So, I have learned some things about myself.  I think I shared with you that I need to be on “execute” mode in autumn or nothing gets done.  That means I have to plan, organize and supply myself before then.  And dude… I’m notsomuch going to let that stuff interfere with being at the pool, so…

I have come to peace with shoving some very specific stuff on my kids and to that end, this weekend I organized my first meeting of a small cooperative of families that want to do an integrative course on geography (physical and human–the latter of which is TONS of culture), religions, some art where possible and literature.  Our little group is five (possibly 6) families including my own and have 8 (possibly 10) upper middle school/lower high school kids and then another 5-6 younger kids who will learn about the same areas at the same time.

We will be using the Great Books “Reading the World” text from their Many Voices series and the HOPE is that we take each month and devote one week to geography (physical and human), one to religions, one to literature and then have a culminating party with food and music, etc. from the region.  The more I look at it, the more I feel like we won’t be able to dig deeply enough into any one area deeply enough for my liking–but it will definitely be a good spine to work we do in our house together when we’re not with the group.  So that works.

That’s going to take care of social sciences, literature and art for my kids (who will also have choir to round out their “fine & performing arts” requirements).  Both will do chemistry next year for science plus the Science Olympiad stuff we’re doing (BigGuy on the middle school team and Girly in the monthly Elementary Science Olympiad monthly club).  BigGuy will have another year of his boys program that is literature and naturalist.  That leaves me with math, writing and foreign language.   We’re adding Latin and that might just be the foreign language component.  Both might just do IEW for writing again next year.  That leaves math.  No big.

I’m also working with our Science Olympiad sponsor to branch out in terms of serving the homeschool community with more STEM offerings that fill the voids.  They’ve had an overhaul in staff to better serve the needs of the business by removing someone who was not very organized and not very service-oriented.  The owner/founder is also delegating to help make sure that all of his big ideas get executed–and that’s huge.  I essentially vomited thousands of ideas onto them last week and they were thrilled.  🙂

So now we just lay out the next year and start prepping so that it’s just execution when the time gets here.  I’m kind of excited!