Tag Archives: Well-Trained Mind Academy

Plan for Next Year

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While we have liked Power Homeschool and it has definitely helped while incorporating the toddlers into our family, there are some definite negatives to it so we have decided we will not be using it last year.

So I’ve been lesson planning. I’ve been working on Fritz’s plans first. He’s going to be in high school. How did that happen? I started this blog when I was pregnant with him and now he’s almost 14 and heading into 9th grade. Crazy.

The boys will both be using Layers of Learning as a base for history, geography, science, and the arts, but I am making it so I am not so needed and they can do it on their own. Fritz will be doing year 1, 14 units for two weeks each and 6 units for one week each. Adrian will be doing 34 units from year 1 and 2 for one week each.

They’ll be using Writer’s Workshop for grammar, usage, and mechanics and vocabulary/spelling. They’ll be using Cover Story for writing. They’ll both be working on handwriting. They’ll be using Progeny Press literature guides. I haven’t picked books for Adrian, but Fritz will be reading To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, Romeo and Juliet, and Lord of the Flies as well as reading and analyzing a few Robert Frost poems.

They will be using Family Time Fitness for PE. For math, they’ll be using Art of Problem Solving. Adrian will be doing prealgebra and Fritz will be doing introduction to algebra. I have never seen Adrian get so excited over math as when I showed him the AOPS samples. He loves the idea of playing with numbers to make it all make sense. I gave them both several choices for math and they separately both picked the same one.

Fritz will be taking Spanish I from the Well-Trained Mind Academy. We agreed that truly learning a foreign language will work better with a live teacher. He’ll be taking that two mornings a week. He’ll also be doing on-line seminary, covering the second half of the Book of Mormon in the fall and the first half of the Doctrine and Covenants in the spring. He’ll have one evening a week in person at the church for that.

Fritz will also continue doing Code Ninjas. I’m not sure exactly how that will look by the time school starts. The dojo is currently shut down completely and he’s been working on Unity 3D/C# on his own a little bit at home and then taking some on-line classes from the senseis via Zoom. He takes digital logic once a week, Python twice a week, and HTML once a week. He is also on the esports team. He has practice two evenings a week and games on Saturdays. We’ll see how any of that changes in the fall, but for now he is loving it.

Our 2020-21 school year will be 34 weeks long. We’re going to start the day after Labor Day and finish the Friday before Memorial Day.

3 Week Down, 33 To Go

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We have completed the first three weeks of the school year. So far, it’s going great.

Religion
We learned some vocabulary words and about the Plan of Salvation and keeping the Sabbath Day holy. (Ani has been to more days of seminary already this year than last year. It’s a nice thing to be healthy! They are doing Old Testament this year. She loves her teachers.)

History
We’re doing modern history this year so we started in the second half of the 1800s. We learned about Africa and India and a little bit about the US. We read a book about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Fritz was horrified at what men thought about women in the 1800s.

Science
We’re doing physics this year. We’re using Elemental Science. The boys are loving all the experiments we are doing. We are doing 6-10 experiments a week. We learned about air pressure and water and made hovercrafts.

Latin
The boys (including Adrian who isn’t specifically taking Latin, but is around when we do it) have learned 5 verbs and 5 nouns and the amo chant and the first chapter maxim in Latin for Children A.

Art and Music
We learned about Georgia O’Keeffe and George Frideric Handel. We’ve studied several O’Keeffe paintings and listened to several pieces by Handel.

Cameron
Cameron read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson and several poems by modern poets. He’s learning to write in cursive. He reviewed nouns. Spelling You See is worked great for him. He started the second level of Writing With Skill. He had worked on two-level outlines and notetaking. He’s started formal logic and vocabulary lessons. He’s completed three lessons of Math-U-See Algebra.

Fritz
Fritz read Homer Price is has read several chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He’s learning cursive and doing well with Spelling You See. He’s reading his own passages for narration now and doing lots of dictation. He reviewed nouns, pronouns, and verbs. He started vocabulary lessons. He’s almost done the third lesson of Math-U-See Delta. He loves division.

Adrian
Adrian is still working through his phonics lessons and using Explode the Code. He likes Spelling You See. He is learning to do narrations. He doesn’t like copywork, but he puts up with it. He reviewed nouns and verbs. He’s almost done the third lesson of Math-U-See Beta. He much prefers the videos to doing the worksheets.

Ani
Ani’s school year didn’t really start until this week. She had her first Well-Trained Mind Academy classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. She absolutely loves her classes and thinks all of her teachers are great. They are challenging and have a lot of work to do outside of class. Balancing the workload with taekwondo classes (and now she’s been hired to actually work at the taekwondo studio) isn’t easy, but she’s loving all of it.