2024-2025 School Year Planning Post

The journey continues! I'm so blessed to have another year to plan and home educate two amazing people! We have a wonderful community as well that I'll share a little about in this planning post. For reference, if you are interested in any past planning posts you can visit them here:

2023-2024, 2022-2023, 2021-2022, 2020-2021, 2019-2020, 2018-2019, 2017-2018, 2016-2017

This is the first year I will have a high schooler!!! I can't believe Christian is 9th grade! For that reason, I'm keeping our normal records of books, activities, etc. but also formatting them into transcript form for Christian. I have a long post here all about high school credits. If you're interested in learning more feel free to download the free handout I created for our community.

Now, as is typical of my planning posts, I will go through each subject under the Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, and Knowledge of the Universe to share a few things about our school plans!

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Knowledge of God

The first priority of this subject is simply the Word of God. As a family we are reading through the entire Bible chronologically. We are currently half way through and will start another reading plan in January. The kids also have their Bible curriculum that they will work through as part of their devotion time. I also am hopeful that this school year will have something helpful at church that will continue to disciple them in their peer groups. We have a wonderful pastor that preaches in an expository style through the Bible and always has a word to share with our children and teens!

In our Morning Time we will be reading and studying church history in the book Hearts and Hands.

Knowledge of Man

Below is the list of each subject within Knowledge of Man and what I plan to use for both students:

History - Christian will be finishing his CLEP American History course and take the test for college credit. Eva Mae will be reading selections from several American History anthologies (this one and this one) for the period of 1815-1880, and all of us will enjoy Red Badge of Courage and Across Five Aprils as audio books on our commute to Nashville Notes each week.

We also will be looking at some ancient Roman history in our Citizenship as well as through some books like Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth and Guerber's History of Rome

And we keep a Book of Centuries - we each have our own (read about it here)

Literature - I'm really excited about our book club this year! We have some wonderful titles planned with literature activities in our book clubs. You can read all the titles here. We also will enjoy learning Shakespeare with some friends and attending performances by Nashville Shakes! We'll continue with the Poetry and Humanity book and also study the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in our Morning Time.

Citizenship - I've shared our reading plan for Citizenship in my Morning Time post. We will be studying the life of Marcus Brutus by Plutarch and reading the book Ourselves by Charlotte Mason.

Economics - I am finally scheduling the book Whatever Happened to Penny Candy! We watched West Side Story a few months ago before going to the symphony concert to hear the Bernstein performance and Eva Mae couldn't believe when the candy sale tag said Tootsie Rolls were only 1 cent!

Composition - Christian and Eva Mae will be working on essay writing throughout the year. Christian finished a writing camp this summer that teaches how to form a thesis statement, write introductions and conclusions, and other tips for writing clearly. The books The Lively Art of Writing and Know and Tell have helped guide them in their composition. 

Languages / Art / Music - all of these are discussed in my Morning Time post! In addition to our folk song and hymn each month we are also continuing lessons at Nashville Notes (Eva Mae on flute and Christian on baritone) as well as a focused composer study on the pieces we will hear at the Nashville Symphony this school year! If you would like to take my class on composer study let me know! I have two 6 week sessions available. One for ages 10 and up and one for ages 5-10!

Knowledge of the Universe

Science - Since this is a very big subject to try and fit in on this post, I encourage you to read and download our plans from this page! I'm really excited about our community that will be studying physics together. It's a blessing to have the support from friends and also for my children to have other peers who will be learning and talking about the same things when we get together.

In addition to those plans we will also read these books this year: All About Rockets and Jets, James Maxwell Immortals of Science

Geography - we continue with our plan to read through Halliburton's Book of Marvels! We are about halfway through the Orient. It took us around 3 semesters to read the Occident and I'm pretty sure we are on the same timing to finish the Orient this semester. Don't skip this book! It has been one of my favorite all time homeschool books!

We also will work on the next books in our Trick Geography plans. This year we are doing South America. I'll also supplement with some stories from this public domain work.

Natural History - I'm excited to have community for nature study again this year. We will meet once a month with an object lesson that will focus on botany and foraging. I'll update my nature blog so you can read and learn more! Check out all our past lessons here.

Math - Christian will continue with Saxon Algebra 1 (he's about half way through now) and Eva Mae will continue with Saxon 6/7. Eva Mae will also have an online math component - I'm still working out the details of how I will have her set up to complete these lessons.

Physical Development - Christian is beginning his fencing training this summer and will continue through the school year. I'm looking forward to having him work at home on exercises and strength training. Eva Mae and I will begin a morning program together from various HIIT schedules.

Handicrafts - this is one I feel like I end up "planning from behind." Right now, the plan is for Christian to build rockets (He will be using openrocket on the computer and working with a team to build one for competition.) Eva Mae will probably show interest in things throughout the year and because of the flexibility of homeschool, she can pursue those interests!

I do want to look into some volunteer opportunities to keep record for our homeschool. My first place to look will be the state parks and I'm hoping we can help out a few times each semester! Thanks so  much for looking through all of this information! I'm so excited for our year of school and love talking about Charlotte Mason and planning! If you have any questions or would like to have me sit down with you to help you plan, feel free to reach out! I have a consultation page here with more information!