Building Sandcastles
... and then there were three.

Good news!

We were able to find a local Christian school willing to provide us with not only the names/publishers of the textbooks they use, but also the girl's schedules (if they were to attend the school). Here is what it looks like:

Class	TeenGirl (hrs./wk)		PreTeenG (hrs./wk)
1. Art	1.0	--	1.0
2. English	3.0	--	3.5
3. Life Skills	1.0	--	0.0
4. Maths	3.5	--	4.0
5. S.Studies	0.0	--	3.5
6. History	1.75	--	0.0
7. Geography	1.75	--	0.0
8. Religion	1.75	--	0.0
9. Civics	1.0	--	0.0
10. Sciences	3.5	--	3.5
11. Handwk.	2.25	--	2.25
12. Swedish	3.5	--	6.5
13. 2nd Lang.	3.0	--	2.75
14. Elective	2.0	--	2.0

The times work out to about 6.0 hrs./day. The minimum requirement is 4.5 hrs./day, 185 days/year -- and up to 1/3 of those hours may be taught outdoors!). The reason we're so excited about this is because if we can fashion our schedule to be similar to an "approved" one, we will have less problems from the municipality. I have been in contact with a lovely Norwegian woman who is homeschooling her daughter using the actual school texts (although she uses state school texts) and she has homeschooled for three years now with minimal problems.

Ahem ...

We do plan to change a few things, of course. Making the classes shorter, to begin with. We prefer the Ambleside artist rotation. By law, the girls have the right to study their "home language", so equal time will be given to English and Swedish studies. The usual choices for second language are French or German, but TeenGirl wants Spanish, and I believe it's a more relevant choice for her. Music is usually chosen as the elective, so we are continuing with Hebrew prayer.

Some things puzzle me.

Surprisingly enough, the Christian school only devotes one hr./wk to the actual study of Christianity (!). It is actually a legal requirement for the students to learn about world religions, but why does the Christian school devote more time to religions other than its own? *shrugs* As for me and my house ... we will be continuing our Torah Studies; using Torah Class, Heart of Wisdom, and First Fruits resources (and of course, the Scriptures themselves).

Finally, isn't Social Studies the same as History and Geography? I always thought it was. They even give the two the same amount of time for 6th and 7th grades. Interesting ...

Posted by Alyx at 6/30/2006

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