The school year is winding down...

Yes, it is. We've complete Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory by Heart of Dakota, and we really enjoyed it! I think our favorite part was the book American Pioneers and Patriots. We just loved the short stories about the pioneer children and the "How they ..." pages that told how they made butter or soap or log cabins... or even how they lived on a sailing ship!

We had a change in math programs part way through the year due to my ds7 being diagnosed with a color deficiency. We opted to stop using Math U See (which I had been using successfully with all my children except this one.) SO we switched over to the (recommended by HOD) Singapore Math US Edition. Because it is a totally different way to teach math, I thought we would do best if we started at the beginning... so we went back to the beginning of first grade with both my ds7 and dd8. Alot of it was review for dd, but I'm okay with that. We are now about 1/3 of the way through the second book, and we'll work on it all summer so that we can start book 2A in the fall. This will put dd a bit behind, but I think that will be okay if she can work at her own pace, she may even catch up at some point.

Besides math, over the summer months ds will continue to read through the Emergent Reader set in Beyond. I added in the alternate books, so it is taking quite a bit longer to get through the books than it normally would. This is okay, because ds is progressing nicely and enjoying his reading time. He is even choosing to read on his own to himself some days! I had a Little Bear Treasury book that he completed independently! I'm so proud of him! My dd is also continuing reading over the summer, but she'll be reading some of the storytime books that we haven't yet read. The list is full of so many good books!

I've already started preparing for next year. We'll be starting Bigger Hearts for His Glory, and I'm super excited about that! I've already got every book we'll need, except three from the Extension Pack... which I'm not even sure we'll need, but want to have, just in case dd needs a little extra challenge. I've been organizing and preparing notebooks, binders and the like! While out with the family today, I happened across a 20 pack of page protectors for $1.50! I bought four packs, enough for history notebooking for both children. After I was home, one of our older children told me what a steal I had gotten, that generally these page protectors are closer to $4 a package! Woo-hoo! Now I realize I'll need at least 12 of these packages - I'll have to go back for eight more! Here's the real question... do I really NEED them? Can the children do a notebooking page on a piece of copy paper and then three hole punch it to fit in a binder? Or will that be sloppy? We've done lapbooking, but never notebooking... so this is a new journey for me!

I decided on separate composition notebooks for the vocabulary work we'll be doing in Bigger. And then dd will need another notebook for her Dictation work... or I can have her do that on loose leaf paper, and then put it in a Language Arts binder for her. She won't be doing spelling like ds. He gets 340 note cards and a special box to hold them all... I got a box that will hold them all for $1.25 at the same store as the page protectors. I've never seen a box that will hold that many, so I'm glad I found it! He'll be learning cursive this year with Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting book D. I'm hoping that jumping book C will be okay. His penmanship is very good, so I think he's ready. My dd has already learned cursive, so she will be doing copywork of the poetry selections in Bigger. For her I have the poems printed in the Getty-Dubay cursive font (I used the StartWrite program to do this) and put in page protectors for her. She'll then copy a portion of the poem onto loose leaf paper which will go into the page protector as well, and we'll have a nice poetry copywork binder at the end of the year.

I'm thinking two binders for each kiddo. One binder to hold all the Language Arts stuff (dictation/spelling, copywork, grammar - maybe even a pocket for the vocab book) and another to hold the History and Science notebooking pages.

Now to figure out how to make this work with the oh-so-organized-Workboxes!

*Ü* Blessings,