I taught C to read last fall using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, which I highly recommend. For reading this year, we'll read tons of library books, just like we've been doing all summer. We'll cover fun fiction as well as science, math, and social studies topics. One of my goals is to keep a blog list of all the books he reads this school year and have some sort of ranking system for them. There are some books I've run across this summer that weren't worth our time, and others that I'd love to recommend to everyone.

For math, we'll be using Saxon Math 1. C is very bright and already knows most of what is in the kindergarten book. I figure we can take our time with it if we need to and even carry it over two years if it's necessary. I taught 6th and 7th grade Saxon math for a few years and loved it.

Since we won't be having to focus so heavily on learning to read, I thought we'd pick up science and social studies once a week. For science, we'll be using 3 different books recommended by TWTM: Everybody Has a Body, Mudpies to Magnets, and More Mudpies to Magnets. One thing I'm working on now is a schedule of some sort for what we'll learn when. We'll start off with health and nutrition so we can carry it on throughout the year. When we've covered the basics of that, we'll study animals and make a trip to the zoo (when the weather is cooler!). Next will be things like earth science, chemistry, and physics - things we can do indoors when the weather is too cold to be outside. When spring rolls around, we'll study plants and maybe plant our own patio garden. (We don't have space since we live in apartment.)

As for social studies, we'll learn our geography (one of my weak areas) by watching The Amazing Race and plotting the teams' travel path on our super-size laminated world atlas. Then on the pages with the individual continents, we'll locate the cities the teams visit and learn about some of the things about those cultures. We'll also do community studies and take a few field trips to places like a farm, a dairy, a fire station, a post office, etc.

I'm not the only one excited about getting started. C is chomping at the bit to start. He keeps wanting me to give him the math workbook so he can go ahead and get started on it. He doesn't like the fact that when we do start, he'll only be doing one math sheet a day. He'd rather go through it like he goes through the activity books we get at Wal-Mart - finishing the whole thing in a matter of days. When I pulled out the science books this morning to look at a few more things, he asked, "Are you going to teach me something right now?" He was disappointed when I told him we had a few more weeks before we got started. Fortunately he's got a full schedule over the next few weeks, so he won't be too bored while he waits!