What! A Blog About Us?

I was writing up an email for a friend at our weekly homeschool playgroup about the curriculum we use and how I find it.  It ended up being something that I thought I’d post here as well!

OK, Here is a rundown of the places I buy my used curriculum as well as some links to curriculum we like.

http://homeschoolclassifieds.com/default.asp This is my favorite place.  Use the search link to find something particular.  I sell things on here as well.

http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=15 To me, this site is not as easy to buy things from, but I have found some really good deals.  You can’t post things for sale here until you have made a minimum of 40 (I think) other posts on the varius forums.  A lot of their forums are really great, but be prepared to spend lots of time.

If I buy things new, I usually buy it from Rainbow Resource. If you’re not easily overwhelmed, they have an awesome free catalog filled with products and reviews.  It is huge though, so beware.

Timberdoodle also offers good prices and shipping.

I research my curriculum choices carefully.  My favorite places to read reviews of each product is at homeschoolreviews.com and Cathy Duffy Reviews.

Now for the curriculum!

Teaching Textbooks You can do several sample lessons in each book as well as take a free placement test to make sure you buy the right level.  They have wonderful customer service!

A World of Adventure This is a unit study for grades 4-8 that covers most everything except math.  You are welcome to borrow the Egypt section that we are finished with.  We are not loving the Rome section, that’s why I’m looking at a different history program.  I really love how this unit study does language arts and Bible, but I didn’t want to use it just for those things.  We may go back to it after Rome…

Sequential Spelling This really helped Taylor start noticing the patterns in words.  After volume 2 though we are moving on to Spelling Power.  I see lots of books for sale with this, but the only book you need to do it is the actual Sequential Spelling Volume 1.  The spelling in the World of Adventure book is good for some kids, but Taylor needed something more….sequential.

Hands and Hearts History Kits In all of our homeschooling life, THIS has been the single best thing that we have ever done.  We love these kits.  If I had the money to, I would buy every single one.  Your business here also supports a very special homeschool family. 

OK, the line up for the rest of the year for us is going to be

Zoology 2 with Notebooking Journal (and co-op)  We are loving this book and plan to continue on with it.

Story of the World Volume 1 with Activity Book I’m hoping to borrow this from a friend to save some expense since we will only be using the 2nd half.  We will read the section of the actual Story of the World book aloud together each day, and then Taylor will be expected to do more in depth reading and papers on her own.

Teaching Textbooks Taylor should finish up Math 5 by February and get a good start on Math 6 by the end of the year.  A lot of the beginning of the book is review, so I will just have her take the quizzes until she gets to an area that she needs to work on.

Bob Jones Math 1 This is working for Isaac, and I’m familiar with it from using it with Taylor so we will keep on trucking along.

My goal for the rest of the year in Language Arts for Taylor is to be able to write a variety of really good paragraphs.  To accomplish this, I am using ideas and resources from wherever I can find them.  I’d love to buy a book such as this one.  Until then, I will continue making up my own lessons.  I’m getting a lot of ideas from Jimmie’s Blog.  Her 10 days of Language Arts series is especially good.  Today I started using her free Sentence Patterns ebook. We covered independent and dependant clauses as well as phrases.  I found some free worksheets online to go along with the lesson, and then I had Taylor make notebooking pages about each one.

Isaac is working through Happy Phonics and Explode the Code book 2. He reads to me every day also.  For writng and handwiting we use Writing With Ease level 1.

As a family we also do daily read alouds.  Currently, it’s The Adventure of Pinnochio which is available as a free download.  We started reading this book because the section we read of it in Writing with Ease were so interesting.  Let me tell you, this book is hilarious!  And the lessons to be learned in it are much more obvious than in the Disney movie.  It is more disturbing also though…

Since I am not currently using A World of Adventure, we are working our way through Wisdom and the Millers along with Leading Little Ones to God. We are also still working on memorizing Ps 23.

Phew, I was planning on writing down the plan for next year also, but I think this is more than enough to keep you busy for a while!