Trash and Keep Pile

As I have done every school year since I began this journey I find myself making changes.  By now I have discovered what works for us as far as homeschool curriculum goes and what doesn't.  I am disappointed to find that some of the things we loved last year did not make the cut this year.  It may be we are just burned out with the daily repetition of some of these books.  It pains me to say that two of these are classical education curriculum's, Writing with Ease and Writing with Skill.  Both of these are great writing curricula, and we haven't ditched them for good.  It's just the day to day repetition of the curriculum has become tedious.  I do not feel that either one of my kids age getting any thing new out of these right now so on the shelf they go. 

Another casualty from the first quarter is the Novel Units literature guides.  Ug,  I have to say I did not like them.  There are so many reasons I won't take up time writing about it.  Let's just say that they were not user friendly.  I still had to do alot of prep on my own and some of the questions in the books did not line up with the novels.  I won't use them again. 

For Poogie history was a big flat failure.  I tried using The Story of the US and The Complete Book of US History.  They just didn't offer enough comprehsion and geography work.  So we are using something I already had, Abeka US history and geography.  I will be adding historical reading to go along with the time peroids. 

So things we are keeping but using as a supplement, such as First Language Lessons.  Great curriculum, but not our daily cup of tea.  We are returning to Easy Grammar for Poogie with FLL added for diagramming and extra practice.   Poogie will be using EG 6 since I had the teacher's edition. 

Poogie is also keeping Rod & Staff Arithmetic 5 but we are supplementing with Math Mammoth on subjects that she doesn't master in the text.  Right now we are doing a MM unit on fractions because she just didn't get it in R&S. 

For Poogie's writing we are going to give Writing Strands a whirl.  I have it already so why not.  For T I have ordered Jensen Format Writing to replace WWS.  We will use WWS but not on a weekly basis. 

I have decided to let T read the novels we have chosen and give him writing assignments and projects to complete for them from free sources on the internet.  The Novel Units just killed his love for the book, and mine. 

Finally, on The Well Trained Mind Forum I found a link to a free PDF of a curriuclum I have been wanting to try for reading for Poogie.  The Reading Detective from The Thinking Co. offers this.  I am going to try a few lesson with Poogie and then I may order the software version.  T has liked the Editor in Chief software so it would be fun for Poogie to have her time at the computer too.

I guess we just need to see how the next 9 weeks go...

ps please forgive the typo's spell check wasn't working and I've run out of time.