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General

This year is the “learn to write or die trying” year. Science has 42 essays!  History has five major papers. Religion has lots of summaries. Get ready and hold on tight! I’m going to post individual “cheat sheets” to these courses in the next couple of days.

The main thing we’ve realized in high school is that unless you are in an LS class, the syllabus daily pacing is REALLY hard to follow (for our particular personalities; for most other people it’s fine, I hear.) I do better metering it out myself. Some things turn into “unit studies” and others it’s just a weekly goal. 

English (Warriner’s or Holt/Wordly Wise)

  • Read over the text book and syllabus. It’s a 4-day schedule. Decide what you think of that. We ignored it and did a weekly goal. We did about 3 exercises each day. For spelling and vocab, we start those on day one, too and do an exercise or two each day. 
  • Vocabulary: Even when we switched to Holt, we used the Warriner’s vocabulary. Wordly Wise was too much back then. I might try it this year. See my Quizlet list for the Warriner’s vocabulary pretests.

History

  • Choose your history books. If your kid’s not an awesome reader, and you don’t have an audio option, choose not-so-hard history books. We dove back into the boxes from previous years wherever we could. 
  • Separate the literature and history schedule. My kid reads daily 30-45 minutes and summarizes it on a google doc or comes and blabs to me like Charlotte Mason kids. This habit dramatically reduces the “feast or famine” reading marathons. 
  • See my cheat sheet once I write it.

Latin

  • Get your vocab in order. Check out my resources here.

Religion

  • Acquaint thyself with the books and assignments. This syllabus really threw my kid and me.  Give it a read-thru. The old Catholic school books don’t use normal chapter numbering and then Laura references page numbers instead of chapter titles. The combination of these two things have made me crazy since 3rd grade. 
  • I often go through the syllabus and use a highlighter in the textbook so I can break it up by chapter and ignore the syllabus. The only bummer there is that there’s a lot of handy info in the syllabus and the “overview of assignments” docs. I’ve never found a solution that works for my brain. GRADER. I can’t live without them.