Special Delivery!

It was delivery day at Little Angels Academy!! I absolutely LOVE new textbooks and I was so excited to get their first semester books in so that I can make my plans. As a former teacher, it doesn't take me too long to write my lesson plans when I have my materials in front of me. So, I sharpened my pencil, grabbed my lesson plan book and got to work! Does anyone else do lessons the old fashioned way? When working at the public school, they began making transitions to electronic lesson plans and I happily complied. But, there is something about writing out plans in pencil. It makes you feel prepared, yet flexible. 

One challenge that I had with these plans was the fact that I am working in a semester framework rather than a yearly framework. We are doing the Language book and Science book only for this semester. I was a little concerned at first but then figured out a way to make it happen! As I explained here, we are doing Apologia Astronomy which is set up to work two days a week. I simply doubled that so each lesson would be completed in one week instead of two. Looking through the Science book and notebooks, I am really excited about this subject!

A harder challenge came in with the Language since it is created to last all year. However, I made a discovery that helped me out. I had already planned to make Writing our Focus for this semester. Call it a special area if you will. While looking through the Language book by Bob Jones, I realized that every other lesson was built on a writing genre. Each chapter could stand alone and did not have to follow the one before. This makes it ideal to do all odd numbered chapters in Language period, and all even numbers through our Writing period. One book will cover two areas! By planning it in this way, we will only be two chapters shy of being finished at Christmas break. Each chapter takes a couple of weeks so we will only need to do it through January and start our next semester the beginning of February! Whoo!! Did you get all of that? LOL 

Anyhoo, to make a long story short, my semester plan is doable! Yay! We will just see how it goes in practice. One of my favorite parts about creating our own homeschool schedule is knowing that I can plan for breaks when we need them. For instance, my hubby and I are going on a cruise in September. I am planning for the girls to have that week off as well! I am also planning for a week at Thanksgiving and three weeks at Christmas. :) Love it! 

Thanks for swinging by! I hope to have pictures up soon but I must find my charger to my camera. Ahhh!!! I just had it! Don't you love how something can disappear?! Happy blogging!