That's a wrap!

The 13-14 school year is in the bag and all wrapped up now. It's been a bittersweet year, full of changes and learning curves but also full of exciting adventures and discoveries. I went back to work last August as the Academy Coordinator (aka- principal) of our homeschooling charter program. With more than 220 students, two buildings and 15 staff members, it's been a challenge to figure out how to work part-time, homeschool 6th grade and still do all the bits that we love while getting all the work done that has to fit in a day.

Looking at our plans for this 13-14 year, some of our best laid plans were completed but some... they fell apart mid-stream. Our curriculum plans were basically destroyed due to me being less able to provide direct one on one instruction and work. We ended up dropping Bravewriter in late October, in favor of NaNoWriMo and then a writing class from Athena's Academy.  Art of Problem Solving was put on hold while the kid attempted a high school site based Algebra class. He ended up finishing one semester in the classroom and returned home for the last semester via UC Scout.  We did complete Intellego Ancient Civilizations, as well as Horrible Histories related to our spring break travels. The kid happily worked his way through Intellego's Plate Techtonics and Evolution units. These were some of our most fun lessons all year!

We also found huge success in simply free reading. The kid has blown through 60 books this year, raised his lexile score by 200 points and shown that you don't actually need a boring literature anthology to learn. He did two novel studies based around Ender's Game and A Tale of Two Cities. He just finished a fantastic analysis paper on the use of foreshadowing in the movie "Frozen", along with several papers for his academic writing class.

Now that we both have a better handle on middle school homeschooling along with me working, we can start looking forward and figuring out what 7th grade will hold! We're opting for a few changes and a few consistent hits that we've had over the years.  I'm feeling less ambitious and planning to stick to more options that we know were successful in a model where has to work alone most of the day.

Language Arts
Don't Forget to Write for the Secondary Grades: 50 Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons (Ages 11 and Up)
Dystopian Literature from Online G3 (hopefully!)

Science/History
We're opting for a double-Science approach this year! Neither of us were really excited about studying medieval history (the standards based part) so we opted for history through science. We'll be tackling all of these:
The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way
The Story of Science: Newton at the Center
Intellego: Chemical Reactions and hopefully Oceanography

Math
We are hoping for a site-based high school Geometry class. Plus Math Olympiad and our regular math competition team.

The Extras
Fencing twice a week will continue. He's also hoping to take a Video Game Design class, along with guitar again and at least one dance class. Our school is also adding a student leadership program which he'll be a part of this year. He has at least three mods he's also planning on programming in Minecraft.

We're discovering that he's at the age where everyone keeps asking when he's going back to "real school".  The truth is, the further we get from "real school" the harder that seems to imagine. We have finally found a school that works for us and lets him be himself. He doesn't have to hide or pretend, doesn't have to shove his book in his backpack and pretend that he isn't reading that one. Perhaps we'll stumble across the perfect fit, but in the meantime, we are happy just being happy!