Preparing for Our Upcoming Homeschool Year

   This coming week we will take a break as I prepare for the upcoming year, which will bring some new and challenging events. We are looking forward to new learning adventures. ( If you'd like to see what I'll be using with each child, you can scroll to the bottom of the blog & view our 2012-2013 curriculum.) One thing this year that is totally new for us is joining a homeschool co-op. We will meet once a week, and the kiddos are really excited about it! This means, of course, that we will do all of our other schooling on a 4-day week rather than 5-day week timetable. I am going to be working on how to schedule our days, with input from the children, too, because they usually have some helpful ideas. Another new thing for us will be separating Doodles and Bug for each subject area. Originally they were together for Bible, history, science, and read-alouds, and then I separated them for science this past year. Now they will be separated for every subject. This also creates the need for a new schedule. I will post our schedule at the end of this week (when I'm done working on it!) Even then it will be tentative, though, because we won't really know whether or not it's successful until we've had a couple of weeks to put it into practice.
   On a different note, Baby Girl has been happier this past week, which is a HUGE blessing! It is so much easier to face her delays and special challenges when she is a content little girl. We have also seen her make some progress in expressing her needs both verbally and with sign language. I am praying for BIG strides for her this homeschool year!