Pressing On

Another post strictly for those highly invested in homeschool.  CURRICLUM!  The magic bullet of homeschool guaranteed to quell bad attitudes, remedy skills that should have been mastered already, create eager learners, and make school FUN! Even though I know better now, it's fun to live in the utopia created by homeschool curriculum marketing for a little while as I plan school every year.  In reality I've found it depends almost entirely on your student as to whether a wonder-curriculum is going to go anything as promised. If your kid does not want to learn anything, if he/she is consumed by an incredibly narrow field of interest, or if work is not his/her forte, good luck. I've already sung the praises of Saxon math in a previous post, so I won't spend time on that; suffice it to say that it's going swimmingly again this year. In fact we don't have anything brilliantly new and exciting this year, except for "Byline" writing, which I reviewed in

Or can you? Due to a number of changes to our school year, we had to abandon our plan of an "Institute for Excellence in Writing" (IEW) writing class for my high schooler. Now, we have been fans of Andrew Pudewa and all he offers with IEW for a decade or more and still are, so I was very leery of taking a different direction with my grade 10'er; however I think we found a solution! This child is not so much a fan of school, but if she HAS to sit down and put things in writing she gravitates toward journalism and creating newspapers and magazines and the like. So, when our supervising English teacher brought Byline , by Clearwater Press , to our attention, it seemed like a no-brainer! She gets to spend the year writing a newspaper! The curriculum is by the same folks who produced " The One Year Adventure Novel" and  " Cover Story ", which allow students to spend the year writing either a novel or a magazine as their English class.  "Byline&q