Off to a good start with school

I was a little stressed about what to do this semester for school. I don't have all the books we need. I do have the curriculum and all the teacher things, but not the books. When John got sick last summer, I honestly didn't know what was going to happen. I thought we might be in the States on medical leave by now so I didn't order it when I needed to. Then when we did go home for vacation, it was too late to get the materials in time. So, now we need to move in the next month or so from here and I'm kind of waiting to see where we end up before I get it. So........what do I do in the meantime????

I decided we'd continue the study of the US Presidents we started last semester and then I would have Ike do a big study on the US Constitution this semester since that's required in some schools freshman year. I have a lot of books we'll use to piece some things together for the month or so that we need to. We can also use the internet a lot for info on things going on during the time period we're in.

For fun, we started reading a book about Daniel Boone last week. He's a little before the time period we're up to, but the kids are really enjoying the book. It kind of goes with the pioneer/settler theme we'll carry through with this semester. We're up to President Monroe, so now we're really going to hit some westward expansion. Gold rush, Levi jeans ...... all kinds of fun stuff. We'll just kind of piece some units together and hit the key points and people from that period each week. I can look through my teacher materials and get material for some fun lectures if I don't have books on everything. Not the ideal way I would want it, but it will work.

We're finishing up our unit on marsupials and continuing on with our animal study this year.
We also started a nice book about the weather to give them an overview of that. It's pretty interesting so far. If we get really interested in any of this, we can expand the studies. I think I see my homeschool totally turning into "unit study led"..........hmmm............... (at least until we get more books ordered.) We're going to take advantage of all the books and materials we already have and hit some of these unit studies I've put off for a while until we found a better time to do them. We are also doing health this semester.

We did a really intense grammar study last semester, so I want to target writing skills this semester. Ike can pull out the novel he needs to work on and the other guys can do all sorts of things. This week I have them all working on book reports. Levi is doing Frankenstein and Sam is doing Swiss Family Robinson. Meggie is doing a simple picture book--- Story about Ping, and Faith is doing the Courage of Sarah Noble. I got some great book report forms off of a site last week. We're using them for the first few to get them thinking and used to it. This is something new for the girls.

We're still plugging along with our musicians and artists studies. We're enjoying Degas right now. He's so fascinating since he drew everything out on a grid first and then pieced things together to make painting.

I'm so glad I have all those books from all the years of Sonlight curriculum we did! It gives us nice reading material and resources to use as we piece together some units!

Hopefully, we'll really have a nice semester--- even though it's nothing like we had planned originally!