Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Our First Full Year of Morning Time: What We Included

Here is the second part of my year in review.  This was the first year I was teaching all three of my kids.  Elijah was in 6th grade, Noah was in 3rd grade, and Zach was in Kindergarten.  This year was quite a bit different than our other years, I'm not sure if it's because I was teaching all three of them or if it was because we were doing a whole lot of new stuff.  I feel like as we are wrapping up this year I need to look back and see just how far all of my kids have come.  There were many days this year that we struggled to just get the minimum work done.  I know at this point all of us are ready for a great relaxing summer break!

I'll start my curriculum review by going over what we did together, next time I will go over their individual curriculum choices.


Morning Time:

This was our second year doing a morning time, but this was the first year we that we went full force!  Our morning time included our Bible time, hymn memorization, Bible passages, famous speeches, and documents.   For our hymns we learned How Great Thou Art, In Christ Alone, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, and Amazing Grace.  Next year I think we will learn quite a bit more than just four, I started out slow because I wasn't sure how my boys would react to them, but they really loved it!  We also learned some Bible passages, Galations 5:22-23 (The Fruit of the Spirit), Ephesians 6:11-18 (The Armor of God) and Matthew 5:3-12 (The Beatitudes).  We learned The Nicene Creed, The Gettysburg Address and we are working on the Declaration of Independence.  Also in our morning time we included history, read aloud, and our Classical Conversations memory work.  

History:

This year we continued using The Mystery of History and did Volume 2 The Early Church and the Middle Ages.  I absolutely love this history curriculum!  It is so thorough and exciting. I love how it ties in Biblical history to word history.  We didn't do any of the activities this year, we would read the lesson, Elijah would do a note booking page about that lesson while the other two had coloring pages they would use.  I also made timeline pages for each child to color and use instead of doing a big timeline on our wall.  I think they each enjoyed coloring their own timeline figures.  We also did most of the mapping activities.




Bible:

Our Bible curriculum consisted of a few different items this year.  We used the following books throughout the year The Ology, Church History A-Z, The Biggest Story and finally we worked through a Grapevine Study on Biblical Feasts and Holy Days.  I really enjoyed having different things to go through.  It kept it fresh and didn't get stale through the year.  Last year we did the Apologia Who Is God and really loved it, but it did get a little repetitive as the year went on.  So I think next year I will do something similar to what we did this year.





Read Aloud:

This year I had a great hope for our read aloud time, I had so many good books planned, but something amazing happened this year!  We went off of our plan because we found some amazing books that we just fell in love with!  We finished reading The Green Ember series, and we are working through The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series.  We did get through most of the ones I had planned and a few that we started we just didn't finish because we lost interest.  Some of the ones we didn't get through we will read either through the summer or save them for next year.  Here is the list of books that we did read this year from my list:

  • D.L Moody
  • Ronald Reagan
  • Castle Diary
  • Adam of the Road
  • Rabbit Hill
  • Twenty and Ten
  • My Side of the Mountain
  • The Door in the Wall
  • The Bears on Hemlock Mountain




The ones that we started but didn't finish are The Samurai's Tale and The Trumpeter of Krakow.  I'm not sure what we didn't like about them but we just couldn't get excited about either one.  We got about eight chapters into each one before we stopped so I feel like we gave it a good try.  Oh well, not every book will be a hit and that ok!

Books that we didn't get to but will save for next year are John Wycliffe and The Wheel on the School.  I am looking forward to reading both of those.

Next time I will get into each child's curriculum and what we liked and didn't like about what we chose.  Here is a hint- we changed a lot through out the year!


**There are internet links in this post but I want to be clear that these are not affiliate links.  I just like to include links so it's really easy to find the items I mention.**

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