My 3 Boybarians is having a not back-to-school blog hop. This week she’s covering Curriculum.

I’m midway though my planning week. We will start school this coming Monday. I recently discovered Sue Patrick’s Workbox System. I plan to use the workbox with our curriculum, Galloping the Globe. We’ll stick with what GTG suggests for Science – Considering God’s Creation, and Social Studies – Our Father’s World.

For Language Arts we’ll continue with Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading (my 6.5 y/o can read but it’s good review). We are also going though First Language Lessons. We have been enjoying working though the poetry, and memorization especially. We do everything FLL suggest. We mainly do FLL and OPRGTR after our breakfast and lunch while we are still sitting around the table….

For phonics we are using Explode the Code. Indie, starting 1st grade – 6.5 y/o will be starting book 3. My daughter will be doing Getting Ready for the Code – Book B. She is K-5 this year. She will be turning 5 at the end of this month.

Indie and Beluga will both continue with Math-U-See. Beluga will finish up Primer, and Indie will start Beta (book 3). We’ll work on Handwriting Without Tears once a week and at some point we’ll work on Story of the World Vol 1. Not sure how much we’ll get to. I think GTG covers some history and we’ll be using lots of literature, real books to supplement.

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This is the first year we’ll be declaring to the state as a homeschooler. Here in Florida, you only need to start this for 1st grade. I want to make sure I’m really organized this year. I’m a pretty organized person naturally but there is always something I can work on.

This is the second year I’ve used a binder for keeping track of my planning and activities. It worked pretty well for me last year. At times the binder got a bit bulky and heavy but, for the most part I kept it home, on my desk.

My planner is a “pleather” 2 inch, 3 ring binder.

This year I added tabs for any ideas/print outs I get for the following weeks so I can keep track of them. Last year, I found myself misplacing my ideas or sheets I printed out for the following week.

I also keep my household papers here. (I got my ideas for this binder mainly from Flylady). My chore lists, emergency information for the kids, medical info., hurricane preparedness list, etc are all in my binder.

My notebook/binder has enough room for my calendar as well. I use a Mead spiral bound calendar from Wal-mart school section that also has 3 ring binder holes. It works great! I’d love to only use Google Calendar, and my iPhone for my calendar but I’m not there yet. I still love having a hard copy to fall back on.

The calendar is where I log future activities so I don’t miss play dates, sports activities, classes, homeschool meetings, or other doings.

In my binder I also keep a list of what my kids need to know per grade. Printed from here.

I have a section with pockets where I keep schedule sheets, soccer and dance schedules, library events, etc.

The most important section of my notebook is my planner. This is where I log all of the homeschool activities we do each day. I didn’t find planner pages that really worked for me so I made my own two paged planner. I got my inspiration from Donna Young.org. She has so many great forms on her site. I like the spaces down the left side for each subject, and the days of the week are written across the top of both pages.

It’s nice to have one place to keep activities that I want to do the following week. We are going to do this Enchanted Learning craft so I printed it out and stuck it into m binder so I actually get to it!

I also find that it’s nice to have a few clear, 3 ring sheet protectors in my binder. This way I can slip a class schedule, or sports roster into my binder quickly without having to hole punch them.

That’s about it for my planning. Time for me to get back to work! 😀