Our Core Book

We do half our year before winter break and half after winter break. Years that are divided into trimesters stink, because the middle trimester is split in two. So, one thing that I strongly prefer is quarters over trimesters. I would really like eight weeks and an exam week to make a 9 week quarter.


I am very happy with the CM-ish/ classical-ish work that we will be doing this year. I created a lesson plan/ core book that seems to be working well. I turned a word doc to landscape, let my little man pick a background color, typed The Well-Nourished Mind across the top, underneath this I typed Overview of Weekly Topics for Recreation, Recitation, and Reproduction, and inserted 6 text boxes. I like this style of Guide.

Text box 1 is narrow and runs about 2/3 of the page with the words artist, composer, poet, life skills/ handicraft, nature walk, and unstructured play/ masterly inactivity. Text box 2 is wide and also runs 2/3 of the page. It has space for memory work in English grammar, cultural geography, political geography, science, Latin, and Farsi. Running underneath and the length of boxes 1 and 2, box 3 goes to the bottom of the page and is my space for dictation. Box 4 begins at the top runs 3/4 of the way to the bottom and is where I will place the poem that the little man is working to memorize. Box 5 is in the little space below box 4 and has space for the title of the literature book he will be working on with room underneath to check off 2 days of narration and 2 days of reading aloud. Text box 6 is narrow and runs the length of the doc for spelling words.