Okay, so I am officially starting homeschool with the kiddos this coming Monday (4/20/09). Yikes! Actually, I’m feeling pretty ok about it. Got the schedule all sorted out. See?
What, you can’t read that? Well, click on it and it will take you to the bigger version. For term study this time we are doing a unit on sea life. That way when we go to Family Camp at the end of the term, we can have an excuse to go to the excellent Oregon Coast Aquarium (like we need an excuse).
Even better, the aquarium has a whole bunch of downloadable curriculum for homeschoolers, which will make organizing easy for me (big plus). Yay! So now I’m all excited.
I went through what I have and need yesterday and am hoping to make it out to Exodus Books tomorrow or Saturday to finish picking up class materials. I think I need to clean off one more bookshelf today so I can finish setting up the classroom and then I’ll be ready-ish. So yep, feeling pretty good! 
Oh, were you wondering what the heck Resurrection Term is? We are running our school year according to the church calendar and days of creation. So instead of having three or four terms of school and then the summer off, we are having seven terms that are seven weeks each.
The first week of each term the kids have off of school as a reflection of Sabbath rest the first day of each week. The school year starts mid-November for Advent Term, and that entire term of seven weeks is off of school (first term of seven, also reflecting Sabbath rest on the first day of the seven day week).
There are several advantages to doing it this way.
- Your children’s brains don’t leak out their ears over a long summer holiday.
- The longest break comes around Christmas when everyone is swamped and wants to do family stuff anyway.
- If you don’t like the schedule or get behind on something, your term is only six weeks of actual school time so it’s not going to screw the kids up too much to just wait and revise next term.
- For summer, we do a bit lighter load and the schedule is flexible enough to allow for that.
If you’ve been calculating in your head as I’ve been explaining, you’ll notice that seven terms of seven weeks makes 49 weeks but there are 52 weeks in the year. That leaves three floating weeks to take elsewhere as vacation.
We’re taking two in June, before and after Family Camp which is the start of the Apostolic Age Term and then the last one probably in August somewhere during the Church Age Term. No doubt this will come up again in a later post, but if you’d like to do a bit more reading on your own, this idea was developed by my friend Melody at Solis Ortus.
Oh! Also, I’ve decided not to bore all of you with our day in, day out homeschooling details so I have started a dedicated blog for that in order to better bore only those of you who wish to be bored. It’s at HomeschoolSandbox.com. My friend Lana who is currently homeschooling her two school-aged kids has joined that blog as an editor, so she’ll be posting her homeschooling life on here as well. I’m excited! Should be fun.Welcome, Lana! This should be fun.
Rachel
Fiendish friend for effusive fun!
