Planning for Next Year—Preparing for High School

Summer is the time when all of us teachers—home and traditional—get ready for the next year. Honestly, I usually start planning in January but this year I actually started researching curriculums and such in November. I suppose part of it is that we will begin high school next year. How is that possible? It seems only yesterday that we started our homeschooling journey with a 1^st grader and a baby. Next year they will be in 9th and 3rd grades.

At this point, I've picked my curriculums and I have just been getting my yearly lesson planning done. I did this last summer and it was a lifesaver during the school year. We had a lot of disruptions to our school year last year and it was great to be able to go back to the plans, see where we left off, and go from there.

Of course, this year is different because I'm not just planning for one school year but essentially for the four years of high school. I need to be sure to a certain extent that what I am doing this year will lead into what credits we need for the sophomore year and so on until we graduate. That has been more of a struggle. And it seems as soon as I have something settled in my head of what we are going to do that I lose confidence in that idea and try something else. It has been exhausting and we haven't even started yet.

Thankfully I have everything set. Most of my curriculum is purchased and most of that is also planned. In about five more weeks we start our next year and the next great adventure. I'm looking forward to it...I hope they are too.

Blueberry Picking

Since moving to NC, we have wanted to do some fruit picking in the spring and summer. It's very agricultural around here and we were always hearing about the great fruit picking. Finally last weekend, the pastor's family at our church invited us to go blueberry picking with them. Interestingly, the blueberry farm was only about 5 miles from our house. So we are definitely planning to go back in a couple weeks.

We only picked one full basket worth of blueberries. And we used every one of them. We of course ate them right out of the container. But I also baked a blueberry pie with a crumb topping. I made blueberry muffins twice (2 different recipes). My husband made us blueberry pancakes one morning. And last night I made a blueberry-pineapple smoothie. It's been such fun trying new things with these huge, fresh blueberries. I can't wait to go back and get some more.