Seventh Grade

It is hard to fathom that our oldest is about to finish 7th grade. She was in Classical Conversations from 2nd-6th grade and achieved Memory Master each year. Latin was begun online when she was in 3rd grade, which was also her first year of Essentials, the language arts portion of CC. We had her take Essentials again in 4th grade, then in 6th grade. For 5th grade we found a local author teaching writing for a semester and I really can't recall if we did any writing the other semester of 5th grade.

7th grade brought some challenges--I was going to be gone one day a week with my younger two kids who were still in CC. I also needed to be more involved with my younger kids' education, so we opted to hire out a lot of what our 7th grader was going to do. Her schedule has consisted of 4 live, online classes with 2 different schools. This has provided a serious time-management course as she manages her schedule completely. It has been remarkable to see what she's been given for assignments and all the responsibility on her shoulders. I'm sharing because I'm sure I'm not alone in having to chart a fresh course come 7th grade. I don't know that we'll repeat this with either of our other two children--well I know we can't exactly because we don't start Latin until 4th grade now, so they will finish that subject in 9th grade as well, but will only have to take Latin III once instead of twice (you can take it with a different focus, our school does classical authors as one class and Christian in another). We haven't planned to count high school classes taken in 8th grade as part of the high school transcript at this point.

So, a possible course load for a 7th grader:

English 1 (writing/grammar/literature), Logic I , General Science, Latin II (we did these online)

Pre-algebra and Bible (parent taught)

We have used Saxon math starting with 5/4 in 3rd grade, but for pre-algebra made the change to McDougal-Littel. The English 1 class is a pretty meaty class involving grammar, literature and writing.

Fundamentals of Faith by John MacArthur is a terrific choice for discipling at this age. It's actually quite good for any believer to go through.

Next year we'll back down to only 2 online classes. We love the online as an option for those times where there isn't enough of Mom to go around though. They learn how to work with another full-time teacher and manage assignments and deadlines. The work is graded and they are helped in their writing (this has been a fantastic year with writing due to English and Science). As with any class taught by someone other than mom or dad, there are situations that arise which really help prepare them for what will come later in life especially because of deadlines and standards. Having work graded and compared to peers is helpful. I'm very thankful for the opportunities our online schools have given the kids with regard to their maturity and positive Christian example, without the teachers having too much influence over my kids.

That's all for now!