Homeschooling U: MtMM

My oldest started MtMM at the beginning of this month. I cannot believe she is so close to high school!

We are doing most of MtMM as written. Below are our changes to the guide:

Math: Horizons Math. She will finish PreAlgebra soon and start Algebra.
Writing: Since we skipped WWTB1 in CtC, she is doing WWTB1 with her brother in CtC. When they finish, she will go back and finish the creative writing from Rev2Rev.
Bible: We found with Awana, that during the school year, it was too much to do HOD independent Bible as well. So this summer (when she doesn't have Awana), she is finishing the Bible she started in RtR and Rev2Rev. She is in Awana Trek, and they have daily Bible study plus read half of the NT each year. Each book they read from the NT they give a summary with key verse, author, theme, etc as well. So it is a lot of studying! We are still doing the Apologia book together though.
State Study: We have decided to skip this. She does want to study music theory, so she will do that instead.
Dictation and DITHOR: These we do but not exactly as scheduled in the guide. We do dictation daily instead of three times a unit. DITHOR we often do daily for a genre and then take a week or two off. It varies depending on outside distractions to our school day though. We will aim to do five genres this year though.

MtMM wasn't too hard to organize! I ended up with two binders for her.

The first binder is economics, history, worthy words, president study, and geography. Economics, history, and president study are simply the notebooking pages sold by HOD. For worthy words, they are instructed to answer questions about a famous speech or writing on index cards. Another parent typed up those questions into a single file. I chose to print this file, as I knew she woudl loose the index cards. And it is easier for when we don't get to the discussion immediately. Finally, for geography, I printed the student maps from the CD and put them into the pocket. She will put them in the binder itself when she is done with each one. The teacher maps are in a binder with the maps from Rev2Rev (I might add RtR maps to that same binder as well). At the back of this binder, we have the storytime bookmarks. The appendix of the guide has a page similar to the file I printed from Facebook.

For science, I went through the guide page by page. I typed up all questions that were to be answered (mostly from the books). It was tedious, but it will make checking work so much faster for me! For days were they are to do a written narration, I made a page with lines. For the Elements book, I chose to purchase the pdf version online. I could then easily copy any of the activities into the file I made for my daughter. And then for labs, I recreated the lab form from the appendix of the guide. If I only had 1-2 kids, I don't think I would do through all of that work. But with four kids, I think it will be worth it! At the end of the binder, I have the pages printed for some fo the activities in the Elements books inot sheet protectors. These are pages that are in the Elements book, but they are also free printables on the author's website.

Next, I fot everything ready for the nature journal. My daughter already had a nice set of colored pencils, so she will use those. I bought the markers and journal from Miller Pads and Paper. Then I got pens from Walmart and she gathered the last remaining things from the house. We put them in a little bag so nothing gets lost or misplaced.