School Plans 2015-2016

[I have decided to break this post into more than one post...because it sort of became...too long].

Part 1: the dilemma

Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” 

                                                                            ― L.M. Montgomery

(I am applying this quote to the new school year.)

I mentioned before that I've been working on my homeschooling plans for the next school year.  For me, "working on plans" is much less sitting down with an excel spreadsheet and much more waiting; thinking, praying, and just waiting for something to strike me (like inspiration from the Holy Spirit).



July is slipping through my fingers and the sales offered by the homeschooling curriculum sites are coming and going fast enough to make my head spin.  All kinds of thoughts have been percolating in my brain and it is time for me to get concrete.

Last night I started digging.

I turned to things that I remembered having read once.  I turned to old friends, old sources of wisdom and inspiration to try to get my juices flowing.  I came upon this over at In the Heart of my Home
which begins with this:

Late last summer, as I was gathering my thoughts on curriculum and trying to plan the year, I hit a wall. Actually, I was probably already flat up against the wall, but the time of year compelled me to do what I'd always done, so I pressed on. But I didn't want to plan. And I wasn't enthused about all the things that had previously sparked so much creative energy. 

I read on.  (from "Could it be a storybook year?")

For over twenty years, I have been inspired by the art and the literature of picture books. I've thrown my whole heart into creating with books, whether it was bulletin boards in a classroom or fullblown unit studies for many ages. Literature-based learning was where I invested most of my creative energy. Some people love their cameras, some their paints, others their yarn or fabric. For me, it was always those beautiful books and the endless possiblities of things we could do with them.

That got me thinking about storybooks and then about literature in general.  If we needed beautiful books, I needed to track down good recommendations.  I started with Elizabeth Foss' Serendipity lists here and then looked at Ambleside's lists here.

Here's a peek at Ambleside's list for K-1 (just to get your creative juices flowing).  If you look for these on Amazon, you can probably find 10 of them for sale for $0.01 each.  I'm not sure what condition these will arrive in, but I'll let you know.  I ordered a bunch.

Marcia Brown Ruth Brown Jeff Brumbeau Eve Bunting Eric Carle Kay Chorao Joyce Dunbar Marie Hall Ets Candace Fleming Denise Fleming Mem Fox Don Freeman Nancy Price Graff John Graham Hardie Gramatky Donald Hall M.C. Hellendorfer James Herriot Angela Hunt Karla Kuskin Munroe Leaf Jonathan London Page McBrier Edna Miller A. A. Milne Martha Sanders Brinton Turkel Susan Wojciechowski

Stone Soup The Picnic The Quilt Maker’s Gift Flower Garden House for Hermit Crab Cathedral Mouse Ten Little Mice In the Forest Gabriella’s Song In the Small, Small Pond In the Tall, Tall Grass Time for Bed A Rainbow of My Own In the Hush of the Evening I Love You, Mouse Little Toot Oxcart Man Gather Up, Gather In James Herriot’s Treasury for Children The Tale of the Three Trees James and the Rain The Story of Ferdinand Red Wolf Country Beatrice’s Goat Jumping Bean Mousekin’s Christmas Eve Mousekin’s Frosty Friend Mousekin’s Golden House Mousekin’s Thanksgiving Mousekin’s Woodland Sleepers Patches Finds a New Home Now We Are Six The House at Pooh Corner* When We Were Very Young Winnie-the-Pooh* Alexander and the Magic Mouse Thy Friend, Obadiah The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey

My brain being the unsystematic boom-and-bust type of brain it is, immediately began expanding this notion upward to my older grade-school aged children who would need more than picture books (even if I know they'll read (or re-read) those too!)

I revisited this list for children's books and then this post for the older children over at the beautiful blog Wildflowers and Marbles.  I might have made a few more purchases.

[A funny aside: the other night I mentioned to my husband that I had begun planning for the new school year and buying a few things on Amazon.  "Yes," he said, "I noticed the cart on Amazon had fifty things in it!"  heh heh...just browsing...]

I'm going to break here to give you a chance to follow some of those links and get your ideas going too.  In my next post I'll add the second set of thoughts that went into my schoolyear planning.

***I'm adding something because I forgot: Run over to Amongst Lovely Things and read a whole bunch on forming your children's moral imagination! (lots of book recommendations there!)