The Well-Educated Mind: Part I

So, I may not have a Part Two for the Well-Watered Soul for a while. I just wanted to talk about the fact that I am

DONE WITH HOMESCHOOL!!!!!! See here for my final moments on that with Michael. Apparently, about the same time (Noonish), George was finishing up math with Paul at home. Who knows? Maybe they ended at exactly the same time! TEE HEE. They are so connected at the hip, I would not, at all, be surprised.

Anyway, in summary, we had a very good year. Things seemed to be so balanced in getting through things but still having flexibility in going to plays and field trips and the like. I think taking out the literature/read-alouds and only having them at night has made our days run so much more smoothly. Sometimes, those LOOOONG Sonlight readers would really bog down our history because I didn't want to move on until we were done with the book for that time period. Now that we have been through the read aloud favorites in their catalog, we can pick and chose what choice books to read at night, and I am not caring what time period they are from. George has gotten through some fabulous books with them. He is currently reading The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. That will take them well into the summer, no doubt.

So, we got through Ancient and Medieval history this year. I used The Story of the World CD to give them a quick overview and then I went back through those time periods with 2-4 pages per day of The Kingfisher Encyclopedia of World History. IMHO, the Usborned Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History is much better, but it is nice to go through another one. We also did cover the dinosaur/early animal stuff in the Usborne this year. It was pretty weird, but the boys have always been curious about it.

For Science we used the Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia. Again, I think that the Usborne is far superior. We went through geology, earth science, conservation, ecology, and astronomy. We will continue with the astronomy studies throughout the summer as we do stargazing with our telescope in the clear summer skies.