Heart of Dakota Progress Report

I just thought I'd check back in with a bit of a progress report on the Heart of Dakota curriculum we're using. We're still loving it. It's totally taken the stress out of homeschooling for me. No more worrying about working out balanced lesson plans, about "covering everything," about "doing things in the right order." I plop open the book, and we go.

L likes the lessons, and the book selection. He's whizzed through the Frog and Toad books. He seems to enjoy the relatively short length of each subject each day. He doesn't seem to fizzle out before we're finished like he sometimes did when I was making up our lesson plans.

In  short, this is the most fun we've had at school in ages. Also, I sort of hate to actually say it, since things can change at any time, but for the first time in a while, I sort of feel like I have things under control here.

In typical fashion though, I'm going to tinker with the plans just a bit.

Instead of doing the HOD plans on Fridays, I have plans to start making Friday sort of a themed day some weeks, just to keep things fresh. We'll be picking a topic, and running with it on those days, reading relevant books, watching related videos, doing projects. This essentially amounts to what I was doing before, just on a much smaller scale. I figure some weeks I'll pick our Friday topic, some weeks I'll ask L what he wants to learn about.

This will in turn cause the Heart of Dakota curriculum (which is based on a 5 day week,) to last a little longer than a year, which should be fine, since we started it at an odd time anyway.