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Ebenezer
Jul. 18, 2006
Curriculum
Seeing as how this is technically a homeschooling blog, I should start by describing the current plan for this school year (LONG POST):
Dancer is 4. She went to preschool last year and thrived, so she will be returning this year three mornings a week. But she will not be neglected at home! She'll be using:
* Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading. Confession: Dancer has been reading for almost a year now. But I know her primary method of learning was whole-word memorization during lights-on time in bed and following along while we read together. Well, she did know most of her letter sounds from this LeapFrog toy her older brother got when he was about 2 (and for which I chastised my dad for buying as a Christmas gift at the time because I insisted the child was too young. Dad, I'm sorry, I was wrong.). But she still doesn't like to sound out words herself, and part of that is not knowing letter combination sounds. Of course, she'll ask what a word is and after being told will remember it ever after. I'm trying to wean her off of that, and this book will work very well, because it allows me to pretend that I'm teaching her new stuff when she actually already knows it, therefore building her confidence, and then, using the same book, we'll do stuff she doesn't already know.
* Singapore Math Earlybird 2A through as far as she wants to go.
* Handwriting Without Tears first printing book
* Reading, reading, reading...with occasional Five in a Row discussions
* Osmosis from older brother's lessons and participation in art, music appreciation, PE....
* Ballet class once a week
Comet will be 8 at the end of August. This is our second year of homeschooling -- he went to the local Christian school through 1st grade. He'll be using:
* Sonlight 3 Advanced Readers for history/readers/read-aloud, with supplementation from Story of the World.
* Singapore Math 4A - however far he can go
* Calculadders for math fact drill
* Bible: This one is subject to tinkering, but right now I plan to have him read aloud from his Discoverer's Bible suggested passages from Sonlight, and then I'm hoping to do more of a "study" by working through Nancy Ganz children's commentaries on Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus (probably not all this year, as they're pretty thick). He'll also be memorizing Bible passages per Sonlight's schedule. And we do family devotions in the evening, currently using Character Building for Families as a spine.
* Piano lessons, year 2. For music appreciation, Comet often listens to classical music in bed, but we also listen to the Classics for Kids radio show every week online.
* Art: This is the subject that got dropped for time last year, but over the summer I found Discovering Great Artists and love it. Its projects are deceptively simple -- that is, they are simple to set up and execute, but the premise is imitating techniques of great artists, so we get art history and art theory rolled into one, without having to use exactly the same materials. (I mean, I'm not going to give gold leaf to a third grader, but he can experiment all he wants with aluminum foil.) We've been doing some catch-up over the summer. Previously I used How to Teach Art to Children, which is okay, but heavily focused on art theory, with some projects that were a bit much for my son, or too involved for me to facilitate. I'll probably go back to it sometimes.
* Prima Latina. I don't know a lick of Latin. Other than SAT-vocabulary roots, I mean. So we'll be learning together.
* Spelling: Self-styled program based on commonly-used words, his own ongoing list of trouble words from dictation, and phonetic groupings.
* Rod and Staff 3 Grammar and dictation 2x/week.
* Classical Writing - Aesop: We started this last year because I was less than thrilled with Sonlight's LA program (we stuck with the grammar part until now).
SL's writing component was too...I don't know, random? for my son. It suggested good topics to write about, but no structure for how to write. I love the imitation process. I have discovered that Comet is great at retelling stories (from our history lessons, for example) that have a definite beginning, middle and end. He'll use vivid language and good transition cues. He's not so great at narrating or writing about more thematic things, like, say, "Describe a day in the life of a medieval peasant." I'm quite confident the problem is thought organization. So the upshot is, I'm going to keep asking him to narrate orally from history with me writing, and he can practice his writing with the imitation program until we make the mental leap to synthesizing information. We do this on a two-week schedule: one week of analysis and one of writing/revising. We also don't do the whole formal grammar/spelling component, obviously -- just as needed for the task at hand.
* Science: Again, we did not like SL science AT ALL. Comet liked some of the reading selections, but as an overall program it was terribly ineffective. It tried to cover too much ground an inch deep and asked only fill-in-the-blank questions. So this year -- and we've already begun this because Comet had saucer-eyes when we opened the package -- we're starting with NOEO Chemistry 1. We love it. After that -- I assume we'll finish about halfway through first semester -- we'll do Apologia Elementary astronomy, and whenever we finish that, we'll do A Child's Geography (earth science). After that I think we'll stick with alternating NOEO and Apologia, depending on the subject matter. We'll want to do botany from Ap., and physics from N.
* Penmanship: Handwriting Without Tears cursive book 2.
* Swimming lessons, if our schedules match with the health club; otherwise a weekly homeschool PE class.
Whew! I think that's everything. It sounds like a lot but we get through it all pretty quickly.
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Posted by 
Jul. 18, 2006 - Untitled Comment
We like Singapore math too. We use it with another math
and it really rounds things out. We've never tried Sonlight, but love
Rod and Staff English so far. Hope you are having a great summer!
When are you starting up "school" again?