 Hey everybody, welcome to the La Dacue. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be our homeschool plans for the fall season. Now I know that you are probably used to me sharing our homeschool plans or our curriculum choices for the entire year. That's what I've done in the past. That is not what I'm gonna do this year and probably not what I'm gonna do moving forward. There's a few reasons for that. The number one reason is while I have all these resources on hand, I don't actually know what we're gonna be doing for the entire year. I'm really just guesstimating. I kind of follow Emily's lead and I try to only follow that for a few months at a time or plan a few months at a time. So when I'm coming on here and I'm like, okay, this is everything we're using for the whole homeschool year. It is really a very, very vague estimate that I'm giving you guys. And then I feel like I'm coming back at the mid-year and then the end of the year and I'm not necessarily contradicting myself but I'm telling you what's changed. So instead of doing that, mainly because I don't want you to stumble upon these videos years later and only watch the very first one. I think, oh my gosh, she used all of these resources for second grade and not watch the mid and end of the year updates so you don't know that the things changed, especially with so many new people coming into the homeschool journey. I just kind of wanna give you the most real time choices or plans that I can. So this is what I have in mind. This is my plan for the fall season. And when I refer to the fall, I am talking about the timeframe of September 1st through about Thanksgiving. We'll stop somewhere around the Thanksgiving timeframe either the week before or the week up. So that's the timeframe that I'm going to be showing you kind of what my plans are, what I've selected, what I think we're gonna be working on, the unit studies that we're planning, the resources that we're gonna be using, et cetera. So that's what I'm gonna show you today is the fall season. I will continue to come on as the year goes on and I will update you on what's working, what's not working, what we're changing, and then what we're doing for the next season. So I'll be back sometime in November to let you know what we're gonna do for the holidays and so forth. So you're gonna get a much more accurate real time, live look into what's going on in our homeschool. And I hope that you guys are gonna appreciate that. Okay, so before I start showing you the resources, I kind of wanna tell you how I think our day is gonna flow. We pretty much always have a very, very slow start to our day. We are not morning people. That is no surprise. You guys know that about us. So we all kind of wake up and do our own thing. I try to screw something the night before so that Emily has something to explore when she wakes up if she wants. Kevin kind of does his own thing. I am like totally in need of caffeine and normally I mindlessly scroll on my phone or sometimes I will read a book and just something to kind of give me like a quiet, slow start. And then when we are ready, we do our morning time together. Normally that's all of us. Sometimes it's just me and Emily depending on what Kevin's got going on that day like if he has yard work or if there's errands that need run or whatever. But that's what we start our day with is our morning basket or our morning time. Now I'm gonna be back next week because that is an entire video all in itself and I really don't want this one to be super long. So we'll be back next week to tell you all of the changes that are happening during our morning time, what our plan for our morning time and morning basket is and then what our morning basket is going to be for the fall season. So all of that is coming next week. So make sure you're subscribed and turn your notifications on. Now after our morning time, we kind of roll into our table time which is when we do any of our structured work. So any kind of like curriculum stuff, anything that requires Emily to write, anything that requires one of us to teach happens during our table time and we call it table time but it doesn't even necessarily always happen at the table. It could be anywhere, the car, outside, the floor, the couch, the bed. I don't know why I call it table time. It's just what I've always called it. It's kind of what I deem are more like serious work if you will. The things that you kind of need to be in a seated position to do. More focused work I guess. And then after a table time we typically break for lunch. Now I'm not sure if lunch is going to come like before or after this year. That's the one thing that's up in the air but our homeschool day is like morning time, table time, normally a learning lunch and that's when Emily listens to audiobooks, podcasts, watch educational videos, whatever it is, it's separate. It's our time away from each other. It's our time to recharge before we go into the afternoon which is when we do activities together. So those activities could be poetry, tea time. It could be a project from a unit study. It could be just playing games, a subscription box, nature study, art, just online classes. It's just kind of a time for us to come together and do I guess really it's like the enrichment part of our homeschool when we do all those like extra things in the afternoons. So that's playing games, doing projects, arts and crafts, nature, subscription boxes, all of those things happen in the afternoon, late afternoon slash early evening. And then typically Emily and Kevin will work on dinner while I'm working on work. And then that's kind of where our day stops. Everybody has free time or family time afterwards. And then we come back together at the end for our bedtime basket. Now I know I haven't updated you guys on a bedtime basket in a very long time so I will have that on my list as an update as well. It'll be coming to you soon. Okay, so that's kind of how our day flows. Our day has flowed somewhat similar to that for as long as I can remember. It just kind of has like a rhythm. It's just how what we do, we wake up, we do our morning time, we move to the table. We have lunch somewhere in there. We do some sort of afternoon activity that's kind of an enrichment to our homeschool. That's kind of like something to look forward to. We have dinner, we do family activity. We have our bedtime basket and then everybody kind of winds down for the day, which for me means work a few more hours, but that's not homeschool related. And that really is the flow that has worked for us for years now, some kind of variation of that. Okay, so now let's talk about the resources that I have planned for the fall. We will start with math because that for whatever reason seems to be the topic that everybody is normally the most curious about. For math, as far as curriculum goes, we are going to be continuing to use teaching textbooks. Emily is absolutely still in love with it. And I figure if it's not broke, don't fix it. So she's going to keep using teaching textbooks and then I'm going to be supplementing that with books, games and hands-on resources and centers. So I will leave a link to the centers in the description box as well as everything else I talk about in this video. If you want to know what I'm referring to when I say like books, games and hands-on resources, most of the things that I will be using will be things that I showed in all of my back to school hall. So I will also link those as well for you because most of the things when I say that will be stuff that I purchased over the summer specifically for our fourth grade year. And I don't know which one specifically that we'll use. It'll just kind of be whatever we're in the mood for, whenever we're in the mood for. So for language arts, a very big portion of our language arts is going to be coming from Waldox, Wizards and Wands. So what we do for, this will be our fourth year, is we start our year off in a very magical way and we do a portion of Waldox, Wizards and Wands and we read one of the books. So if you're not familiar with Waldox, Wizards and Wands, I'll link it for you, I'll link the look inside. It is six unit study courses, if you will. Astronomy, Alchemy, Potions, Muggle Studies, Herbology and Magical Creatures. And so each year, instead of doing all six courses, we do one of the Harry Potter books, a lot of the language arts that's in here, which is your Charms and Kentations and Spells, which is basically all of your language arts, like dictation, narration, writing, projects, et cetera. So we do six weeks worth of that. We do one Harry Potter book and then we do one of those classes. So in the past, like last year, we did book three, we did six weeks worth of the language arts and then we did Herbology. This year, we're going to be doing the astronomy portion of Waldox, Wizards and Wands and then all of the language. So some of the really fun projects in here that we really like is like creating your house crest, creating a new wizard transportation, the daily profit, roll of story prompts, writing prompts, copy work. All of that will be from Waldox, Wizards and Wands this year and then obviously we will read the fourth Harry Potter book together as a family. For printing, she is doing printing power. Now, this is 100% of her choice. I had handwriting books in kindergarten. It caused a total utter world war between the two of us and so I put them away. We have not done handwriting at all since kindergarten. We're going into our fourth grade year. But last year over the summer, towards the end of the school year and summer, she asked me if there was a way that she could improve her handwriting. She wanted to have prettier handwriting like mommy and I told her, yeah, there is. You can work on some of these handwriting books. So this is, I believe the second one in the series, maybe the second or the third, she started with the first and she has of her own accord willingly worked her way through, she's already actually a good portion through this one. She's about halfway through this one already. But I don't do anything. I don't ask her to do it, I don't require her to do it. She actually put this in the pile because she wanted me to tell you guys that she's doing it and loving it. But I'm not pushing her at all, like zero, non-pushing. And then also she will still be doing Night Zookeeper because she really, really enjoys that as well as books, games, hands-on resources and centers for language arts too. So I have a lot of different things like that that we'll be working on. The one thing that I will be working on with her is writing and we're going to take this time to work on personal writing, which will be like letters, blog posts, journal entries. And we will use our Mail Time Monday kind of slot to do that. So I just wanna improve on like personal writing techniques and how to, you know, write better, if you will. So we will use our Mail Time Monday, like and that be kind of our goal is to, you know, do more of that. And then the last part of our language arts is her book club. She's doing an out-school book club with Mary Hannah Wilson. She's super, super excited. She loves it. And the four books that they will be reading during the fall are Nims Island, The Lemonade War, The Prairie Thief and The Hartwood Hotel. So those are the four that she will be doing with that book club. And then they meet once a month to talk about them. They do like a fun activity and different things like that. And she loves it. It's a blast. They did it all summer long. All right, our unit study. Sorry, you guys, I keep looking down cause I made notes on my phone, so I wouldn't forget. Okay, so for our unit study, and I already told you that we're going to be doing the astronomy portion of Waldox, Wizards and Wands. But Emily, when I showed her what was in that, she's like, I really want to know more. I want to do more. I want to experience more. She's a little bit older now. She wanted to go a little bit deeper. So we will do the astronomy portion of Waldox, Wizards and Wands. And then I have created a space unit study and a moon unit study, which this is actually an update of Lunar Lore. It's an expansion that's amazing. So these will be the two units that we combine with Waldox, Wizards and Wands for basically an entire semester long astronomy study. And then in addition to all of that, we have chosen to do the who was unit that have to do a space as well. So we will do the who was Galileo unit, the who was Neil Armstrong unit, and the who was Sally Ride unit. And then I also created two free mini units that are based on picture books and we'll do those too. And those are Edwin Hubble and Mae Jemisin. So those will be kind of the five biographical historical units that we do to go along with space. Okay, now for all of the extras. For our online classes, the only out-school class that I have her signed up for at this time is the book club that I mentioned with Mary Hannah Wilson. If she asks to do anymore, I will obviously sign her up, but as it stands, that's all she's doing right now. She does, we do also have a subscription to Talk Pastel. You are an artist, no sweat nature study, squilt music, and Learner's Lab, which is calling Kesslers. We love all of them. We do as much as we can live, but a lot of the times we end up going into the archives and doing replays of everything as it fits into our schedules and as it fits into maybe unit studies that we're already doing, which I love. So obviously we will be doing a lot of the Talk Pastel space art. We will be enjoying some of the squilt music, some no sweat nature studies. She has some of their space related. So we will incorporate as much of that as possible. For our subscriptions, we are still doing four different subscription letters. We will be receiving writings from the wild, heritage letter, as well as the American Heritage Adventure and letters from afar. So while we love all of the letters, this way we are getting some American history and American geography in with the heritage letters. We are getting some science in with the writings from the wild and we are getting some world geography with letters from afar. So those are the four letters that we are keeping for this season. Like I said, that doesn't mean that that's not gonna change in the future, but that's what we have for right now. And then as far as our subscription boxes go, the one Emily begged us not to get rid of for her was the My Zoo Box. I think she mainly just likes that it comes with the stuffed animal, honestly. But she gets to learn more about an animal, which she loves all animals. It comes with the book. It comes with the stuffed animal. It comes with more details and activities that you can do with it. And so I'm good with that. If she's going to learn more and get a stuffed animal, then I'm all for it. The subscription box that I wanted to keep because I'm in love with it and we have never given it up is Universal Yums. This is a family thing that we do. We love sitting down at the table together and being able to try snacks from all around the world, the faces that we make, the laughs that we have. I honestly can't imagine giving that up. It's just kind of become our thing for our family and it's probably more rooted in the memories that we've made, which is why I refuse to give that box up. But either way, it is a staple in our homeschool so we will be keeping that. And then the subscription boxes that Kevin is doing this year that he has chosen for our homeschool is the Mel Physics Box as well as the Mel Chemistry Box. Now there will be unboxings coming of both of those so that you guys can see more. And then we also have picked up a few of the science unlocked from home science tools. These are not subscription. You can buy them in a bundle and get a discount and you can buy them based off of whatever topic you're doing. So we have a few different ones that we'll be doing. One of which is called Blast Off so it was gonna go really, really well with our astronomy unit. And again, much like the others, I will have an unboxing and more details about that coming soon. So that is pretty much all of our like main big stuff that I have planned. Essentially, we will be doing language arts using Waldox Wizards and Wands with her printing book, with her book club, with me supplementing with books, games, hands-on activities, same thing with math, teaching textbooks, me supplementing and then just a huge astronomy unit study in which I will be adding in, you know, games and books and hands-on resources and then the who was units for history and then we will be doing some science and geography subscription boxes. Now the last, very, very last thing that I have to tell you guys about are the field trips that we have planned because we have told you already that that is our one thing for this year. And I'm not sure how many we're gonna be able to do because well, it's Florida and things are on the rise and things are being locked back down again I'm not exactly sure how we feel about everything yet but as it stands, as long as nothing changes too drastically, the two big field trips that we have planned for the fall homeschool season are we will be kicking our school year off with a trip to the Wizarding World and Orlando Universal and then we will be closing out our astronomy unit at the end of the fall with a trip to Kennedy Space Center. So those are the two kind of larger field trips that we have planned for this season in our homeschool. Now the last thing I wanna tell you guys before we leave is to keep in mind that this is plans. This is what I have planned. This is what I think we're gonna do. This is not set in stone. If you watched our teacher tag video, you heard Kevin say that I like to plan and then I typically pulverize the plan. So this is what I'm hoping that we will do for the fall. This is pretty much what Emily has asked to do for the fall. I literally created those unit studies specifically based off of her interest and what she wanted. So I'm hoping that she enjoys them and that we have a lot of fun together as a family. But things are bound to change. If she sparks an interest, we will go in a different direction. If something's not working, we will change it or we will get rid of it. So keeping in mind that plans are just that, plans and nothing more, this is what we will be doing in our homeschool for the fall season. Now if you would like to see this in action, let me know in the comments that you want to see more day in the life videos. I'm not sure how you guys feel about them. So if you like them and you enjoy them and you want to see kind of how all this is playing out on our homeschool, you know, in like real time, then I would love to know that that's what you wanna see and I will make sure that those get on our to-do list so that we can get more day in the lives to you guys.