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Do you finish your curriculums?
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Do you always finish your curriculums for the year? If not, do you finish it the next school year or just start fresh with new stuff?
We always finish our curriculum, whether it gets finished as planned or carried over to a new school year. The ONLY exception to this has been a book here or there that we just didn’t all (Voskamp’s Geography of the Holy Land comes to mind). It may take us longer than planned, but I don’t want to start something without finishing it, especially since I buy all our books. Often, we finish a curriculum early–as was the case this year with our science. In this case, I didn’t feel obligated to begin something else right away, but we did finish. Dd just finished EFFTC, 1 last week. I wasn’t planning to start her in volume 2 til next year, but we’re going to begin this week. It all washes out in the end in my experience.
For us, that depends on the curriculum (whether we liked it or not) or if it’s something that can be carried over to the next year, like Spelling Wisdom from SCM, math, copywork books, cursive, etc. Certain science-related resources will carry over to next year (Jack’s Insects whether we cont. w/ the Notebook or not, the book will be finished either way, but will be probably be continued next year and a living book my oldest is reading, we’ll see).
Latin/Spanish/music/Shakespeare/some devotional books (like Discovering Doctrine for my oldest) will be carried over to our next year, but we may change the foreign lang. programs we’re using, we’ll see. History, our main science text, and new Bible studies will will be the only things that will definitely be new to all of us. My dc will have different lit. books to choose from and as well as a new read aloud for the family.
I say all of that to say, “That depends.”
With a highschooler coming up, several things will change for him and be added, but some things will carry over. My middle boy has grown a lot this year and is ready for meatier independent Bible time, and my youngest will probably begin some independent reading, but not much.
HTH and doesn’t confuse
.Yes and No! It depends on what it is and when we started it. We generally homeschool year round with breaks for babies (the last 6 babies were born during the traditional school year months! this next one is my first summer baby since my oldest). So we start some things at odd times. For example my oldest finishes her math curriculum this week (2nd week of April) and will go right into the next level. My 1st and 2nd graders are using Language Lessons for Little ones but didn’t begin it until partway through this school year, so they’re on lesson 102 of 180. They’ll just keep plugging along and begin the next level when they finish, which will be during the summer. We also started using a history spine in January that we don’t plan on finishing, we’re just going along as far as we get before this baby arrives.
So a little of both.
Does that help?
Like others, it depends on what it is. 🙂 We are so helpful, aren’t we?
For my 8yo this year, we started EftTC2 today. We may or may not continue it through the summer – depends on how much time we have – but it’s not my priority by any means, so if we don’t, we will continue it next year. My 10yo I had to cut down on the amount of history books overall for the year just because we had a bad fall term, so those got moved to free reads (and yes, she has read a couple of them all on her own). We will do what we can throughout the summer, on a lighter schedule than currently, and then start fresh, I think, unless I can fit one more in right at the beginning of the school year – no more than 1 book, though. My 6yo won’t finish Aesop this year, so I will be continuing that one for sure and then adding her next book(s) for Year 2.
So yeah, it depends.
Math, yes. Everything else, maybe. We’ve moved on because they’ve lost interest, I’ve gotten sick of teaching it, they’ve outgrown the material, we’ve decided to switch to a different curriculum, etc. I’m also terrible about finishing chapter books. I’ve quit quite a few read-alouds midbook over the years (and some of them were very good).
Thanks. I always feel like I bought it and need to do everything in it to finish. As we are looking at the last leg of this school year there are a couple things I’m wondering if we’ll really finish. The biggest one is math. I like starting fresh for a new school year and feel like if we are not finished everything from this year then we will already be starting out next year by being behind. We’ll probably just work on it into our summer break until finished but all of us really look forward to summer and don’t want to have to continue to do math. Somehow we’ve got to keep reading going with my oldest, too, and as much as she hates reading and struggles with it, I’m not looking forward to that either. I keep trying to tell myself that we homeschool and it doesn’t really matter if we finish the book the end of this year or the beginning of next, but I guess I like completion and fresh starts.
I get what you are saying, pangit, I like a fresh start too. But, the reality is that that is not always possible in the “completed the text” kind of way. I am a checkbox-er-offer…I like to check things off, throw the workbook out (because it’s completed), put the book back on the shelf, start a new book, have all new material for the next year…I do, I really do. Hey, let’s face it, I like that during the year, too. For some reason I get bored with certain material (honestly, not all of it!) and/or figure out late in the game that it just isn’t working OR I have not read the material well enough OR didn’t give it a fair shot to work…I don’t know. But, any way you look at it, I like the “new” also. But, that is not always a good idea, so…
How I try to look at now is: When I’m planning our new term/year, or whatever, I plan a couple of new things along with new literature/composer/artist/poetry, etc., and that helps me to feel like it’s new, cause it is, but not where I have to learn a whole new program and throw everything else away. I also love to restructure our days OR adjust the layout of the paper schedule we’re using. Those kind of changes help me to not get “bored” but not change too much for my dc. They do like to finish what they’ve started (unless they hate it!) and they really don’t like me changing their core curricula. Sometimes I have to tell them that it’s for my sake and sometimes it’s for theirs, they seem to understand.
The one thing that I do love about CM is the variety…which I know has it’s own curse. But, it keeps me from getting bored and even as we’re changing out artists and maybe even the way we study them, it’s still studying them. But, the foundational principles don’t change: narrations, focused attention, habits, short lessons, good literature, etc.
I think I may have wondered off in this post. Sorry. HTH
We won’t finish everything by the end our school year which is the end of this month. Letters from Egypt will be cut short though I’m impressed we got through as much as we did considering how heavy it is for a first grader! Also. we were reading the Liberty Nature Reader specifically for narration practice and we won’t finish all the stories this month but we’ll do narration from our others books next year so I’m not worried about missing the last bit of that book. We didn’t do all 36 map drills I had scheduled for Africa, and about a month ago I gave up on ever doing our 3rd composer study. It’s easier to ditch it and start fresh next year than stress out trying to cram stuff in. Math is the only thing we are carrying over, everything else has been finished now. 🙂
I am OK if we just get “nearly” finished because if we pick up the next text in the series there is always some overlap. I want my 2nd grader to get a littler further along in his math book when we finish on May 3, so we are doubling up lessons. We aren’t going to finish Story of the World 2 for sure, but we are taking a break to do something else next year so it works.
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