Mason for Me: Planning Y8 (on a budget)!

I think I've got my plan guys! When I did year 7 last year I pretty much took the literature and history options, cut everything that I had already read or that wasn't public domain or available at my library and called it a day. But for year 8, I really wanted to do the whole thing, or at least more of it.

 Lucy, my oldest, is only in her last term of year 2 right now so I don't have any experience with planning the higher levels with all the choices. It was a little bit overwhelming at first and I just couldn't wrap my head around it until I printed out the detailed list from the website and started marking it up. Then I pulled up the basic/lite version online so I could kind of see what they thought was most important to keep which helped me come up with a that I'm really happy with.

 I did end up cutting some stuff but  not much and it's definitely more well-rounded than last year. And I'm less likely to panic when I have to start planning upper levels for Lucy so that's a big win too!

Now that I've said I'm not cutting much - I am cutting all Bible/Devotional, Government and Logic reads because I have my own bible study plan I like and I read all the others back in high school. What can I say, maybe my mom knew what she was doing back when she planned my highschool :-) I'm also cutting Health and Art. Somethings gotta give and better those than laundry. Or at least I feel like that's what a responsible mom would say.

I'm keeping all the History and plugging away at Churchill. And I'm going to buy Churchill this year even thought I could get it from the library because I have come to love it and I don't love having to keep checking it out so many times. Although I might keep checking it out every once in a while because our library culls books like crazy! I consider it my civic duty to keep those good books used so they don't leave the system.

I'm only cutting The Voyage of the Armada from biographies because it's not public domain. I was torn between A Coffin for King Charles and Queen Elizabeth but our library has the former so that settled it. I'm buying A Man for All Seasons and reading the rest online.

For Geography I'm getting Kon Tiki from the library and using the public domain Columbus biography. I will be adding in Ourselves and the Bacon Essays but I've already read Utopia. For Ourselves, I didn't read it in Y7 so I'm doing the Y7 schedule plus a bit of Year 8. I won't be adding Plutarch. I've liked the Plutarch that I've done already but I'll wait for Lucy to do more. She'll be in form 2 in just over a year (what?!how!?) so I won't have to wait long.

There are a few selections of Literature and Poetry that I've already read but everything else will stay as schedule dictates. I'm also thinking of adding in Beowulf because I read the big Y8 poetry back selection in Y7 but I just realized that as I'm writing this and I forgot to actually add it to the schedule. Oops.

I went back and forth about science/nature study books. As someone who studied and worked in the biological sciences field, I don't really feel like I need the science selections and most of these texts are ones I'd need to buy but I do obviously enjoy studying science. So I'm compromising. I'm cutting a few, relying on the library and using the excuse that I'm pre-reading for Lucy. Which isn't really just an excuse. As much as I love the idea of living books, I do get skeptical when it comes to science. I tend to think of science as being more like math in that it has it's own language and needs to be taught that way. But maybe a few years of CM science will change my mind on that.

*And just when I decided to do The Chemical History of a Candle, this post showed up in my feed. What timing! Now I'm even more excited about it.

I didn't get to very many free reads in year 7 and I have a feeling I won't get to many of the y8s either but I've read many already and I will try and use several from that list as books in my yearly Back to the Classics Challenge if possible as well.

I've updated the schedules although in a few cases I just said "spread book evenly" because I haven't checked it out yet to see how many chapters. For keeping, I bought a nicer notebook and will try keeping everything together in one reading journal like Celeste did. I'll also have Book of Centuries and hope to add lots of entries into that but for things like lists and maps, I think this will be nice. I've put the schedule for term 1 into the front of the notebook and copied my year 7 timeline into it, both so I have it as a reference and so I don't lose it because it was just a loose piece of paper before and I'd like to know where it is when the kids hit this year 7 and I need a refresher. Next up I need to downloaded and organized the books. I've got a few left to purchase but I'm getting there. 

I had a pretty small budget for this because I need to make my Y3 purchases by January and I hope to add a couple bigger curriculum choices for us in the spring and to be honest, I have a lot of non-curriculum mother culture books that are really calling my name (Karen Glass's new book about narration! Cindy Rollin's morning time book! Megan Hoyt's A Touch of the Infinite!..I could go on). I did manage to tuck away about $100 for this year 8 project. Then I dropped my kindle for what was apparently the last time. The screen froze up and I cried. So most of my school budget went to replacing that. It's totally worth it because I use it for both me and Lucy and while I have the kindle app on my phone and a fire, if I'm doing ebooks for educational purposes, I really like having an old school, does nothing but ebooks kindle. That left me just a tiny budget for the hard copy books for now, but one of the great things about AO is does not force one to choose budget over quality.

So here's my budget breakdown:

-New (refurbished) kindle = $60
- Flexbook Reading Journal = $17
- Ourselves $13.50
-A History of the English Speaking People: A New World = $4.50
-Beowulf = $5
-A Man for All Seasons $8.50

Total = 108.50

Not bad! Now that stuff is coming in, I'm really excited to start reading. I had planned on waiting until January but I'm might start a bit sooner. I'm pretty sure it's gonna take me at least a year to get through all this. And I can't start my classics challenge books until January and too much waiting is bad for your soul. Or something like that ;-)