The History of the Renaissance World

I was so fortunate to be one of the lucky winners of an ARC of Susan Wise Bauer's next book in her world history series - The History of the Renaissance World. I am so excited to have the opportunity to read it before it is released. We use this series for our high school students and I have been waiting not-so-patiently to add this book to our curriculum. By the time our upcoming freshman needs it, it will be published. I am currently reading the book and will post a review once I'm finished.

Trying something new. . .

Now that the oldest has been accepted to his preferred college and is finishing up the remainders of his senior year of high school at home, I have been looking back and pondering what I want to do differently with the younger two students. Each student is different and I must work with each one to fit their curriculum to their needs and interests. But generally, I like to be somewhat consistent in how we school.

I use The Well Trained Mind as my template for our homeschool. I find it to be the best in explaining the method and in giving examples of curriculum to fulfill the needed coursework. I also believe that it is the most complete and ambitious vision of what homeschooling can be.

My kids don't seem to enjoy math very much and we tried various math curriculum with the oldest and Saxon Math seemed to work as well as any other. With my upcoming freshman, I am considering switching to Jacob's Elementary Algebra. If this doesn't seem to work, we will probably fall back on Saxon Algebra 1.

This summer we are trying something we haven't done in quite awhile. My kids are all good readers and prefer to read books on their own.  However, I will be reading Sophie's World out loud and then we will discuss together. That is the plan, anyway.

We will continue to school year-round and take short breaks throughout the year.
Their music study will continue with private lessons.
I think the biggest change will be that I am going to try to add much more literature that we all read and discuss together, not just one student and parent.

I am still trying to figure out the best way to tackle Latin study. Nothing we have tried has really clicked with all of us. I am considering Wheelock's Latin this year - but we will see how that goes.