That's right we are doing trimesters this year. A whole new concept for us, but one I think we will like. I scheduled my trimesters in three, twelve week blocks with a week break every 6 weeks. I feel that week is much needed to recharge, reflect and prepare for the next six weeks.
I planned the year out using this calendar from the Donna Young website. If you never visited this site check it out. Great resources for just about everything.
Next week is our final week in this 6 week block. So far we have been happy with all but one of our curriculum choices and have been moving smoothly along.
As I said we are changing one subject in our curriculum. Poogie will be completing the last unit in her Chemistry text and we must move on. While we enjoyed the text the new material was quite and dry and a little overwhelming. Our new choice has brought us back to an old reliable curriculum that I used for T all the way through high school, Apologia.
We are secular homeschoolers, but I do use a lot of Christian curriculum. One, because it is cheaper, more widely available and has great supplements. I have created my own curriculum over the years due to a lack in secular choices. It tends to burn me out and leads to a very unhappy teacher and student. So what I do is take great curriculum like Apologia, Bob Jones and others and modify it to suit our needs. It is so much easier.
That said Poogie loves biological sciences and would love to study zoology and virology. Since there is a lack of, or any middle school curricula on virology, we have decided to focus on zoology of land animals. Apologia has a great curriculum for elementary and middle school. I will enhance and beef up the curriculum with videos, reading, my college zoology textbook, field trips and even some dissection. According to Apologia Poogie is suppose to be doing Physical Science this year, but since she will be doing physical science for high school I wanted to do one more year of fun science.
We will begin the new curriculum on September 28th, the first day of our next six weeks. Can't wait!
