Where Has the Time Gone?

As I try to organize my supplies and my space to prepare for a new school year, I am struck by how fast the summer has flown by. It seems we were just scrambling to finish up third grade material and take tests; and, here it is almost time to start again.

We are expecting a big change this year. My sister is going back to school to complete a nursing degree and her children will be staying with me Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I won't have them all day everyday, but enough that I will need to keep up with some of their work too. It just makes it even more pressing for me to be more organized this year.

For social studies and science I am going to try to do Unit Studies. My neice and nephew are both close in age to my oldest son, so I think they will all be able to work on the same (or similar) material. Our first unit study is an Astronomy Unit. I'm developing it myself. I've purused several different companies' Unit Studies. Some were very in depth and/or kind of complicated, I thought. Others were extremely simplistic. I'm going to try to find a middle ground. I have developed an outline of what I think we need to cover and some activities to include. But, I don't want to be too rigid. I want to be able to expand as the kids' interest is piqued. And some things might need to be skimmed over if they aren't as interesting or dropped altogether if they are too complicated.

For language arts we are going to do Literature Studies. I actually purchased a book on this, because it is completely new to me. I'm hoping since grammar is taught in the context of the selections being studied, it might not be as boring as what I was doing last year. I am not using the spelling from the Literature Studies. Because my oldest had such a problem learning to read he still needs a very phonetically structured spelling approach, which does not describe the Literature Studies spelling at all.

Back to my original thought...we've had a wonderful, fun-filled summer. We went to the beach. We visited Yorktown and the Petersburg Battlefield. We visited family. We went on hikes. We swam at the pool. We've tended a vegetable garden that has provided (and still is providing) us with abundant zuccini and tomatoes! We've played with friends and done many other fun things. They say time flies when you're having fun--I guess that's true.