The Bright and Shiny Grade 6 Plan

I love planning!  Planning trips, planning a party, and especially planning our homeschooling.  I've learned that it's a map I'm making, but that I might not necessarily follow the planned route exactly, and that's okay. I work with real children who have ideas and ambitions of their own and I can't force my plan on them; they have to come along willingly.  And that is enough metaphor for one paragraph.

I have the year mapped out with blocks and secondary lessons and breaks.  It is a fairly traditional Waldorf grade 6 year with some of our not-so-traditional resources thrown in.  We aren't giving up Life of Fred and you can't make us!  Here is the block rotation:

Ancient Greek History I

Mineralogy

Coastal Ecology (class trip)

Ancient Greek History II

Nature, Number, and Geometry

Ancient Roman History I

Introduction to Physics

Ancient Roman History II

Astronomy

The Middle Ages

Our secondary lessons are mostly connected to our main lessons.  In some cases we simply do art and music from the historical period we are studying in our main lesson (Fine Arts).  We have a couple of cooking secondary lessons planned; one ties in with Ancient Greek history and the other with Physics (cooking is Vocational Education which I am required to offer beginning in jr. high) .  December is always our month for holiday crafting (Applied Arts).  We have two Health lessons planned: one on nutrition to tie in with Mineralogy and one on public and personal sanitation to tie in with Ancient Rome.  (Aren't I clever ~ take that state of California and your required subjects, because I can make health tie in with Waldorf no problem.)  We'll also have a sewing block, which doesn't really tie into Astronomy but what can I do?  The boys want to learn to sew on machines this year.

Papa is going to expand on our Physics and Astronomy blocks by working with the boys all year using two books: Galileo: His Life and Ideas (25 Activities For Kids) and Isaac Newton and Physic For Kids: His Life and Ideas with 21 Activities.

I outsource Physical Education; we have a great company that comes into town and offers PE classes to home-schooled children once a week.  My boys love it.

In addition to main and secondary lessons we will continue to work with (as I said before) Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents (kind of sort of business math, don't you think?), Daily Grammar (simple, easy to use, and they like it), and Spelling City (they love it and seem to be learning some spelling).  Oh, assigning novels last year worked so well that we are going to do it this year as well.  I'm looking at Newberry Award winners and Honor Books again.

The only thing that is really up in the air is foreign language.  I am required to offer foreign language, but my students aren't required to take it and so far they aren't interested.  We bring in Spanish in a fairly organic manner but at some point they need to choose a language.  Maybe we'll try Mango Languages this year since it is free.  I keep telling them that they had better pick up some Dutch as I am thinking about sending them to their uncle in Belgium as "foreign exchange students" in a couple of years.

There is is, pretty as a new copper penny!