erin.kate,
In the instance of your nine year old son, I would probably start the school year with Grammar Island (1-2 months). Then (starting month three) I’d do one Practice Island Sentence each school day until I ran out. Also starting in month three I’d alternate between Building Language and Music Hemispheres. I’d do one of them MW and one TTH. You may not cover an entire lesson each time… in fact, I’d keep it kind of short (15 minutes). I’d keep doing these two and the sentences until you run out of the books. Whichever book you run out of first, you can use those days of the week for Sentence Island. I’d keep doing this until you work through all the books.
If you are the more organized sort, you actually can go through the books and make a schedule/plan about the actual number of pages you want to cover each day and then you’ll have a plan for exactly how long this will take you. I’m not the organized sort, so we kinda floated through this and I stopped the kids whenever it seemed like a natural break in the text. I’d let them narrate it back to me and we’d pick up where we left off last time. BTW, as far as Building Language goes, you might want to make flash cards and review them at the beginning of each lesson or every other lesson. This will come in handy by the time they’ve done two or three years of the Language books.
I do not include literature in this. I just kept reading with my kids whatever I already planned for literature. Also, this doesn’t cover creative writing… except in understanding poetry. If you are looking for something creative, I’m currently teaching One Year Adventure Novel…but it really is for older students. Until then I used something like IEW’s Fables, Myths, and Fairy Tales.
Hope this was helpful. If you need some more info, let me know. And I’ll try to check in more regularly! Sorry about the delay.
Jen
