Learning never stops in the Land of Oz. We enjoy learning in various ways all year. For the last month or so I’ve sort of enjoyed a break from regular planned school and let the boys explore their interests at their various camps.

Perched on the threshold where the boys are ready to take a lot of their education into their own hands to explore more outlets that they enjoy, we stare into the abyss and are clueless.

We’ve covered such a broad base of subjects from science to history to geography to music. All sorts of things. Now we need to get more in depth into fields and also start to head toward fields that are truly interesting to each boy.

This scares me though because it is definitely harder to plan. I’ve found a course we are going to try out. We’re working on the first unit and the boys seem to like it so far! Huzzah! If this works it gives us a main science plan for the next little while.

Right now? It’s General Science at a far higher level to prepare the boys for the advanced studies they would follow if they went to public high school.

Right now the plan progression is: General Science, Physical Science, Marine Science, Biology, Chemistry, Physics.

Marine Science just sounds cool. I want to take this as much as they do! The good news is the program we found, while costly, actually covers the coursework for AP classes which means I can find out how to get them into AP testing for Bio, Chem, and Physics and they could possibly get college credits.

That would be nice. Real nice. I like the idea of working on college credits because if you have to take the class once it might as well count! I hate repeating classes. (This is probably a personal thing since I repeated several classes two or three times between private middle school, high school, and university. Frustrating.)

Today we did a cool experiment to look at what the density of items means. FUN!

Of course we’ll see if we stick to this. We tend to jump around, so who knows. But at least it’s a basic plan to get us by and we could end up loving it!

Unfortunately that leaves me lacking the rest of my plan for the year.

We are continuing our literature lists from two different websites. Right now the boys are enjoying Around the World in 80 Days for example. Other reads we are looking forward to in the immediate future are: War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, King Solomon’s Mines, The Little Book of War, and some biographies on Helen Keller, John Jacob Astor, and Will Rogers.

Obviously these cover more then just literature and are partly historical in nature. Yet, I am trying to decide on possible history/geography courses. There’s plenty of possibilities but I’m just not sure if there’s something particular I would like to pursue. I’m definitely looking for ideas!

Our daily devotions are detailed. For those wondering, Caramon is NOT entering Seminary this year due to his birthday falling in October. Yes, I know this means there’s a possibility of only three years in Seminary but we don’t know that for sure. Here’s a little glimpse into our daily devotions: Brother prayer and personal prayer followed up by a chapter of scripture, one general conference address, and one article from their church magazine. Joram will graduate from The Friend for kids to The New Era for teens in October. Caramon is already using this. I think it’s a fantastic devotion time for them that will hopefully help them to grow into strong spiritual men! As Joram enters the priesthood this September and Caramon advances, I marvel at their spirituality. They take their priesthood duties quite seriously and of that I’m so proud. It’s all them. They are amazing young men!

We decided to join a local homeschool group that has a variety of clubs and class offerings. I’m hoping that the boys will find ways to explore their elective interests this way. Joram really enjoyed his summer theatre class and that’s just not something I can do myself. I have the theatrical background to more then cover it, but it’s just not something we could do on our own. Caramon wants to continue his study towards all things CSI related. He already has completed two CSI courses at camp, an entire CSI thing put out by Discovery Channel, and earned just about every related merit badge in Boy Scouts I think. I’m not sure where to send him next in his learning path. Mostly this is library visits where he just researches.

I think both boys would love a battle bots group. Yeah because THAT is cheap. HA!

At any rate, that’s where we sit right now. Yay for school!

Please, comment. Especially if you have curriculum reviews/ideas!

For now I leave you with our experiment on the density of objects from today:

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In case you want to know those layers are from top to bottom: Liquid: Oil, water, corn syrup Objects: Ice, grape, rock. We actually placed the liquids in first as oil then water then corn syrup. It was cool to watch the liquids bore right down through each other just like the objects!

–Lady O