New School Year

It has been a happy yet full summer. So much fun was had. We took a great family vacation to Acadia and had awesome weather. Quinn spent a week at New England Frontier Camp. It was his first sleepover camp. Evelyn took part in the theater camp at a church on our street. They did the musical Rescue in the Night. We ventured to Six Flags, the beach and spent many hot afternoons at Cunningham Pond. And we aren't done yet! In fact the best beach days, in my opinion, are after all the school kids have gone back to their buildings! September has many more hot days, great parking and few crowds. I can't wait!
That said, we will probably start easing back into some lessons soon. We generally don't take quite so much time off at once. This enables us to have three day school weeks through the winter when the kids ski, take spontaneous time off when we need to or feel like it and we don't have to spend a month reviewing everything the kids have forgotten from the previous year. Plus we can start slacking off the moment the spring buds begin appearing in late April. It works well for us.
I haven't formalized all of our curriculum yet for this year. I do know that we will be doing Sonlight Core 3 history and read alouds. Readers will be a compilation of books pulled from both Sonlight and Veritas Press. Math will be Singapore with a little Life of Fred and Keys To... thrown in for older ds. We will be concentrating on the first few units of IEW and continuing our poetry list from IEW Poetry. I will be continuing Spelling Plus with my older non-speller but am considering getting Phonetic Zoo for my younger/natural speller as she is more independent anyways and could use more challenging spelling words. I have a large list of favorite art blogs that I pull great art projects from but my older ds also will be continuing Complete-A-Sketch volume 2. He prefers more technical drawing. DD will be doing soccer and dance and DS wants to join the swim team. They both ski throughout the winter. We will be studying the book of Acts at CBS and I think I have decided on using L'Art de LIRE for french but who knows. Many loose ends to tie up! If anyone has used L'Art de LIRE and has any comments about it that would be great! I will post more when I have figured it out! Happy homeschooling everyone!