Month: January 2018

Curriculum Fall 2018

I love looking at curriculum.  I also love making my choices and having things planned out way ahead of time so that I can forget about it all when summer hits.  🙂  It is also nice having my curriculum plans on my blog so that I can look back through the years to see what we have done.  Here is what I am thinking for the 2018/2019 school year…  Oh and one more reason that I am planning ahead is that we’re about to hit high school with Lucy and I want to be sure I have a good plan for where we are headed!

Lucy (8th grade) –

Heart of Dakota Resurrection to Reformation (I am using all of their recommendations including Apologia Astronomy for science, an IEW writing book, Rod and Staff English 5, and Drawn Into the Heart of Reading.  This is all scheduled in Heart of Dakota.)

Teaching Textbooks pre-Algebra

Duolingo Spanish

Piano and ballet lessons

Julia (6th grade) – 

Heart of Dakota Resurrection to Reformation (I am using all of their recommendations including Apologia Astronomy for science, an IEW writing book, Rod and Staff English 5, and Drawn Into the Heart of Reading.)

Teaching Textbooks 6

Duolingo Spanish

Piano lessons and possibly ballet

Esther (3rd grade) – 

Beautiful Feet Around the World with Picture Books

Usborne Beginners Animal books and 100 Science Experiments

Reading – Sonlight reading 3 vocabulary and comprehension questions

Math Mammoth 3

Rod and Staff phonics 2

Rod and Staff Spelling 3

Cheerful Cursive

Piano lessons

Isaac (1st grade) – 

Beautiful Feet Around the World with Picture Books

Usborne Beginners Animal books and 100 Science Experiments

Math Mammoth 1

Rod and Staff phonics 2

Heart of Dakota’s Emerging Readers Set

A Reason for Handwriting A

Colin (4yrs old) –

A Year of Playing Skillfully – we’re already using this lightly and love it

a math or a Rod and Staff workbook if he is interested

listening in to our Around the World studies

Annette (1 yr old) –

She will do lots of “being cute and disrupting things” I’m sure!

Much of what I am using for Esther and Isaac I have used before and am confident in (Math Mammoth, Rod and Staff, etc).  I’m excited about the Around the World studies, this is new to us and looks fabulous!  We have a couple of friends planning to use this also.

Lucy and Julia are continuing on with some things that have already been working well for them (Teaching Textbooks, Rod and Staff English).  Heart of Dakota Resurrection to Reformation looks like a really great next step for them and I feel like it will prepare them well for high school.  More focused writing assignments and history notebooking will be a good challenge for them.  I am hoping Heart of Dakota will be a good fit that they can continue on with through high school.  We’ve used some HOD in the past and for many years I have added HOD reading selections to whatever curriculum we used.  I’m looking forward to using their full curriculum.

This past week I have been working on a spreadsheet of all the curriculum we’ve used over the years for each child.  You can see across the top I have a page for each child: along the left side are the subjects, and at the top are the years, beside the year is the grade that particular child was in.  I haven’t finished filling these in, but its been extremely helpful.  I can quickly look and see for example that Isaac was only two when we did our human body study, so we’ll do that again with him.  It also helps when planning for my younger kids future school years.  We’ve been homeschooling for so long and with a variety of things; I don’t want to forget about any of these fun resources when it comes time for the younger ones!

Our Homeschool Day (and Checklists!)

This year I have kiddos in 7th, 5th, 2nd, K, a 3 year old, and a baby.  Caring for the new baby and at the same time having another child reach school age (my K boy) seemed daunting this year.  I feel like things have mostly gone well and at this point we’ve got a good rhythm to our days.  We definitely had to make some adjustments to our schedules and chores and figure out what works and what doesn’t.  Lots of planning and organization has helped, along with lots of flexibility too.  Here is what our day looks like currently:

wake up, kids each complete a morning chore, eat breakfast
9am we say prayers together and start school
everyone does history together at the kitchen table
older girls move on to independent work such as piano practice, math on computer
while K and 2nd grader work at the table with mom
12:00 lunch (K and 2nd grader are done for the day by this point)
mom nurses baby to sleep – kids have reading time or Spanish on the ipad/ quiet play
big girls work with mom
3pm done with school, snack time
play time
5:30 or 6:00 dinner, several nights a week we take Lucy to ballet
everyone works together to clean up kitchen, clear table, pick up toys (see chart)
7:30 prayers
Dad reads out loud
8:30 head upstairs for brushing teeth, bed time

Each child has one morning chore – empty dishwasher, feed and let out the dog, take laundry to the basement and sort, or change hand towels.  We used to have a checklist for these, but at this point the kids are good about getting them done without checking them off.  This chart is laminated and hangs on our refrigerator.  I write names on the lines with dry-erase marker and switch them weekly.  The second row is where I assign meal time chores which also rotate weekly.  My three year old doesn’t get put on the chore chart yet but sometimes he helps someone with their chore.

The school age kids each have checklists for the day.  I print these off weekly, but they stay the same.  It’s a list of subjects that they check off as they complete each one.  Assignments within subjects usually stay the same so they know what to do (math = 2 pages, reading = 20 minutes, etc).  I prefer using pencil instead of dry erase on these because I sometimes write in special assignments they need to remember or other notes.

For other chores we’ve switched to doing a family cleaning time on Sat mornings instead of doing them daily throughout the week.  I have a checklist for that too!  Some of these chores are easy enough for the smaller kids to do on their own, other times a child works with Dad or pairs up with an older sibling.  We usually work for a couple of hours and get as much of this done as we can and then call it good.  😉

A few other things that help us function well… I keep a one week dry erase calendar on the fridge where we write in appointments, classes, etc.  I also fill out and use a meal plan.  Any thoughts or questions?  What helps your family function well?