Summer 2022 Recap & Back-to-Homeschool 2022-2023

It’s that time of year again… Back to homeschool time! We really enjoy the book in the featured photo, This Is My Home, This Is My School by Jonathan Bean. We highly recommend it for our fellow homeschoolers!

We had a successful summer season filled with fun and learning! The kiddos each completed 2 sessions of swimming lessons at 2 different swim schools. We enjoyed crop share boxes from local homesteaders/farmers. We hosted company and visited friends. We visited fun touristy attractions near home. We attempted a backyard garden and added a flock of 4 Ameraucana hens to our crew! The kiddos sold hand-knit hats at a local Children’s Entrepreneur Fair. We revived “Morning Time” for our homeschool (I’ll save the details of that endeavor for another post). We were blessed to find a homeschool group at our new church that has lots of fun extracurricular activities planned for fall.

We went camping at:

• Yellowstone National Park
• Grand Teton National Park
• Camp MiVoden – Family Camp

We read aloud or listened to these books together as a family:

• My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George + movie by Disney (1969) + LitWits class
• ***spoiler alert*** We didn’t like the movie at all, they killed off Frightful! Boo!
• The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane by Russell Freedman + Animated Hero Classics cartoon movie + trip to Legacy Flight Museum
• Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare
• On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Frightful’s Mountain by Jean Craighead George
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol + LitWits class
• The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien + LitWits class
• Poetry for Young People: Rudyard Kipling
• Famous Composers (audiobook) by Darren Henley

I’m planning to soft start homeschooling the Tuesday after Labor Day. We’ll start with art, history, science, Bible and literature. When we’ve wrapped up camping season, we’ll add math and language arts. Then we’ll batten down the hatches for our 2nd winter in Eastern Idaho. 🥶 ❄️ ⛄️

Here are some resources we’re planning on using this year.

Bible: More Than Words: Level 1 (Living Faith Bible Curriculum), and The Wonder of Creation: 100 More Devotions About God and Science, and A Hobbit Devotional.

Math: Teaching Textbooks levels 4, 5 and 7

Spelling: All the kiddos will start off by finishing their spelling workbooks from last year. (We needed a summer break from spelling so we didn’t get these completed yet) Once those are done, our younger 2 kiddos will use Evan Moor Building Spelling Skills: Grade 3 & 5 and our oldest will use Word Roots Level 1 Workbook – Learning The Building Blocks of Better Spelling and Vocabulary (Grades 5-12)

History: Our 7th grader is going to try Mystery of History, Volume 1. We’ll use American Girl books together too. We are wrapping up American Girl: Molly 1944 – American History Unit Study and Nanea and I hope to create posts about those two unit studies soon. Next up we will be studying Samantha and the industrial revolution. Here are the other 2 unit studies I’ve created so far: American Girl: Kaya 1764 – American History Unit Study and American Girl: Felicity 1774 – American History Unit Study

Science: We still need to finish our space science unit and then we will go on to The Good and the Beautiful: Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish we may add more units as time allows. Our oldest will also have The Good and the Beautiful: Maturation and Sexual Reproduction. We will also be reading The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Eight Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning.

P.E.: We’ll go back to climbing at the gym once a week or so when the weather cools and we’ll sign up for ice skating lessons when the season starts. My daughter is signed up for ballet/jazz classes. I’m also wanting to try out cross country skiing and snowshoeing this winter.

Handwriting: The Good and the Beautiful level 4 for all the kiddos and A Reason for Handwriting border sheets for memory verses.

Art: I’m planning to start the year with a mini unit study of John James Audubon. I have a goal of drawing one bird each month using YouTube videos or other art tutorials. We are also going to try and do our own version of the Index Card Art challenge by designing an index card during morning time.

Language Arts: 101 Doodle Definitions and Question a Day Journal for Kids. Plus, our oldest will use The Good and the beautiful level 6 language arts.

Music: Simply Piano by JoyTunes and the kiddos have requested to try out Simply Guitar. I found some great Usborne books on classical composers at the thrift store and we’re listening to a Famous Composers audiobook on Audible.

Also new this year is a giant wall schedule made with 2 black poster boards side by side and 3×5 cards.

FIAR = Five in a Row, a lovely literature based homeschool system

MVD = minimum viable day or the least amount of schoolwork we can do and mama still feels good about it

TGATB = The Good and the Beautiful, a lovey homeschooling curriculum

📚✏️ Happy homeschooling friends!

🍎 What are you most excited about for the upcoming school year?