How to Choose the Best Curriculum for your Family

When deciding which curriculum to use, I tend to get a little excited about something I think would be cool and fun.  What I sometimes forget to ask myself is how well it will work for my children.  From the beginning I have used Cathy Duffy's 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum.  Recently I acquired her newest book which is 101 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum.  Which has a few new ones added and few taken away.  These books have been an invaluable resource for me.  I have actually just discovered that she has recently put our a newer version entitled 102 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum.  
       

                                                 

She begins the book by having you determine your priorities, as in what is most important in your children's education.  Then there is a quiz for you take to determine which method of homeschooling fits you the best, Charlotte Mason, Classical, Traditional, etc.  When I took this quiz I learned that I am a Charlotte Mason, Classical, Unit Study, and Eclectic kinda gal.  Very helpful, I know!  Actually I scored pretty high in Charlotte Mason.  I believe I have mentioned before that I like her ideas but find them hard to implement.

Once you have discovered what type of style you like, you can move on to find out what type of teacher you are.  She gives descriptions in the book about the different types.  They are Wiggly Willy, Perfect Paula, Competent Carl, and Sociable Sue.  For that, I learned that I am a Perfect Paula, I like schedules and routines, I like to have everything planned out in advance, and I am more comfortable with a "cut and dry" type of curriculum.  Can you see where Charlotte Mason might not fit?

Once you have discovered your teaching style, then you can go on and find out what your children are.  Using the same descriptions, I learned that I am teaching a Perfect Paula and a Wiggly Willy.  This may sound like its not an important thing to figure out, but really its super important!  If I want to teach math to my Wiggly Willy while I am a Perfect Paula, if I teach him straight from a textbook, he will certainly not enjoy that and will probably not excel in math.  On the other hand if I teach my Wiggle Willy math using a curriculum that integrates lots of manipulatives, he will be more successful because he can touch and feel his work as opposed to just having to write it all down and read from a textbook.

The rest of the book is a list of curricula, which learning style it most suits, amount of writing, whether it is grade level specific, amount of teacher involvement, and so on.  So now that I know what my kids need, I can make a more informed decision about their curriculum.  After the chart she gives a detailed description of every curriculum that is listed in the book and she includes websites, addresses and phone numbers of the companies.  This is a great help, because then you don't have to do the digging yourself to find a particular company.

Let's go back to my math example, we currently use Math U See, so I went and looked it up in the chart and for my Perfect Paula its rated a 4 and for my Wiggly Willy its rated a 5.  The scale goes 1-5 with 5 being the highest.  Let's say that I was thinking about switching it up for next year, and I thought maybe Singapore would be nice to try.  I looked that up on the chart and for my Perfect Paula, it would be fine, it's rated a 4.  But for my Wiggly Willy it's only rated a 2, so that tells me that it would probably not be a good fit.  You also need to remember that these are generalizations so not every Wiggly Willy will be great at hands on math or struggle with work books.  I do take that into account as well when I am searching for things.

That is how I usually pick out which curriculum will work for us.  Unfortunately her book doesn't have every single available thing out there, so there are many times that I will ask friends or in a Facebook group about a particular one.

Have you every used Cathy Duffy's book?  What other ways have you used to pick a curriculum for your family?  I would love to hear from you!!

A Really Late Post About our Curriculum

Now that its almost March I thought it would be a good time to share our curriculum for the year.  Yeah, nothing like being a little behind!  Anyway this year we are teaching 4th grade and 1st grade, also with a tag along 3 year old.

Before I get started though, I want to mention that I provided links to the different things we are using only to help you find out more about them.  I am writing this post for fun, and I am not affiliated with these companies.  I simply enjoy sharing what we like and use.  Enjoy!

For our 4th grade curriculum we are using My Fathers World Exploring Countries and Cultures.  That includes Bible, Geography, Science, Music and Art.  In Bible we have been reading through Window on the World and Hero Tales.  Geography is a country based study including mapping, cultures, and people.  We have been "traveling" to different countries including, the United States, Canada, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, just to name a few.  In Science, we have been learning about the different ecosystems around the world.  Music and Art have included music and crafts from around the world.

We are using Abeka Language A and All About Spelling Levels 4 and 5 for our Language Arts.  We began the year using the suggested Language arts by My Fathers World but they did not work for us.  So we switched in November to Abeka, it fits our learning style a bit better.  We just finished up All About Spelling Level 4 and began Level 5 a few weeks ago.

For our math we are using Math U See, he just finished Gamma and we have moved onto Delta.  We will plan to get about half way through Delta this year and finish it up next year.  I am still trying to decide if we will stick with Math U See or move onto Teaching Textbooks for a more independent study.

 

Before the year began I had planned on giving Elijah an independent reading list of books I wanted him to read this year, but he got interested in reading The Lord of the Rings.  So that is what he has been reading this year.  He has read The Hobbit, and is now almost finished with The Fellowship of the Ring.  We are also reading Christian Heroes: Then and Now for our read aloud time.  We have read Cameron Townsend, George Muller, Nate Saint, and David Livingstone so far, currently we are reading Amy Carmichael.

                 


Our 1st grade year has been interesting to say the least!  Noah is a total opposite learner from Elijah.  So what worked for Elijah is not working for Noah.  Which is a challenge, but nothing that we haven't been able to work through.  Noah is using My Fathers World 1st Grade, Learning God's Story.  It includes, Bible/History, Reading, Math, Art and Music.  For Bible/History we have been learning the books of the Bible, and making a timeline of Old Testament history beginning at Creation.  I started the year using the reading program in the curriculum along with All About Reading but it was too much and moved pretty quickly, in my opinion.  So we dropped it and just stuck with All About Reading.  In Math we have been working through the Complete Book of Math, learning counting, patterns, and simple adding and subtracting.  Although just this week we began Math U See Alpha as well.  Art has been picture study from famous artists, they also use Drawing with Children, which I hope to use as some point but haven't found the time to really dig into.  Music has been learning about the orchestra and listening to Peter and the Wolf.

We began the first few lessons in All About Reading Level 1 at the end of last year, I really wish we had started it sooner.  We have been moving pretty slowly through it, but as of the past few lessons I can tell its really working!  Noah is really picking up on the concepts and is actually reading!  We are a little over half way through and I am hopeful that we will finish it up this year and move to Level 2 next year.

As a foreign language study we have been using Song School Latin Level 1, we began it last year but it kind of got put off about half way through the year.  So we picked it up again, starting at the beginning because I couldn't remember where we left off!  We are just using the DVD, I had bought the workbook, and teachers manual, but found that it just added too much for my guys to handle.  We just finished up the level 1 DVD and this week began Level 2.  My boys really enjoy it, although I think it has more to do with the monkey story than actually learning Latin!

And now for our little 3 year old, Zach.  Back in August, I began to think about preschool for our little guy, he is just such a distraction for my older boys.  As much as I would try to occupy him he would always find ways to get into trouble!  With our move in October, though, we put it off and didn't sign him up for preschool at that time.  In November I began again think that it would be a good idea.  So we got him signed up and he began preschool in January.  It has been such a great thing for everyone.  He goes two mornings a week, from 9-11:30.  So on those mornings the older boys and I get some good time to work on school work and do some science experiments that we might not have done with a three year old at home.  Its also been good for Zach, its teaching him to be more independent.  He has always been pretty clingy and needy, as far as not wanting to go the bathroom by himself, or not wanting to do anything for himself.  Just in the last month I have seen a huge change in him.  I am really happy that we made that decision.

This got to be really long!  Sorry!  I hope you enjoyed learning about what we are using this year for school.  If you have any questions about anything we are using just ask!  I would be happy to answer them!

Our New School Room Tour

I know you have been anxiously awaiting the tour of our school area!  So here is it!  Our brand new school room.  I must say though, that I am not totally happy with it.  When we moved in, I gave myself a week to get things unpacked and ready to start school.  So I really just threw things on shelves and hung stuff up so we could begin school and not get farther behind this year.

I am already planning on reorganize this summer.  I am really hoping to get a few new pieces of furniture, and get rid of a few pieces.  I have my eye on some things from Ikea!  Like this really cool Trofast storage system, and these awesome shelf ledges.


Alright, here ya go, our school room and family room/play room!

Here is a straight on picture of our school room.  This is looking in from the hallway that has the stairs that would take you to the main level of our home.

This is Elijah's desk.  Really since its been so cold here, they all just hang out in front of that little space heater and do their work. :)

Here is Noah's desk.  On the window sill he has his Art Cards from MFW 1st grade, he loves them!

This is our Expedit shelf from Ikea.  I LOVE it!  But as you can see its a little messy and disorganized right now.  That is one thing I hope to take care of this summer.

In this cubby hole is where I keep Noah's school books.  He has a binder for his completed work in MFW 1st grade, his All About Reading Level 1 books, and some math manipulatives.  The big blue bin next to that is some teacher stuff, like my laminator, laminating pouches, and some art trays. 

Here is our Tot School supplies, Zach has a crayon box, some coloring books, and a few workbooks from Rod and Staff.  I also found Little Hands to Heaven from Heart of Dakota at a used curriculum sale, that I might use next year.

The next two cubbies I use for Elijah's things. In the one on the left I keep his Geography Game, All About Spelling teachers manual, Math U See textbook and a few other things that go along with MFW Exploring Countries and Cultures curriculum.  In the cubby on the right I keep our family binder, homeschool binder and all of my main teachers manuals. And a bunch of other junk that has gotten stuffed in there! 

 Under my main teacher manual cubby I have a Thirty-One Fold N' File that houses all of our student sheets.  They are separated by weeks and grades into file folders and then put into hanging files.  Next to that I have our main lesson planner, it has my lesson plans, and calendar.  I like to keep track of field trips we take and count school days, even though my state does not require it.

Under the cubby that has my lesson plans I keep a basket with our morning things in it.  First thing in the morning when we begin our school day, we come together and do a Bible lesson, hear a missionary story and then do some character study.  The rest of the Expedit houses reading books that go along with our geography and science studies.  I also keep our easy readers, and preschool books in there along with toys for Zach to play with.

Next to the Expedit is my desk.  The green and blue paper bins are where they turn their work in once its completed and then I grade it.  Every few weeks I will file it away into their binders of competed work.  

On the opposite wall, we have a few book cases that have some more puzzles and things for Zach to do.  On top of those I keep our book basket books, which are mostly library books.  I have one for each of the older boys and then a general library basket that we keep books that they just checked out for "fun".

Attached to our school room we have a small storage area, it doesn't have an overhead light, so its not real functional.  I keep some more toys and art supplies in there.

In the bankers boxes we keep their completed work from previous years, along with Math U See teachers manuals, All About Spelling teachers manuals, and My Fathers World teachers manuals that we are not currently using.  

Across the hall from our school room is our nice, large family room.  We do our read aloud time on the couches,  which makes it nice and cozy.

The big book case has the majority of our books and a few toys.  Which is why I would like to get that nice Trofast system to get those toys off the book case so I can add more books!!

This is the Lego and game portion of the family room.  The tall book case holds our games and the rest of that little mess over there is legos.  We also have a small trampoline that Noah uses to get some energy out!

 

Well there you have it!  Our little school room!  I hope you enjoyed seeing some pictures of where we do school and hang out.   Next time I will be finally getting around to sharing what curriculum we are using this year!

Our New Home

In case you missed our house buying story you can check out part one here and part two here.  Today I will share about our new house and a little bit about why we moved.

First of all, we were renting our old house from my parents, with the intention to buy it soon.  We really loved the location of the house, but it just was not meeting our needs right now. It really was not something we wanted to buy. The house consisted of 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (only one shower), a living room, dining room, and kitchen.  We also had a nice big storage room and rec room in our basement.  The rec room was more of a lego explosion room than anything else.  :)

What wasn't working in that house was that we had the three boys sharing the smaller bedroom (it was about 8 x 8 room) in order to have a designated school room.  We chose this option because I was stressing out over using our dining room as a school area and having school stuff spread through out the entire house.  Having all three boys in one room was NOT working for us!  We have one that is an early riser, one that is a sleep in-er, and one that is noisy when he wakes up!  That combination did not work well!  In other words when the early riser got up at 6:00 or 6:30 they were all up!  Which left a grumpy one, and one that didn't know how to just chill out and play quietly.  If you haven't caught on, I am NOT a morning person, and I prefer to ease in to my day.

The criteria we used when looking for a new home, included the following:  At least 3 bedrooms, at least 2 bathrooms (one of those being a master bath), two living spaces, a dining room, and a designated area for school.  Things that we were hoping to find but were not deciding factors were: an updated kitchen, an attached garage, and a nice size yard.

I am so happy to say that we got almost everything we were hoping for!!  We found a split level 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom home with two living areas, an attached garage and a nice size yard.  The one thing I had to compromise on was the kitchen.  Its not terrible, but its tiny, and could use a little updating.

Here is how we are using our new spaces.  We have a master bedroom with a bathroom.  We have two of our boys, Noah (the sleep in-er) and Zach (the noisy one, who will also sleep in if given the chance), sharing a room, and then Elijah gets his own room.  This has been amazing for all of us!  They now sleep in until about 7 or 7:30!  In our basement area, we have a large family room and the fourth bedroom which we are using as our school area. There is also a half bath down stairs which works wonderfully for when we are doing schoolwork and Zach needs to use the potty.

I don't have great pictures right now of our spaces, but here is a little glimpse of where we do school and our outside space.  I hope to post better photos later and give you a little tour of our home.

To the left in the picture is my oldest sons desk, he's the tall one in the photo.  To the right is my middle sons desk, he is not in the picture.  The little on in the picture is our three year old.  

We were so lucky that the previous owners left this great play set.  It has a climbing wall, a slide, monkey bars, and swings.  

Selling and Buying a House Part Two

Last time I gave a run down of what our summer looked like.   Today I'll talk about the challenges we faced when trying to actually get moved in to our new house!

Like I said before, we had about a two week gap, or so we thought, from the time we closed on our old house and when we were able to close on the new house.  Talk about nerve-wracking!  After some negotiating with our sellers we were able to get our closing date moved up to October 2, they had actually already moved out of state.  We still ended up with two nights in a hotel but that was better than a week!

At our home inspection, everything went well, no major issues!  Yeah!  Then came the termite inspection, he found no termites, because he stepped into the house and was instantly covered in FLEAS!!!  Yup, the house was infested with fleas!!  So we had to get it bug bombed, and argue with the sellers to get them to pay for it!  So what happened was they sprayed for the fleas and then they would come back 7 days later and spray again to kill off all the ones that hatched from eggs that had been laid.  In between that time we closed on the house, on October 2 which was the day that I flew out to visit my parents with the boys.   Yes, I still went because we already had the tickets purchased.

I was pretty nervous flying by myself with the three boys.  Two of them are old enough that I wasn't too worried but then I had the 3 year old too!  Thankfully all went well!  I was armed with snacks and electronic devices!  Including an iPad and DVD player with DVDs they hadn't seen before.  Our trip to my parents was a great vacation away from the stressful summer that we had had.  We did a lot of really fun stuff, including Legoland!

While I was away my husband was able to stay with his parents.  On a side note, I forgot to mention that a week before we were to be out of the old house our van broke down!  So we had to get a rental for about 2 weeks.  It was actually a great blessing in disguise, the rental van had a DVD player that our van does not.  It was a total life saver!  Especially since we had to be out of the house early in the morning and couldn't check in to the hotel until 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and my husband had to work.

Ok back to the story, while I was gone we had a few more issues come up, the hot water heater was not working and my husband thought he saw more fleas even after the second treatment.  Our house had to get super bombed a third time to get rid of the fleas, thankfully we hadn't moved anything in yet.  As far as the hot water heater, well that wasn't able to get fixed until after I came home.  So we ended up spending two nights at my in laws house, before we finally got moved in and had hot water!

That about sums up our summer house adventure!  We are so blessed to be where we are and love our new house!  Next time I will tell you a little about it!  Maybe even show a few pictures!

Selling and Buying a House Part One

Well, let's see.... since my last post was about our summer schedule and its now February, I think its time for an update!

It all began last June, my mom and I took a little shopping trip to a big city (aka Ikea!).  While on this overnight trip we got to talking about the house (which we were renting from them) and the future of it.  My husband and I had been feeling for a while that we needed to make a move, since having child number 3 and then beginning homeschooling we kinda felt like we were busting at the seams.  So in short we determined it was time to list the house and for my family to move.  We got home from this trip and contacted our realtor, she came by the following day and told us what we needed to work on to get it ready to list and by the first week in July our house was on the market!

Fast forward about 2 weeks and we had an offer that we had accepted, we were super excited and had a closing date at the end of August.  It was working out perfectly because my parents usually leave to head back south about that time.  Well, after about 2 weeks and going through inspections and such our buyers backed out!!  We were so devastated and frustrated!  Here we are at the beginning of August and not having a buyer, not having a place to go and my parents getting anxious to get back to their home.  Not to mention I had started packing!!!  So most of out kids toys, our kitchen, and homeschool things had been packed.

So now lets fast forward a few more weeks, I decided to go ahead and begin school about the second week of August because I knew we would be taking some time off to move (whenever that would be!).  About two more weeks pass, my parents are literally packed up ready to leave town and we get a call from our realtor saying that she had another offer on our house!  Yeah!!  So we accepted that offer and had a closing date set for the end of September.

We still had not found a house to buy.  We began looking at rental houses but very few were willing to give us a short term lease, because we were planning to keep looking for a house until  we found one!  That was very frustrating because we really had not idea what we were going to do.   Thankfully we found a great house to buy that we both loved and met most of our criteria!  The only downside was that we would not be able to close on that house until October 10.  Which meant we would be "homeless" for about 2 weeks!

After a little thought and realizing that staying in a hotel would both be expensive and difficult.  I asked my parents if I could come visit them with the boys for about a week.  The cost of airfare for all four of us was about what we would have spent on a hotel alone for two weeks.

I wish I could say that it was a great smooth transition and move, but well.... it wasn't!!!  I'll tell you more about that next time!