2019-20 School Year Outline

The 2018-19 school year is officially in the books. We’re already gearing up for the 2019-20 school year starting the week after Josie gets back from Heart Camp.  I’ve made a general overview of projects and plans. Much is review for them / units I’ve already prepped in years prior. Some of the areas overlap (chiefly geography, science and / or history). I expect to move somewhat quickly. I’m adding project-based learning activities for them to demonstrate understanding. This year I’m really emphasizing they need to log work in their daily journals since their reading and writing has much improved the past 6 months.

General Weekly Structure

I present new work at the beginning of our 9-12 morning work period, generally as follows:

• Monday: Review
• Tuesday: Math
• Wednesday: Music and Language
• Thursday: Science and / or History
• Friday: Geography

The rest of the time (2.5 hours roughly) the kids are free to choose whatever work they want off the shelves). I will also give repeat individual presentations if needed. Then in the afternoon is a reading hour and second work period spent mainly on creative endeavors. In the evening before dinner, we do reading and math practice with Dad, and practice violin.

---

Creative Projects

Herb Garden Project: The kids will plan and grow their own herb garden from seed. They will keep independent garden research journals including sketches, graphs and tables of growth, rainfall, predictions etc. I can’t wait to see what this looks like at the end of the year.

The Work of Wool  is a handcraft book with tons of amazing projects. I’ve been eyeballing this for some time, and I think this is the year. We are fortunate to have a local wool producing farm that does tours. I think we may grow some of our own dyes in the garden too.

Areas of study

*projects in bold*

Science / History:

1st Great Lesson

Astronomy:

• Solar System
• Planets
• Making a to scale model of solar system mural
• Building a telescope
• Asteroid belts
• constellations
• moon phases

Geology

• Layers of earth
• Layers of Atmosphere
• Marine geology
• Landforms
• Volcanoes
• Pompeii
• Grand Canyon
• Japan
• Cardinal directions, latitude and longitude
• Biomes
• Habitats: making a 3d “zoo” for each biome

2nd Great Lesson

• Clock of eras
• Timeline of life
• Fossils (from all eras)
• Rocks and minerals
• Design our own islands, assigning latitude, longitude, biome and giving a timeline of how they formed and progress, plants and animal life (real or made up) based on true characteristics etc

Also hoping to do some sort of giant layers of the earth fossil dig and sort but not sure I will have the time to make this happen.

Animal Plyla / Classifications

• invertebrates and vertebrates
• Porifera, Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Mollusca, Annelida, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, Chordata
• tree of life

3rd Great Lesson

fundamental needs spiritual and material

• kids making clothing from Work of Wool project
• cooking projects from garden
• shelter building cultural study and reconstruction project

Ancient Civilization

Seven wonders of world, old (and maybe new)

---

Geography: work in progress

Not as fleshed out as science / history yet; we will cover biomes, animals, cultures + fundamental needs of humans, recipes, music of 2-3 political countries per continent, flags — largely utilizing our Waseca Biomes materials.

Asia (June-August)

• China
• Japan + ?

Africa (Sept-Dec)

• Egypt + ?

---

Language:

4th Great Lesson

• History of language
• alphabet, Story of the Ox in the House
• Word study: compounds, affixes, synonym, antonym, homonym, homograph, word families
• Mechanics: Capitalization, punctuation etc
• Parts of speech: Noun, adjective, verb (all parts of speech — all review but moving in more detail ie tenses, auxiliary verbs, moods of verb…)
• Sentence Analysis

Because most of the above is review, I suspect we will move through quickly and reserve a majority of the year to detailed sentence analysis. This work is primarily for Mary. Josie’s still has significant trouble structuring her sentences. Michael usually talks in made up languages or lately is only using numbers to communicate. Weird  Special kid. I will present this work to all together but I suspect only Mary is going to progress and comprehend.

Michael and Josie still will be practicing cursive handwriting as well.

Everyone will be working on reading and spelling with Waseca Reading program. Research projects and lots of audible books.

---

Math:

All Kids Review:

• numeration
• Operations
• Fractions
• squares and cubes
• squaring, cubing
• square root

Think we will actually do the Hierarchy material this year… maybe.

The following new work likely be only Mary. I’ll try to finish the lower elementary math album (6-9) with her this year. I’ve skipped around some, but we’re so close, so I expect it to be fine.

• checkerboard
• short and long multiplication
• geometrical form of multiplication
• flat bead frame
• bank game with one and two digit multiplier
• decimal fractions
• decimal checkerboard
• binomial, trinomial, polynomial

Geometry album simultaneously with above (all kids)

Equivalence

Geometry Sticks

Polygons and Circles

Area

Solid Geometry

I’m not going to write out what all of this entails, but basically just plowing through the Montessori lower elementary Geometry album. Should get through much of it this year. Not expecting mastery, and we will repeat it for review later.

---

I’m excited for the new school year. By starting in June I think we will be able to incorporate a lot of fun hands-on projects (afternoons) with plenty of time to review and master work. Otherwise I’m expecting lots of swimming, gardening, hanging with friends, practicing music and creating art. I really love seeing our year outlined because I see how much we’ve already undertaken and gives me a scope of what we will hopefully accomplish in the year ahead.

Going to need a lot of coffee!