Evaluating Our 2017-2018 Homeschool Year

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The 2017-2018 homeschool year is over and it’s time to look back.

What worked? What didn’t?

What will we continue to use and what do we need to ditch?

I shared my thoughts on our school year during a Facebook Live. Learn what worked and what didn’t work for our family this year.

I realize this is a pretty long video.

A lot of folks asked me for a cheat sheet. That’s actually hard to provide because a lot of things we tried were great, but there are specific reasons that they didn’t work for us.

Here are a few tips for “skimming” the video:

You will find links to everything I talk about below in the order I discuss the curriculum. You can fast forward to the content you are most interested in hearing about.

What didn’t work in a nutshell:

In general, my Happy Planner was too big. I decided to return to bullet journaling for my home and work schedule. I create a separate planner for school.

My loop schedule didn’t work in a loop. Instead, it became a list of ideas to choose from and we focused on what we were inspired to look at that day.

Our content areas worked out really well for the most part. I shared some of our favorite things.

Notes: What did and didn’t work this year

Planning
1. Happy Planner (blog post…update to share that the planner was too big)
2. Planning Forms (love Pam’s forms)
3. Bullet Journal Method (blog post – the method I am returning to)
4. Looping (good idea – needs to be adjusted because it didn’t work for us)
 
Art
Music
2. Musicals
 
History
1. Usborne World Wars (WW1 and 2 book)
2. Candy Bomber (WW2 non-fiction human interest story)
3. A Night Divided (Berlin Wall historical fiction)
4. World History (textbook for high school)
5. Crash Course World History (YouTube)
6. CNN 10 for Current Events (10-minute current event news for students)
World Geography
1. Around the World Stories (Geography)
4. Pin It Maps (blog post)
5. Fantasy Mapping – This is the first video in the series that we used to create our fantasy maps. 
 
English
1. Brave Writer (Love)
2. Less is More (book – a favorite)
3. Pixar In a Box Storytelling (Kahn Academy – FREE)
4. Annotating Literary Elements (Rooted in Language Product)
6. Philosophy for Kids (guide book)
 
Science
3. Georgia Aquarium (Traveling Homeschoolers
 
Math
1. Singapore
2. Hands-On Equations (blog post)
3. Teaching Textbooks Pre-Alg and Algebra and Geometry
 
Sign Language
1. ASL 1 
3. Switched at Birth (Netflix)

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2 Comments

  1. Thanks for the yearly wrap-up! I loved seeing what worked for others and just using the discussion to fuel my own school year analysis. I also loved seeing new resources.
    I couldn’t see comments you were referring to and I would love to know more about the fantasy maps you tried for geography as well as the few things you stopped and wrote down. I think one was math related. Maybe catch up math?

    Also, I second the idea of party school on math. We called them feast days and we did one feast per month. It was related to different subjects. One month science, one month literature, then math. And so on. I loosely follow CM and was trying to combine her “feast of ideas” with BW “party school” and that was the result. They were so beneficial!

    1. Thanks for your comment. I am going to add the YouTube video we used for Fantasy mapping to the links. I’ll add video one and then you can follow them to find the others.

      Your feast days sound like so much fun! It sounds like the perfect combination of CM and Party School. 🙂

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