Ch, Ch,Ch, Changes

This past April, Jed and I made the decision to home school!  

It was a tough decision, the school Evan and Seth were attending is amazing and in many ways had become like family.  

In the end it came down to how God was leading our family. 

Then came another hard decision, what curriculum to use?!  

The selections are, seemingly, endless. I'm not an organized person so that helped eliminate some of the more hodgepodged options.  

At first I thought I would teach one of the boys with a computer based curriculum and the other with a more traditional curriculum.  

The more I researched computer based curriculum, the less impressed I was by them. At the same time, I found myself drawn to the Sonlight curriculum.  

As I did more research I realized that it was a great fit for our family.  I could teach all three older boys, History, Science and Bible together while addressing their individual Language Arts and Math needs!    

Sonlight has several different options for each subject (except LA) so here's what I've chosen. 

History: Core B

Bible: Core B

Reading: Core B/readers at each of the boy's level

Language Arts:  Sonlights Program at each boy's level

Math: Singapore Math at each boy's level

Handwriting: Getty-Dubay at each boy's level

Science- Apologia's Astronomy

So just before I purchased the curriculum, I changed my mind on Science.  I fell in love with Apologia and the boys were excited about Astronomy so we opted out of Sonlight's Science!  I love flexibility! 

Our Science experiment materials arrived first! The boys met the UPS driver at the road after I told them that he had arrived with our school stuff!  Excited!  

Then the textbooks and journals!

Finally the bulk of our curriculum! I've only been a part of the Sonlight culture for a couple weeks now but I gather that they call this "Box Day"!  

The box emptied onto our home schooling hutch. Much of it is in the bottom cabinet. 

The 36 week instructors guide for LA, History, Bible, Reading and Spelling! 

And so, today begins my career as a teacher and our families adventure learning together!  Hopefully we'll all survive and I can post about our first day later!