I just finished my curriculum for the upcoming school year. It feels so good to have it done, but I can’t send it in until I have the assessment done. I was planning on doing a portfolio of the children’s work, but since I was not as organized as I had hoped, I am going with a teacher evaluation. I found a teacher on a homeschool message board and we will be getting together in early August.

I wanted to have the rest of the paperwork done and out of the way, so I sat down tonight and did the curriculum, although I have been gathering the information for some time now.

For those of you not in Vermont, there are 6 subject areas that we are required by statute to cover. They are: basic communication skills (which is reading, writing, and “the use of numbers,” otherwise known as math), citizenship, history, and government in VT and the US, physical education and comprehensive health education, literature, the natural sciences, and fine arts.

As I mentioned before, I am using Learning Language Arts through Literature this year, which covers all of reading writing and literature, or at least I hope. For literature, I listed the four book studies that will be done with LLATL and added that the children will read other books for enjoyment to be chosen by each child.

In fact, in most subject areas, I listed the skills that I want them to gain, but the topics will be determined by the children. I don’t know if this is acceptable to the Home Study Office, so I am a little anxious about what they will say.

For language arts, I included the scope and sequence of LLATL and for math I included the scope and sequence for Switched-on Schoolhouse Math.

For history the children will decide the topics, but I will help them if they need it and make sure it is appropriate. I want them to learn how to find information on the chosen topics, write a simple report or narrative to share what they learned, and make projects that are relevant to the topic. Hopefully, this is adequate. I know it is, but I just hope the state agrees because I am not sure what else I can give them. I am not going to force the kids to learn arbitrarily determined subjects when they should be able to follow their interests. I did list a few Vermont History topics, but they were vague. And we will do some geography as well.

For Phys. Ed., it will be child-led, but I listed a few activities I know we will cover, too, and for health I listed some topics I got from a sample curriculum I found here.

For science, we will be using an experimental biology book for kids that a neighbor gave me. It has brief explanations of each topic and an experiment to go along with it. I figure we can always get books from the library if we need to dig deeper. Then we will do a weather book I bought last year. It gets into the factors that affect weather and then teaches the kids to make simple forecasts. Finally, we will do something on the planets and stars, probably based on library books. Plus, the kids have been dying to make a solar system model.

For fine arts, Painter has a guitar that he wants to learn how to play and Jokey has a Djembe drum. I am also going to teach them some fundamentals of art, such as line, shape, color, value, form, etc. I think they would really get into that, especially Painter. The rest will be child-led.

So that’s it. I’ll see how it goes and hopefully they don’t ask me for more than that because frankly, I don’t know what I would add!