What's ahead in the Treehouse homeschool?

Up in the Treehouse, Mama Squirrel has been hunched over a desk with a pen in her furry paw, post-it notes stuck to her tail, and a look in her eyes similar to that of a determined but frustrated suitcase-packer.

However, that's not a very leisurely place to be, for either Mama Squirrel or the Squirrelings. And the answer, of course, is not to cram everything in tighter, but to let go of what most likely won't matter on the trip. Or afterwards.

Leisure is having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human.

Okay.

But we are still going to fit in a travel-sized package of Latin this year. And work on French, in which we have gotten unavoidably but sadly behind.

Crayons, going into Grade 4, will be doing Ambleside Online's Year 4, more or less, which covers mostly American history of the 1700's. (We won't be reading This Country of Ours or Abigail Adams.) Geography, nature, and some of the science will be different. However, we're at a very interesting point with the two Squirrelings that are left homeschooling, since some of the Year 4 books also appear on Carol's Pre-7 book list, which we like very much and which gave us a base for planning Ponytails' Grade 8. So this year we'll be doing Age of Fable and It Couldn't Just Happen together, along with Shakespeare and some of the usual other together-things.

Ponytails will have two strands of history: Augustus Caesar's World by Genevieve Foster, and world/Canadian history from 1865 to 1965, using The Story of the World Volume 4 and The Story of Canada which covers, in this squirrel's opinion, too much too fast to be a favourite CM resource, but which is good for a middle-school look at Confederation, the World Wars and so on.

Math will be mostly Math Mammoth for Crayons and Key To books for Ponytails, although we'll also be doing some math journalling. Crayons will be reading Jean-Henri Fabre's The Story Book of Science and doing some Benjamin Franklin science experiments (maybe these, maybe these). Ponytails will be continuing to study science with Mr. Fixit (a.k.a. Dad) but will also have a (short) science reading list.

I'll post more details as I pull them from my tail notebook.