Love days like this!

For some reason brown boxes, delivered by men wearing brown and driving brown trucks, excite me!

For inside our box is our future:

Last week, Matthew finally gave me the go-ahead to order all of our books for this coming year--this amazing year that I will have a fourth grader, two third graders and one two-year-old tornado.

All throughout the year I observe my kids and then set goals based on what they would like to study and what I feel that we need to study. The past four years of my homeschooling have been centered around getting everyone to read and write. Now that those basic skills are well established, we can heighten our learning fun!

Mystery of History will be our history spine for the year as it covers the ancient (Biblical) world. I hand-picked this spine because it's what I'm most interested in right now as I research and study Biblical archeaology. They girls have caught my enthusiasm, and are equally exicted by this study.

We chose physics as our science spine because it encompasses all of my kids' favorite everyday activites from the pulleys on the playground to the sound(waves) of music. Rumor also has it that our family's favorite engineer, Mr. Steve, will be explaining--with the use of restaurant napkins, nonetheless--airplane wing designs and other intriguing aspects of physics left out from this manual.

As supplements to our history, we'll build a paper tabernacle, flip through a historical atlas and listen to a CD or two by overly enthusiastic history teacher detailing Noah's Ark, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and Jesus' birth..

To enhance our language arts studies, we're adding in some root words. I have absolutely.no. desire.whatsoever to teach Latin, but I do share a love of lanugages with my kids. The girls are already learning some Greek, courtesy of their daddy, but this should be a fun play with words.

And no school year would be complete without a read-through of Hank the Cowdog as read by the author. Matthew cut my school wish list in half, but quickly added Hank back in when my girls started crying (with real tears!) and begging for another installment in our Hank adventures.

The only discouraging aspect of receiving our box of goodies, is that we have a few loose ends to tie up on our current school year. We've got in our mandatory days, but the math books have a few more pages and we haven't met our goals for the year. So we'll be finished up our study of the continents during May. We're also planning a run-through of US history as we study the presidents and then do an overview of the solar system. Then, and only then, we'll be able to partake of these fabulous finds later this summer.