Build Your Library? Scale it down and use it as a supplement? Or..?

[stutterfish]

As of September, I will only have one child still being homeschooled.

 

Due to serious burn-out and chronic illness, homeschooling has been bare essentials for the past few years. It has been necessary, but soulless and unfulfilling, and I don't want to continue this way. I need to restore some joy into what we do, but I also need to be realistic about what is achievable with my health and energy levels.

 

I've been looking at Build Your Library. We already have lots of wonderful resources, but they are going unused because, most of the time, I just. can't. think. enough to get us started. I'm coming to the conclusion that my precious energy would be better spent on the "doing" rather than the organising and planning I used to love.

 

My question is: Is it possible to scale down the BYL curriculum and use it just as enrichment, rather than as given? We would probably use it 3 x a week, not 5. (My child will be starting to study certain subjects for exams here and those will have to take priority.) I would substitute our own, contemporary poetry, and might substitute - or skip - a few books if we can't get them here. We have our own maths programme, and art would definitely be more haphazard than scheduled. I have no issue with minimal tweaking. I just need a framework that says "today:do this." I need to make my life easy!

 

If it makes a difference, I'm thinking of the geography year, which is a few grades below my child, but would be appealing to both of us.

 

So what do you think?

 

Thanks in advance. I value the wisdom on this forum :)

[tmstranger]

My son did geography/byl7 this year.  I completely customized it to fit us, so that is really doable.

 

First, I was only going to do 1/2 of it this year and 1/2 next year, but I changed my plans and decided to get it all in this year.  We were also doing a separate history, science, writing, etc., so this was a geography supplement for him.  Luckily, my son LOVES to read and really enjoyed 95% of the books, so he didn't complain about the sudden added work.

 

I had him do the geography reading, map drills, continent profiles, religious profiles, and the readers/literature.  We did very few (but some!) of the written reports.  He did his narrations orally.  I read some of the literature aloud, but as the year went on, I wasn't keeping up, so I let him loose on it. 

 

I honestly really loved what he covered this year.  The spines were good (we did cut a few that were not at our library).  The literature/readers were enjoyable, and for the most part, helped to tie in with the geography, culture, or religion being covered.  We just finished A Long Walk to Water today as he finished up his weeks on Africa, and it was amazing. 

 

Overall, I was very happy.  It was easy to change to fit our needs and not too overwhelming at all.

[Sammish]

You could definitely use BYL this way. We used BYL for grades 3 and 4, and substituted books (we used CHOW instead of SOTW for history), skipped a few books, used her art history but not art projects, etc. It's pretty easy to take what you want to use, and skip the rest. 

[stutterfish]

Thanks, looks like it's a go-er then! No doubt there will be a few new books arriving on my shelf now :)