Yahoo!  Our curricula are ordered for the next school year.  I love July.  We are registered with a state homeschooling program where we can purchase school supplies related to our individual learning plans using state funds but we have to wait until July 1st. 

I ordered the next volume from Story of the World.  I don't know a whole lot about the middle ages so I am looking forward to reading lots of library books and doing some fun  things like building a viking ship or maybe a castle fromt the canon-bubblejet website.  Have you ever seen that website?  It is fabulous.  You can download all the pieces to build famous buildings.  They also have several animal patterns.  Best of all, they don't charge a penny for it.  You print out the pages (it does take a bit of ink), cut out the pieces and glue the tabs in designated spots.  When you are done you have a statue of a castle or a cat or whatever. Here is the website.

Anyway, we are going to study astronomy (especially stars as opposed to the solar system), geology, and weather (especially tornadoes and such).  I ordered a curriculum but we are going to read from real books for our classtime learning.  We are also going to try a literature course according to the style of Adam Andrews and his curriculum "Teaching the Classics."  I hope we can start a literature club with other students, too.  And finally, the girls are so far ahead in math that we are going to have our own, very fun, personal "math club" to polish our skills we have already learned instead of pressing forward to new things.

Oh, and we are going to try the Auralog Tell Me More program for foreign language.  I am hoping the newness of the curriculum will jumpstart their interest again in Spanish (Carina) and Dutch (Abbie and Seth). Oh and also, we will be going back to an official art class again since all three of my students requested it. Carina wants to take violin and Seth wants to do trumpet.  I don't know if that will work out yet...we will see when we get back to Haines.

And that is it for our 08-09 schoolyear plans.  Let's go...I'm ready to start...