New School Year!

Hello!  We are still alive!  Obviously life has been very busy.  I have been traveling around a lot this year, which has definitely moved us off our usual routine.  I actually calculated that from Oct 2011-Oct 2012, I will have been gone from the house for 15 weeks!  That's a lot!  However, despite all our traveling, the boys and I managed to put in a really good school year last year.  We mostly took a summer break and are now fully back into the school routine (except that we'll be away for most of the next three weeks, SO, yeah...)

Here are the boys yesterday on the Loudoun County 1st Day of School.  It was our 17th day of school, but that's a good thing since we'll be missing much of the next three weeks!

3rd Grade!  Can you believe it??

New 2nd Grader!

We are beginning our 5th year of homeschooling!  The first year (ok, first two) were pretty casual and we didn't accomplish a whole lot, but I think the kids have turned out fine. :)  We are still using the Sonlight Curriculum for the majority of our learning.  This year we are going to be starting Core D, which is American History, Part 1.  I'm excited about studying this core, especially since we live in Virginia, home to so much early American History.  We're actually starting the year by finishing last year's core, which I intentionally caused to run into the new school year, and by doing short unit study on Virginia.

This year we're going to be using Apologia for the first time.  I know so many people who just love this science curriculum, so we picked Astronomy and the boys are SO excited about spending a whole year learning about that, as they both already love the subject.  We're going to do it in addition to Sonlight's Science C, which will cover several other topics, but be less in-depth.

This year we're going to be focusing heavily on phonics and spelling.  Since both the older boys learned to read without really ever learning phonics, there are some gaps in their knowledge!  So, we're all going to learn this together....I hope.

Caleb is also going to be taking a writing class with other 3rd-5th grade home school boys.  He wanted to do it, so hopefully he will really enjoy it.  It's every Wednesday afternoon.  Wednesday mornings we'll all be participating in Community Bible Study (CBS) at CFC again.

And then we've got this little guy, who's 4 now.  He and I are working on learning the rest of the letters that he doesn't know and beginning phonics and letter writing basics.  He loves to listen in on the reading I do with the other boys and asks me often to define words he doesn't know, so he's learning right along with the rest of us!

Here's to a great school year!