January is a Fresh Start

January lesson sheets are freshly copied and collated, ready for bright-eyed children on Monday morning.

Well, maybe the children won't be bright-eyed, but at least the work is all planned out. Three weeks off refreshed all of us and gave us a much needed break, however, getting back on schedule is always a relief.


My goals are always high at the beginning of the month, and doubly so after a long break, so the fully planned month gives us a realistic goal, yet one that will push us to achieve more. Monthly lesson planning has worked well for us for years now.

What's in store? Here's a sampling:

Everyone will be doing a lot of writing, starting with some thank you notes. Three of the kids will be joining my weekly writing classes for the upcoming session, working on essay writing.


David and Emily will be reading Uncle Tom's Cabin for their American Literature class. James will finish My Side of the Mountain and read all of A Wrinkle in Time. All of this reading will be accompanied by book reviews. Suzy will be reading a children's version of Pilgrim's Progress. (This will be a huge challenge for her; pray for us!)

Teaching Textbooks math will continue. James should finish Math 7 by the end of the month, so it's time to bite the bullet and purchase Pre-Algebra for him. The others will keep plugging away!

Our geography focus will take us into Canada and Central America and we will also review the U.S. maps we've worked on.

In Anatomy, James and Suzy will be working on the functions of the eye, the ear, the tongue and the skin. They will build paper models of each organ and learn about how they work. Emily will be studying the Avian world in Biology.

David will continue working on mastering JavaScript (via Codeacademy.com) and will continue his economics study (which he tells me is pretty interesting for the most part!)  in Whatever Happened to Penny Candy and the Bluestocking Guide.

That's not all, but that's enough to fill a blog post. Oh, one more thing - we will be taking our first karate tests as red belts sometime in February, so January will be a month of intense learning and practice for us!

American Literature

David and Emily are both taking American Literature at co-op this year, taught by someone who isn't me! LOL

This is a list of what they will be reading:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (they are reading this now)
• The Simple Cobler of Aggawam by Nathaniel Ward
• Sinners in the hands of an angry God by Jonathan Edwards
• Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
• The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe
• The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe
• Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant
• Homeward Bound by James Fenimore Cooper
• Civil Disobedience and other selections by Henry David Thoreau
• The Gift of the Magi and The Ransom of Red Chief by O.Henry
• Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Whew! That's a lot, isn't it? A number of those selections I have not read before, so I will attempt to read them along with my high schoolers.

I may also have them read The Scarlet Letter to go along with the class. In their spare time. Haha

If the teacher provides assignments to go along with the reading selections, I will require those. If she does not, then I will require writing assignments every two weeks. I am also going to require a reading journal, which is something I've attempted before but not seen to fruition.