Curriculum List: 2011-2012

Not everything educational comes as a curriculum or text book or teaching guide. The best part of homeschooling, for me, comes down to having the time available with my children to immerse ourselves in everyday learning, making the most of the ordinary pleasurable interaction with life and knowledge and the world around us. But there is a place, too, for organized lessons and for specific plans for stuffing little heads with important tools and bits of information. My favorite selected resources for those specific plans are listed at the bottom of this post.

Noticeably absent from this list are the categories of Bible and Science and History. These are all subjects that I plan to expose her to through a lot of reading and discussion and field trips throughout the year, rather than from a certain textbook. We will have an animal of the week that we read about and take notes on, and we will be taking nature walks once or twice a week in various area parks. We will continue talking about her Bible lessons from Sunday school, based on the student guides from her class. History will be touched on via her Geography class at weekly Co-op days – next year, however, we will add in a much more organized approach to the history of the world beginning with the Ancients. When I add that she will have weekly Co-op classes for P.E. and Spanish (which I plan to review throughout the week with her) and that Daddy has offered to start giving her piano lessons . . . well, suddenly her academic schedule feels awfully full for a five-almost-six year-old.

So far I have refrained from assigning any one subject a particular amount of time we need to spend on it, and the amount of material we cover each week will vary as we go along and figure out what pace works well. I have an idea, however, that if we find ourselves with more than an hour and a half of seat work per day, I will cut back some. At this age, I feel strongly that children need to be moving and exploring far more than slogging through worksheets. Even our seat work time needs to be oriented towards hands on activities, in my perfect school world. We’ll see how it all works out and learn as we go.

Here is what I have on the school-corner shelf:

The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading, by Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington. I can’t recommend this book enough. We started with this book last year, and it was exactly the approach Buttercup needed to help her get started reading. The lessons are concise and free of busy work, giving her the tools she needs to sound out words – even those she’s never seen before. We completed the majority of it last year, but there came a point where she was having difficulty retaining new information, so we set it aside for the summer. I’m planning to start with a little review, and then we will pick back up where we left off - a lesson which includes words such as “physician” and “synagogue.” I expect we will finish up this text within two months at the most.

Considering how well this method worked with Buttercup’s learning style, I took the author’s suggestions for language and spelling materials.

First Language Lessons for the Well Trained Mind, by Jessie Wise. The author (who also wrote the above phonics book) has arranged a whole series of lessons designed to introduce the youngest students to Language through a combination of memorizing fun poetry, copying excellent prose, narrating from stories and artwork, and learning about basic grammar rules.

Spelling Workout A. Buttecup is constantly asking me how to spell words, so it’s definitely time to start a spelling program. The first spelling list: tub, bus, bat, see, sit, us.

Startwrite: This is a software for making handwriting worksheets. Very very cool. I get to choose the font, the line style, dashes, dots, directional arrows, et cetera, et cetera. So far I have made up every letter for review, plus pages copying the text of Animalia, by Graeme Base (complete with space for Buttercup’s own illustrations.) The plan is to make sheets as we go along for practicing spelling words, quotes from favorite books, dictation of her original stories, poetry, memory work, and so on – whatever strikes our fancy as good material for practicing her penmanship.

Singapore Primary Math 1A: We used some of the Singapore materials last year and I really liked the clear emphasis on the concrete-pictoral-abstract approach, and the many recommended hands on activities.

Miquon Orange Lab Book: I’ve been affectionately calling this our “Hippie Math.” It’s very loosie-goosie in a let kids choose what they want to do and discover all the skills for themselves kind of way. Basically, the teacher introduces the children to math concepts and then turns them loose in a Math Lab environment where children get to experiment and manipulate. I’m expecting this to be a great complement to the Singapore series.

For Bubba, I’ve picked up a couple of Kumon “First” workbooks that Buttercup enjoyed when she was three. These are mainly so that I have something to offer him when he wants to “do school” at the table like his sister. He’s also going to have a “Letter of the Week” featured on his bulletin board to help us continue talking about the alphabet and letter sounds.

There are a few other odds and ends, plus a beginning writing program that I have waiting, but I will talk about those when I fold them into our plans later on in the year. For now, we’re just getting ramped up to begin in a couple days. Wish us luck!!