Back to School Part 2: the plan

My youngest chickadee in the nest will be starting 8th grade this year and for her I have mostly tried and true materials.  Her literature will be the 8th grade Lightning Literature program, which is a nice introduction to reading and writing about literature and poems.  The way it is organized allows us to easily skip around doing only the units that seem useful, as each unit stands alone.  We will continue with Sequential Spelling .  She is not a natural spelling and this program is short, taking only about 10 minutes a day and the way words are covered seem to give her a little bit more sense of spelling patterns, which is about all one can ask for IMO with someone who just is not a speller.  She will also run through a diagramming workbook just to review some grammar, and we usually work in some roots or a bit of Latin here and there.

We will be doing American History at half pace, covering about half the books in A History of US: 11-Volume Set, completing the second half for her 9th grade year and her American History high school credit.  I've used this for all of my girls and just last year replaced volume 10 with the newest version, bringing it up to the election of President Obama.  This will be supplemented by loads of historical novels and additional related books both from the library and my home library, as well as netflix and pbs videos.  As we go through the books I usually add them to "family reading" on the sidebar.  I guess I should retire the old list and start anew (did it)!  I have our long used Cooking Up U.S. History: Recipes and Research to Share with Children and I have Interactive 3-D Maps: American History to add in also.

For science she will be learning Physical Science, also with a variety of resources.  Our base will be The Usborne Science Encyclopedia, Mysteries and Marvels of Science: Internet Linked, along with activities from Gizmos & Gadgets: Creating Science Contraptions That Work (& Knowing Why) , and also some biographies and videos.  Hopefully we will get to the activities each week or 2, and I've invited a couple of her friends to join us for them, thus making sure we actually get to them!

For math she will be doing Key to Algebra - Books 1 thru 10.  She completed the first workbook of it last May.  This program is somewhat more than a pre-algebra course, but less than Algebra 1, which will serve very well for this year.