Team Schmidt in the News!!

http://www.surreyleader.com/community/165460686.html

Box Day 2012

What on earth is Box Day, you ask???

Box Day is the day that your "boxed" homeschool curriculum arrives.

Since accepting my new position as an Individualized Homeschool Support Teacher for HCOS, we decided to switch the children to HCOS as well.  HCOS is a Christian School, therefore I am allowed to use my government funding to purchase Christian curriculum.
Ever since I started homeschooling almost 2 years ago, I have been researching the plethora of homeschool curriculums that are out there. One that has always caught my eye is Sonlight. Their program is literature based and includes many, many books! The core curriculums that you can order include history, language arts, and bible.  Canadian Prescribed Learning Outcomes don't include history until the intermediate grades, but I think if you can get the kids interested in it earlier than that- GO FOR IT! Thankfully, for the grades that my kids are in, Sonlight is covering World History so I felt it was appropriate for us to try it out. (Later on they study American History, so we will likely not use Sonlight for those years).

This is the ginormous binder that is used to hold all the lesson plans for the year! It makes me so happy to have this. Each week, I will take out the corresponding lessons and worksheets so that I am working from a smaller binder. Then when I am finished, I will place them back in here so that they are ready to go for Kezia when she is old enough to use this curriculum.

Here they are opening up the box for the first time. I had clearly, already gone through it and organized them neatly. It was like Christmas in July for our family.

One of my favourite things to do after opening the box and seeing all the beautiful books, was to label them all. Sonlights sends along stickers for you to put on the spines of all the books so that you know which ones came with the Core that you are currently using. I am an organizational junky, so this was just pure heaven to me!

Here is a picture of some of the books that we will get to read and learn about this year. Before purchasing the Core, I looked up every book on Amazon to read the reviews and even compare prices. I was pleased to see that every book received 4 or more stars out of 5, and that all the prices were the same or cheaper than Amazon was selling them for. I am SO excited!!! 

I realize that you can't really see the photo above, but it is a week at a glance for the Core. It tells you the books and chapters you will be reading, as well as any extra materials you might need. This is followed by a detailed plan for each day and subject- a dream come true for me!

While researching the different "boxed" curriculums, Sonlight appealed to me the most because of the rave reviews. One of the things that really struck a cord for me was the movement from the table to the sofa. We need that in our homeschool this year. I think it will be much easier to invite the kids to join me on the sofa to read with me, or to me. I look forward to the guided discussions, and the preplanned lessons that  all coordinate with books and topics of history that we will be covering. Obviously, this is just a couple of subjects and there will be lots of science experiments and math problems to solve. But the core of our little  homeschool this year will be learning about world history together!