End of the Year Review: The Changes We Made

Here we go again with another year end review.  This time I will be talking about each individual child and the choices we made for them this year.  Like I said in my last post, we ended up making quite a few changes through out the year.  Be sure to check out my other posts about Classical Conversations and our all together subjects.

Zach- Age 5  Kindergarten

For Zach, I really thought he would be ready to learn to read at the beginning of the year, that was not the case.  We tried for a few weeks and he just was not getting it, and that is ok.  He had just turned 5, he's a boy and his attention span at the time was really short.  At that point I just put everything away and we just did Math, which was all hands on.  Slowly as the year went on we made some changes and added things in.  We added in The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading instead of All About Reading, Zaner Bloser Handwriting the kindergarten book instead of the Italic handwriting, and Plaid Phonics A.  I love all of those choices!  Zach has just been thriving in all aspects.  He is really beginning to understand some phonics concepts, his handwriting is improving and his reading is really coming along.  During the summer we will continue on with his reading and maybe the phonics book.  All of these books we have been working through super slowly, so we will continue with all of them next year.  The one thing I did stick with for Zach is the Saxon Math K, we really enjoyed it.

Noah- age 8/9  3rd Grade

Noah has made tremendous strides this year with his reading.  He went from reading hardly anything to devouring everything he gets his hands on!  Honestly the only thing that is the same for Noah is his math.  He just finished up Teaching Textbooks 3, he did really well with it.  Although these last few months I have noticed his need for me to help him through the lessons, so next year we will be switching up our math choice for him.  For handwriting I also switched him to Zaner Bloser the 3rd grade book instead of the Prescripts from Classical Conversations, he has been working hard on his cursive writing.  We dropped All About Reading Level 3, and All About Spelling Level 1, I just felt like they weren't working for Noah anymore.  For a replacement we added in First Language Lessons Level 2.  That is going really well, we won't finish the book this year, but I hope to work a through it a bit this summer.  We also added on Nessy Online learning, we haven't been very consistent with it but I can tell its going to be a big help for him.

Elijah- age 12  6th Grade

Elijah worked so hard this year!  He made amazing progress in his spelling and grammar work.  I really didn't make any changes for him this year.  Although he didn't finish his Fix It Grammar book or the Phonetic Zoo.  We will hopefully work through them more over the summer.  I did drop the Prescripts handwriting for him and we switched to Zaner Bloser the 6th grade book.  I am not sure how much he actually got out of it, his handwriting is just not improving as much as I would like.  He is left handed and a boy and his father has really terrible handwriting so I think I will just concede that it's as good as it's going to get.   He also did not do any of the reading books I had picked out.  He just does not like to me to force books on him, on the other hand he will pick up random books and just start reading, so I guess I don't need to worry about him.  He finished up his Teaching Textbooks 6 and did really well, although it was a tough road at times!  I really feel like the Essentials program through Classical Conversations helped a lot with his writing and for a final project for him he is writing a five paragraph paper all on his own with very little help from me.  I am requiring this of him because I want him to know that he can do it!  Next year will be a big leap of independence for him and I know he needs this boost of confidence.

My final thoughts on this year:

This was an amazing year of tremendous growth for all of us!  I am so excited that we made the decision to use Classical Conversations and I feel that after five year of homeschooling we have finally found our thing!  I have been reading a lot about the Classical model of education, and I am hoping to dig more into it this summer.  Reading The Well Trained Mind is what helped me make my mid year changes for Zach, I took most of the recommendations from that book and surprisingly they worked for him!  Here are some books on my summer reading list, The Question, Teaching the Trivium, and The Life Giving Home .


**The links in this post are given to make it easy for you find the items I mention and are not affiliated links.**

Curriculum Choices for the 2016- 2017 School Year

Well it's that time of year again, back to school!  Every year I enjoy the iHomeschool Networks  back to school blog hop!  I figured that even though my blog has sat extinct for the past, I don't know how many months, I still wanted to contribute.  To kick off this month long event it is Curriculum Week!

Today I will be sharing what we will be using for our curriculum this year.  Just to catch you up a bit, this year, 2016-2017, I will have a 6th grader, a 3rd grader and a Pre-K 5/ Kindergartener. We began our school year on August 15, so we are about 4 weeks in right now.

Something new that we will be participating in this year is Classical Conversations.  I am so excited! Our community has not started yet, so I have no idea how this will alter the choices I have made.  I have tried not to add too much more than what was already provided through Classical Conversations.

All three of my boys will be participating in the Foundations program through Classical Conversations which meets one morning a week from 9:00-12:00.  This includes Grammar, Science, Math Facts, Latin, Fine Arts, History/Timeline, and Bible.

All Together Subjects:

History:  

I know that Classical Conversations does  timeline and history sentences, but last year we worked through The Mystery of History Vol. 1 and absolutely LOVED it!  So I wanted to continue on using it, and it just so happens that we will be in the same time period as CC.  We will be using The Mystery of History Vol. 2 which covers the early church and the Middle Ages.  Along with the textbook, I am adding in notebooking pages, coloring pages and timeline figures from Homeschool in the Woods.

Morning Time:  

Another new thing we are adding in this year is morning time. In the spring of last year I began reading Teaching From Rest by Sarah Makenzie, that book totally changed how I thought about our homeschooling. From there I found Pam Barnhill and her idea of morning time. The ideas I gathered from both of them led me to a desire to implement a time into our day for truth, goodness and beauty. For our morning times we will be doing quite a variety of things. We will be using the book The Ology for the first quarter, this is a great book that is teaching us simple principles from Scripture. We are also learning The Gettysburg Address, The Nicene Creed, and the hymn How Great Thou Art. We will also be using our morning time to review our memory work from last year (Scripture passages that we learned), our CC memory work, science, history and doing our read aloud during this time.

Read Alouds:

This year we will be doing a few different groups of read aloud books.  One group will go along with our history lessons, and the other is just a group of books that I am wanting to read to the boys.

Group of fun read aloud books!

History Read Aloud Group

Elijah- 6th Grade

Math: Teaching Textbooks Math 6

I love Teaching Textbooks!  This has totally transformed math in our home!  My favorite part about this program is the self grading aspect!  I used to get so behind in grading math papers and not catching mistakes until it was too late.  This has absolutely solved this problem!

Spelling:  Phonetic Zoo Level A

Last year we abandoned our All About Spelling program because I didn't feel like it was working for him.  What I learned from that was that this kid still needs a spelling program.  So we will be adding Phonetic Zoo level A from IEW.  What I like about this program is that it is self taught, he listens to the CD and takes his test.  With All About Spelling, although I loved that program, it got to be a little too teacher intensive.

Grammar:  Essentials, IEW, Fix It! Grammar

Along with doing the Foundations program of Classical Conversations he will be doing the Essentials program that meets during the afternoon of our community day from 1:00-3:00 pm.  This is a program that is intended for 4th through 6th graders and they cover the same information every year.  Since he will only be getting one year of it I expect that this will be a challenging year for him.  This program includes Grammar such as diagramming sentences, Math games to practice speed, and Writing.  The writing program that he will use is IEW's  Medieval History Based Writing Lessons.
We will also be adding in Fix It! Grammar from IEW, in this program he will work on editing one sentence a day.

Reading:  

Elijah will be reading a selection of books this year.  I have chosen the books for him but am letting him choose when he reads them.  His first choice is A Wrinkle in Time, sorry I didn't get that added to the picture.  *sigh*

Handwriting:  Prescripts History Sentences

We will be using Classical Conversations Prescripts program, where he will be copying the history sentence each week.

Typing/Coding:  

This is an area that usually gets lost in the shuffle as the year goes on.  I am really hoping to push it this year.  Since he will be doing a LOT of writing I think learning to type proficiently will really help him. We use Typing Instructor which is downloaded onto the boys computer.    I am also very interested in my boys learning simple computer programming skills, so we will add in some of that as well.  Along with this book for coding we use a variety of different websites that offer coding lessons for free.

Noah- 3rd Grade

Math: Teaching Textbooks Math 3 

 *see explanation above as to why we love this program!* He began this last year, and was about 14 lessons in. So he will most likely finish it before the end of our school year. In that case we will just move right along to Math 4.

                                            

Reading:  All About Reading Levels 2 and 3  

He has just recently finished level 2 and so we have begun level 3.  In April of last year we had him diagnosed with Dyslexia, and have been working SUPER hard to remediate this.  We worked all spring and summer with a program called Lexercise, where we had a meeting via web video once a week and worked on skills through out the rest of the week.  He made massive improvements!  As of right now we are taking a small break and will begin again in the middle of October for another month.

Spelling:  All About Spelling Level 1  

We began this towards the end of last year (before we realized he was dyslexic) so we will finish this up this year.  If we finish we will move on to level 2 of All About Spelling.

Handwriting:  

Classical Conversations has a handwriting program called Prescripts, basically is uses the history sentences for copy work.  He will work through this as he feels like it.  Our main handwriting program will be Logic of English cursive.  We have the workbook and the tactile cards.  So far its been a really hard thing for him to pick up on, so we will see if I stick with it.  I have heard that cursive is a great thing for dyslexics because there are no letters that can be reversed!   So I really want to push cursive with him.

Typing/ Coding:

Noah will also be using the same typing program and coding book and websites.

Zach- Pre-K 5/ Kindergarten

Zach is a newly turned 5 year old and ALL BOY!  His attention span is not that great, but on the other hand he is super smart!  So this year we will be working on his Classical Conversations memory work, math, handwriting, and reading.

Math:  Saxon K  

I have never used Saxon before but I really like that its not a workbook and uses manipulatives instead.  So far he is really enjoying it.

Handwriting:  

We will be using the Italics handwriting Book A.  I like the idea of teaching an italics version first which will lead nicely into learning cursive later on.

Reading:  All About Reading Level 1  

We will take this program SUPER slow!  Once again this kid is super smart, but also super wiggly getting him to sit and listen to a lesson or read some words is proving to be quite a challenge!  So we will take this as his interest allows, I really am not too concerned if he learns to read this year or not.  I think by the middle of January or February he will be mature enough to really catch on to these concepts.

Well that just about sums up what we will be doing this year!  Be sure to hop on over to the iHomeschool Network and see what others are using this year for their curriculum!

3rd Grade Curriculum

A few months ago I posted what we will be using as far as curriculum goes.  Today I am going to give a little bit more detail about how I am going to be using them.

For Elijah who will be entering the 3rd grade, we chose to use My Fathers World Adventures in US History.  In this program we will be studying about american history beginning with Vikings and moving on to learn how each state came into the union.  We will be reading lots of great books that go along with this time period.

My Fathers World has a built in reading time that they call Book Basket time, we will use this as our reading program this year.  Elijah is a very good reader and does well at comprehension, so I don't feel that a formal program is necessary for him.  Although we will be doing some reading comprehension tests through out the year, just to make sure he is still doing well.

There is also a built in Bible program, which we will be using loosely this year.  We also do the AWANA program so I don't want to bog them down with too much.

We will also be continuing on with Math U See.  Last year in January we began using this program and started in Alpha.  This year we will be working through Beta, which expands on Adding and Subtracting multiple digits.

For English we will be focusing on proper writing techniques, sentence structure, parts of speech, picture study and writing reports.  Our text will be English for the Thoughtful Child  volume One.  This is a completely different direction than what we did last year.

In handwriting we will begin to transition to cursive writing.  We are going to be using A Reason for Handwriting the Transition book.

Something new we are adding this year is a language study.  We will be studying Latin this year, using Song School Latin level 1.  We have worked partially through one lesson so far and I think Elijah enjoys it, and Noah might warm up to it eventually.

We are going to continue on using All About Spelling, that program has worked wonders for him.  We are on Level 3 this year.

Elijah is also going to begin doing some piano lessons at home this year.  We have the program Piano is Easy, which comes with a teaching DVD and CD.  He worked a little during the summer and really enjoys it, but still struggles realizing that it takes practice to learn something new.

He will be doing an online typing program, called BBC Typing.  I have tried to find a program that we can install on our computer, but finding a good one to run on a MAC is a little harder than I  had thought.  So until we can find one he will use that one.

My Fathers World has an art program but we will not be using it, instead we will be adding in Draw Write Now books 2 and 5.  They correlate really well with what we are studying this year.  It won't be a weekly thing, just whenever I find one that goes with a unit.

That about sums up our 3rd grader!