What I Spent Our Tax Refund On

 

I don’t know about you, but this large family with one income doesn’t have unlimited funds for curriculum. Since we started homeschooling, I have made decisions for curriculum for the next year early. Like January/ February early! I then let our dear Uncle Sam take care of most of our school needs. You can see what else I have ordered by clicking on my Curriculum 2011-2012 page above. I have made some changes since the a-ha of Classical education hit me a couple weeks ago, which equaled a massive Amazon shopping adventure.

I wanted a new washer/dryer. In the spirit of adulthood, however, we paid a few bills off and bought school stuff. I can see me carrying a small balance with Amazon for the rest of my life.

The damage:

Progeny Press guide to The Bears on Hemlock Mountain. This is our first try at these guides. We will not wait until Fall to start it.

Explode the Code 1 for Kindergarten for Evan and Explode the Code 3 for Emma as she just finished 2 1/2

Two Plus Two Is Not Five and Five Times Five Is Not Ten we are going to take a break for the regular books and work through this now. I have also ordered the entire light blue series from Math Mammoth. I haven’t decided if we will wait for Fall with it or not.

First Language Lessons Level 2 I had the combined smaller book. I didn’t understand the repetition and sold it. :/ The only consolation is I like the updated version better anyway.

The first three sets of Bob Books. We started these this morning.

The Odyssey for our classical reads, it was one I couldn’t find at our library of the group I was looking for.

The Story of the World Volume 2. I just last week sold my Volume 3. I don’t want to use it as our main spine, we have Mystery of History for that, but to use as extra reading? You bet.

Writing With Ease Sold this last week too. Brand new, for a steal. The buyer may not have even gotten hers before mine was ordered. sigh.

The History of the Ancient World. I bought this because we are just finishing up MOH 1, and with the classical model, that is the time period our oldest needs to be in this Fall for high school. I don’t want to bore him to tears with the exact same text, so we will use Bauer’s book.

ROAR is a family guide for the reading of The Chronicles of Narnia. It is a giant book and was priced at 99 cents at CBD. I added a few things to make my shipping cost worth it.

I had ordered the 3rd grade volume for English from Rod and Staff. You may have read my post from this week about the trip there to get several more levels from their store here in Kentucky.

I just ordered The Core yesterday, and it came this morning! It is a book for us about classical education. I have one more, from the Bludorns on its way.

Seasons of a Mother’s Heart is mine as well. I can’t wait to get a chance to read it!

The Well-Trained Mind started this whole mess!! I am still reading it as well.

The writer of Math Mammoth recommends a regular school text for Pre-Algebra and above. I got this one used for 8 bucks, so I figured I wasn’t losing much if it doesn’t work out.

And finally, even though I could take lots more pics of stuff I bought in the last few weeks, is Song School Latin. I can’t wait to start it!

I am still waiting on some deliveries which I will share as they come, and will share our final selections for each child when we start school in the Fall again.

We have not done any school this week, after some unexpected deaths in our church family. I am very thankful for homeschooling, as we were able to stop our lives, and direct our energy to those who needed it more. I am also thankful that our son was able to leave home and go spend time with his best friend, who lost his father. When we decided to homeschool we never though of things like that, but they mean so much to us!

We have also decided to go back to a year-round schedule, so we not go back to school full-time next week either. The advantages of year-round homeschooling for us are the flexibility and kids who don’t need to review when we pick up again.

I hope to share next week, if the Lord wills, how much the Classical mindset has already changed our days, before we have even begun to use it in the classroom, and how we plan to keep it true to our Biblical standards.