We took an extensive break when my mom visited back in June and did very little organized school work. Instead, I used the time to get familiar with my Homeschool Tracker software and deciding what our goals should be and which resources are available to attain them.

Here is a small screen shot of the student assignments. There are better shots on the website. It costs $49 US. The owners are nice folks. When I received it in the mail, the disk was shattered in a bunch of pieces. I emailed them and they promptly sent another one which I got the next week. That was a year ago and I’ve only recently gotten serious about using it, lol.

I also have the other lesson planning software that we got for a few dollars and have decided to use it only for the extra discs with the special fonts. Since I was already (vaguely) familiar with the Homeschool Tracker, I decided to stop being lazy and learn how to use it. There is a forum for users which has video tutorials and I definitely found them to be useful.

*By the way, I’m not an affiliate of either of them – I’m just letting you know what’s out there and what works (or doesn’t) for me. Donna Young is also very good (and free) and I’m not affiliated with her either but her button is on the left sidebar if you need to get forms from her.*

I’ve been looking at Ambleside Online over the past couple of months and as I’ve mentioned before, I really like its approach. I like the idea of short lessons because:we can cover more topics; our curriculum becomes rich with literature; we seem to accomplish more and not burn ourselves out; my children are able to grasp concepts in small bites and not feel overwhelmed; we can work consistently on a topic without feeling the need to take the whole day to finish it.

Coming up: I would like to share what we have scheduled for our days ahead but in order to do that, I will need to make a separate blog post (it’s long so hang in there – hopefully you won’t be bored, lol).