Curriculum: Elementary

This blog will cover my 3 elementary-aged children in grades Kindergarten, 2nd and 3rd grades.
We will start the home school day going what we call "together school."  This year we have a bunch of fun things lined up.
We will work on Bible Memorization using the CD's: Sing the Word A New Commandment and Sing the Word God the Provider.
Other things we will do in our together time:

• Memorize the Presidents using the book Yo, Millard Fillmore!
• Memorize the States and Capitals
• Memorize the Sign Language Alphabet
• Read through the book Our American Heritage Abeka 3
• Work though Our American Heritage Map Study skills 3
• Watch all episodes of Liberty's Kids through Netflix
• Read real books about topics covered in Liberty's kids and Our American Heritage
• Read through the Bible storybook The Jesus Storybook Bible

The together school takes advantage of their incredible memorizing ability at this stage and covers Bible and History. 
Daddy loves to teach science, so he will be teaching Science to the elementary crew using God's Design series from Answers in Genesis.   This year, they will be studying the Blue series that covers "Our Planet Earth," "Our Weather and Water," and "Our Universe."

For Math, we will be using Horizons Math Kindergarten, 2nd and 4th grades. (Josiah is a year ahead in math.) 
I see that Life of Fred is also coming out with Elementary math this month, and since that is, hands down, our favorite math for the older kids, I will likely order those books and include that briefly in our together school, just cause Fred is so stinking funny!

Praise (Kindergarten) will continue with Explode the Code Online and Explode the Code workbooks.  We were able to find it online for $32.50 for a year subscription, which is great! She started back in February.
She will be finishing Explode the Code book 2 and working on through book 3 this year.  She also reads to us a lesson of her phonice books. She is using Christian Liberty Press readers now.
All 3 of them will continue with the next Handwriting Without Tears book.

Jubilee (2nd grade) will be using Abeka Language 2 book, Explode the Code books 4,5 & 6 and English for the Thoughtful Child Volumes 1 & 2.  She also reads out loud to us for 10-20 minute per day from Abeka Readers 2nd grade or other equivalent levels.

Josiah (3rd grade) will be using Abeka Language 3 book,  Building Spelling Skills 4, and Primary Language Lessons .
He also does 30 minutes per day of reading (currently reading through the Boxcar Children) and also does personal Bible time. 

Hosanna and Josiah will also be using an Art Curriculum this year called Feed My Sheep.

I think that covers the Elementary Curriculum for the year....stay tuned to my next blog that will cover my 2 Middle school students.

Curriculum: The Little People and Bible

It's that time of the summer, when all my homeschool buddies and I eat, sleep and think about curriculum and planning for the next school year.
I have prayed, planned, changed my mind and finally know what I  feel will work best for our family this year. 

I wanted to incorporate some teaching time for Hosanna this year as part of her school to better prepare her for motherhood or wherever God might have her teach in the future. (The Bible makes it clear that all women are to be teachers...to the women younger than they are.)

So with that in mind, I found a really fun curriculum for Gilead (and Praise will sit in too even though she has her other kindergarten school to do.)  It only takes about 30 minutes a day. Hosanna is very excited to teach it though.

She will be using Heart of Dakota Little Hands to Heaven for Gilead.
It includes 2 books and music CD's (you have your choice of 2 for the Bible and devotionals.)

New Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes by Kenneth Taylor

Big Thoughts for Little People

It also incorporates the Singing Bible to help your kids sing their way through the Bible. 

Along with that, he will continue his little workbooks that he is already doing from the "I Can" series...

I Can Cut
I Can....Paste, Color, Trace, Draw

Gilead and Hosanna are excited to start their year and may not wait until August.

Moving on to Bible.
Since we just finished up our 6-year Bible curriculum with Student of the Word this spring, we are ready to start something new as a family.   It was really awesome to read every single verse of the Bible with my children....we have seen so much fruit from it.   We are not up to starting the cycle all over however.  Grin.
With that in mind, we found a neat, well laid-out Bible curriculum to keep us on track that we will be starting soon as a family in the evenings when Chris is home.
It is called Foundations.  We will be starting with Foundations 3 covering the New Testament.
It includes memory verses, daily reading, links to coloring pages for the younger kids on that particular Bible story and twice a week Sword Drills (races to find a verse to learn the layout of the Bible better.)
They have you illustrate the Memory Verse, write it out, act it out and do games to learn it. Effortless.

Foundations is mainly for the benefit of the younger kids who can't read since my 8 yr old and up have daily devotional times by themselves. It still is a great opportunity for us to get into deeper conversations with the tweens and teens. We're excited to use this since it's so well laid out and looks fun for the kids as well.

That's all for now. My next blog post will cover the early elementary curriculum that we will be using  Kindergarten through 3rd grade.