government is an essential part of being an involved citizen - which I hope all of my children aspire to be.

With that in mind, I’ve essentially decided not to supplement world history, just covering it through SOTW3 with the accompanying map work, coloring pages, and review questions/narration assignments. The difficulty, though, is that I am sure there will be at least a few things for which I’ll want to make exceptions! I did decide to concentrate our reading comprehension and literature primarily on historical fiction focusing on early American history. That will make some decisions easier, but there are still so very many excellent children’s history books. I also have Zinn-for-kids, want to buy Hakim, and have the Children’s Encyclopedia of American History. Oh, and she got The American Story for Christmas last year!

The difficulty may be finding enough time to read all of these wonderful books.

I also am having doubts about grammar. I don’t really want her doing a fifth grade grammar book in fourth grade. While I know she could handle it, there’s no real advantage to it and I don’t want to push push push for it to happen. Ideally, we’ll add in some supplemental workbooks from both Critical Thinking and Evan-Moore (editing, punctuation), and take the remainder of GWG Grade 3 (just Chapters 4 and 5 remaining, so a total of forty lessons and two chapter reviews) a little more slowly. We’ll still begin GWG Grade 4 soon after finishing GWG Grade 3 (around January?), but take plenty of time to finish it. If she absolutely is bored silly, then we can start GWG Grade 5 in late fourth grade. I do want to add supplemental diagramming workbooks, too. So we’ll still do grammar four or five days a week, but only three days will be in GWG, and one or two days will just be supplemental workbooks. I think the Evan-Moore workbooks are designed to be done daily, so we may do those all grammar days.

The big thing is that it puts us ready for grade five, logic stage grammar on target with fifth grade. I will have to decide between continuing with Growing with Grammar in logic stage or switching after fourth or fifth grade to something like Hake (Grammar and Writing, 5-8). I can see the advantage to switching, to make sure that there are no retention-type problems. I can also see the advantage to staying with what works! Two more years before I have to make that decision… thankfully.

We are, in theory, set for a summer ‘history intensive.’ We’re reviewing Chapters One and Two in Story of the World: Volume Two, and we’re going to ‘do’ Chapter Three tonight as well. In an ideal world, we’ll do at least one chapter a day, sometimes two, depending on how important I deem the material. The goal is to finish the book with some of July remaining. We’ll take, then, the rest of July and all of August free from history, and be ready to start, on schedule, Story of the World: Volume Three when we start third grade work at the beginning of September. I’m so very excited about this coming year of history - 1600 to 1850 includes so many fabulous things, and there are so many fabulous books to which I just can’t wait to introduce her.

I feel a little bit strange about how we’re conducting this middle ages and renaissance time period, but I know we’ll read some books in that “free” July and August time, not to mention the rest of the year, and she’ll cover the same time period again at least twice before she graduates high school. How many people can honestly say that about their own educational experience? I say ‘at least’ twice because our own plans would have her covering it around sixth grade and around tenth grade, but assuming we continue with Master’s Academy, they will do medieval times during her fourth grade her as well.

The status of other subjects for the summer? We’re doing math only to bring her math facts memorization level up to the same level as her understanding. I’m fairly confident that with that done, her math level with skyrocket even more next year. We’re done with grammar until the fall, over halfway through Growing With Grammar Grade 3. We’ll do spelling at least once a week, hopefully more often, since it’s a weak area for her, and hopefully around the beginning of July, we’ll begin doing some science work. We are even further behind in science than we are with history and I’m at something of a loss as to what to do about that. I don’t want to shortchange her chemistry and physics, but until I prove to myself that we’re going to stay on target, I hate to spend even more money on science curriculum. We’ll be working on Latin more or less steadily and as normal.

I like our summer schedule, though. History, Latin, and math drill daily; some practice in spelling; science beginning later in the summer. I know that next week, when we’re all going to day camp, will prove challenging - finding the energy in myself for schoolwork after a long day will be difficult at best - but I think we can do it.