I was looking through some of our finished projects for 2006-2007 yesterday, and was surprised by how much we'd done - I thought we had nothing to show for this year, but actually we had lapbook projects on Mesopotamia, Hanukkah and Passover, and big "class projects" (large evan-moor pocket-style lapbooks we'd done together as a group) on insects and seasons. We also have lots of lapbooks and projects that we started but didn't finish because the enthusiasm and interest was transferred to other topics, so I'll be putting those in my 'bottom drawer' to fish out and complete when the mood takes us.

I pulled together a load of books and resources to do a project on rivers last autumn, and just at the last moment the children decided they wanted to do a project on South America instead. So our 'rivers' geography was dropped in favour of a make-it-up-as-you-go-along continent project. Everybody really enjoyed it and got a lot out of it, so I'm glad that I let that happen rather than insisting we went ahead with the original plan, but again, the rivers project can go in my 'bottom drawer' for a rainy day.

One thing I would like to encourage this year is getting back to our 'Charlotte Mason' roots (I started to home educate after reading Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's book 'For the Children's Sake' which advocated principles laid out by 19th century educator Charlotte Mason, which in a nutshell involves presenting the best offerings of our culture to the child so that he or she can develop not just the intellect, but the whole person. I do promise to tell you more about Charlotte Mason, but very briefly, I'm hoping to include more Nature-study, classical music and art appreciation this year. I'm planning to add regular up-dates here, so remember to check back!

We don't have to conform to the school term-times and holiday times as home educators in the UK, and I think that in view of the fact that the majority of UK home educators use the 'unschooling' method of home education, timetables can be a little irrelevant.

We are fairly relaxed and are learning all the time, but we do also use curriculum which is divided up into weeks, so for convenience, I try to plan out when we will pick up and put down that curriculum (although life doesn't always go to plan, and we appreciate the flexibility we have to do things our own way, and make the most of every opportunity, and to rest when we need to).

Sometimes we need a break from the curriculum, but don't stop learning, and we'll sometimes do unit-studies or projects and some lapbooking.

I've tried lots of different ways of scheduling through the year: I've 'stopped' for the school holidays. I've carried on all through the year, and I've also tried a 3-weeks-on, 1-week-off scheme all through the year which works out to the same number of weeks as a traditional school year.

I've found that, with the summer holidays, neither working right through nor taking a six-week holiday works very well for us, but we do tend to need a short break, and this year we've taken a nice long break.

We're planning to start back with our curriculum on 8th September, though between now and then we'll be easing back in gently, starting to get back into our routine.

We're just over half-way through Sonlight curriculum levels 1 and 6 which includes literature, history and some geography. (There is much more to Sonlight curriculum, but we'll only be using those sections this year).

I'm looking at one of Dinah Zike's "Great Science Adventures for science, and another for geography. We've also decided not to use Sonlight's "language arts" for English this year, and instead I've found an out-of-print curriculum called "Reasons for Writing" for creative writing, "The essential Spelling List" for spelling, "Jolly Grammar" for grammar. I do like Sonlight's "I Can Read It" phonics programme, but we're also using lots of easy readers, including the old-fashioned "Ladybird Key Words" reading scheme.