Curriculum for 2014-2015

I feel like a kid in a candy store this time of year!  I have chosen our curriculum for next year, and the boxes have arrived.  Let the lesson plan preparation begin!  Of course I enjoy this part, I am a TypeA planner!!!  Here are our plans for the 2014-2015 school year.  Lauren will be in 5th grade, Lyndsey will be in 2nd grade, and Colleen will be in PreK4.  You can follow Colleen's preschool lessons under the Preschool Page at the top!

:::BIBLE:::

This year we are going to start off the school year with Who Is God? from the Apologia What We Believe Series.  It is a 10-week study on the basic truths of the Christian faith.  This first volume, we will meet our loving God who longs for us to know him and spend time with Him.   Each girl will have their own Notebooking Journal for puzzles, projects, questions and to record thoughts and prayers.  There is also a coloring book to go along with the series which will hopefully keep Colleen entertained during our Bible time!

I would also like to work through the Kay Arthur book How to Study Your Bible for Kids.  I am not sure if we will do that before, during, or after Who Is God? Ideally, I would like to get them started on this book and let them run with it during their own personal quiet time!

:::MATH:::

Math should come as no surprise!  I love Saxon Math!  Lauren will move into 7/6.  Lyndsey will start Math 3.

:::GRAMMAR:::

Lauren will return to Building Christian English Series from Rod and Staff Publishers.  Lauren will be in Level 6 Progressing with Courage. Lyndsey will also be switching over to the Level 2 Preparing to Build.  

:::SPELLING:::

Lyndsey will be using All About Spelling which will blend with her reading program.  Spelling has not been Lyndsey's strong subject, so I hope the drilling of phonograms, syllables, and phonetic rules will help improve her spelling power!

:::WRITING and PENMANSHIP:::

I really do not like using penmanship books, but for teaching cursive to Lyndsey I felt the need for guidance!  I chose the Horizons 2 and 3 for Lyndsey.  The cursive begins have way through Horizons 2.  We will practice the manuscript for a few months before starting cursive.  The Horizons 6 is for Lauren to keep practicing.  This is not a requirement everyday for her.  We just do it a few times a week. 

I am using WriteShop Primary Book B for writing for Lyndsey.  WriteShop Primary Book B introduces children to the writing process using engaging activities, crafts, and picture books.

Lauren is enrolled in a writing class with The Potter's School.  She has struggled with writing compositions over the last two years.  I hope this class is the turning point for her.  I have heard only good reviews about this class!

:::READING--LITERATURE:::

Last year Lyndsey started Level 2 of Sing, Spell, Read and Write.   I loved Level 1, but Level 2 was just not appealing to either one of us.  We dropped it by November, and I supplemented with other reading materials that I had.  This was not a good option!  Lyndsey did not progress and improve as she should have!  This year we are jumping in Level 3 of All About Reading.  I think the constant phonogram review and drilling on syllables and spelling will be very useful.  I am very excited about giving this a try!  Lyndsey is a great reader, but she struggles with spelling.  I find this odd since she has been taught phonics from the beginning.  I think she is just in fast forward mode and does not stop to think about each word.  This program should give her the tools!

Lauren struggles with reading and comprehension.  This year I have enrolled her in an online literature course with CenterForLit.  She will be responsible for reading basically 1 book per month.  The class meets once a month to discuss the books with the teacher using the Socratic method to examine the book.  We will probably read the books together each month, but she will be responsible for the book if we do not have time for it during Read Aloud time.  

The Reading Comprehension skill sheets in the picture below are for Lauren once a week.  This is just to work on reading faster while retaining facts.  

I am excited about introducing the kids (and myself) to Shakespeare this year. I have been reading How to Teach Children Shakespeare for a few months now.  We will learn a few lines of Shakespeare each week, and we will start with a piece form A MidSummer Night's Dream.

:::HISTORY:::

We are going to pick up The Mystery of History in volume 2 with The Early Church and the Middle Ages.  We are very excited to travel back in time to right after the death of Christ.

:::SCIENCE:::

 

For Science this year we are going to use the Focus On... books.  The first book we are going to work through is Astronomy.  Lauren will use the Middle School version, and Lyndsey will use the Elementary version.  Both versions are compatible with each other so I will be able to teach them at the same time.  I will probably use the middle school as my teaching guide because I really think that Lyndsey can handle it, but she will only be responsible for the material actually covered in her book.  I think the book will take about 12 weeks, so we will should be able to cover the Chemistry and Geology books also this year.  Yeah!!!

:::GEOGRAPHY:::

We are using the Trail Guide to World Geography this year to travel around the world and make stops on each continent.  We enjoyed using The Trail Guide to US Geography over the last few years, so I think this will be a good fit.  The girls are not so excited about learning all the countries this year.  Time to start working with the iPad app Stack the Countries to get a head start!!!

:::MUSIC:::

We previewed this Music Appreciation program in the spring.  We did a few lessons, and we really liked it.  In Book 1 we will be introduced to seven different composers, dating from 1685 to 1828.   The composers are Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Paganini and Schubert. 

Along with the Music Appreciation program, the girls will continue in the homeschool choir and weekly piano lessons.

 :::LATIN:::

Ugh!  We did not do so good with Prima Latina last year!  We are going to give it another shot this year.  I ordered the DVD teacher this year to move us along.  I think I just let myself drown in what I did not understand!  I know we can do this!

:::ART APPRECIATION:::

 Meet the Masters is another program that we previewed in the Spring.  It was so fun!  I lead the kids through the online presentation.  We learned an art concept to go with each master.  Then we completed at least one project for the master.  We are going to complete Track A this year which will cover Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Winslow Homer, Pablo Picasso, Mary Cassatt, and Piet Mondrian.  I know this will be a special treat!  The girls love Art!

:::Extras:::

Lauren will continue to work on Typing with Always Ice Cream.  Always Ice Cream has really expanded their games online to cover math, english, geography, arts, sciences, and foreign languages for many grade levels.  It is a great way to play and learn.  Lyndsey has been asking for a login for Always Ice Cream, and I will probably sign her up after she completes Reading Eggs.  I do want her to move on into Reading Eggspress.  The Reading Eggs and Reading Eggspress are just great review for her reading fluency.

Bubbles, Butterflies, Bears, and Bees! We are learning the Letter B!

Week 2!  This is starting to become a routine without becoming a routine!  While the big girls are practicing piano or working on their computer programs, Colleen and I are getting some quality preschool time!  This week was Letter B.  She decorated her B with blue and brown dots, and we added Bubble wrap to complete the front of our folder!

 This week we enjoyed working through our folder activities.  We worked a lot on writing skills this week.  She is getting the strokes down by doing a lot of tracing!  Colleen's favorite school time activities are the ones where she is counting.  I introduced the terms most and least, and we worked on "reading" graphs.  We made her own teddy bear counter graph today, and she had fun counting the bears and finding the matching number.

For the grand surprise on Fun Friday, we had bear sandwiches, bananas, and butterfly Little Debbie snack cakes on a blue plate with a blue cup while dressed in a blue dress and a braid!  We also released our butterflies that we had been raising for the month of May.  It will be sad not to get to play with them every morning, but it was time to say "Bye-Bye"!!!!

We raised Butterflies!

Our caterpillars arrived on Lauren's birthday!  We prepared their little food containers and moved the little caterpillars to the containers.

We had fun watching them grow and grow and grow.  Not all of the caterpillars made it to the Chrysalis stage!  Not sure what we did wrong!

 On May 11th, Dad helped transfer the Chrysalis to the butterfly net.

 Then the waiting began!!!  The girls watched everyday (or so I thought) for the butterflies to emerge!  in the meantime, we worked puzzles and games to learn the life cycle of the butterfly!

On May 18th, I walked by the net on the way to church and didn't see anything.  Then I got a text from JM as he was leaving for work with a picture of a butterfly!  The girls could not wait to get home to see it! 

 We went form 0 to 4 by bedtime.  Then the next day 4 more emerged during breakfast!  We ended up with 13 butterflies!!! It was a beautiful process to study and watch.  Our God is so creative!  (Oh, we just fed them sugar water not Cinnamon Sugar!  It was just the perfect size bottle to create our feeder!)  The girls could be found with their hand in the net catching butterflies anytime of the day!  They loved to play with them!  They only set one free in the house, but I was able to catch it and return it to the net!

 Today, we said "bye-bye" to our beautiful butterflies!  We hope they survive in our yard!  This science project was so much fun that I am quite sure we will repeat it next year!

Apples for A

Somewhere around November, my preschool student dropped out of school!  Okay, I cannot blame it on the student.  I take full credit for becoming bogged down in EVERYTHING!!!  Colleen became best friend with the iPad during school time, and she was not playing learning apps!  As things started winding down for the other homeschoolers, I started regrouping and reorganizing preschool.  Step 1 was to move her stuff out of the walk-through to our bedroom.  Even though it seemed convenient right outside the big girls school room, the space was too small and I did not like to sit down with her at her table.  I felt trapped!!  With a little re-arranging, Colleen now has her own school area in the vestibule.  It is so much more inviting, and Colleen is ready every morning to have school.  She is keeping me on track!  We started over on Letter A this week.  Just to review and get back into the swing of school for her.

We start the day with singing a few songs that she should really know by know if she were a 1st child--you know like the ABCs, months of the year, and days of the week!   Then she is adding a bead to our "How many days have we been in school?" chains.

 

We are using a variety of materials.  We are making a Letter Folder each week.  I got this idea from Pinterest of course!  We are working on the sounds of letters using All About Reading Pre-Reading Set.  The Mailbox Letter of the Week has some cute reinforcement activities.  Colleen is enjoying having her own workbooks to use also.  She has My First School Book, Get Ready for The Code A, and Spectrum Learning Letters that she works in everyday.

 We are working on numbers and counting also.  Colleen's new favorite game is Hi-Ho Cherry-O!  She is also getting a little iPad time while we are in the car going to big kid activities.

Week 1 down and we are having fun together.  It helps when I am not focused on making sure the big kids are completing there school work!  

The Last Days of School

May 16th

May 16th was our official last last of school!  We have a few more field trips, a book club event, and a few simple machine labs next week.  But we are FINISHED with all our courses for the year!  Yeah!!! I had the girls Treasure Notebooks out for them to add the finishing touches today.  I also had all their lapbooks/notebooks for the year ready for them to take to their room.  Their desks were complete with Promotion Certificates and Report Cards.  It has been a FUN year of learning!

Lyndsey has been requesting a Presidents party since we finished learning the Presidents a few weeks ago.  Over the course of the year, we have studied each individual president and learned interesting facts about them.  We made a President Lapbook like this one over at Homeschoolshare.com.  The girls recorded facts in each presidential matchbook.  They also learned a song so they can name all 44 presidents in order!

The girls really pulled together this "party" for lunch!  I put some chicken strips in the oven while they dipped patriotic strawberries and built a log cabin and the Lincoln Memorial!

On the Menu

Cherries for George Washington

Jelly beans fro Ronald Reagan

Peanuts for Georgia boy Jimmy Carter

Pretzels for George W. Bush

Patriotic Strawberries

May 22nd

We celebrated The Last Day of School with Corynne and Tyler today.  Tyler actually took his last final on Friday, May 16th.  Corynne took her last final today.  Sonic Drive-In had 50 cent corny dogs to celebrate National Last Day of School today!  Yeah, Sonic!!

 

After our Sonic treat, Lauren, Lyndsey and I headed to homeschool book club.  We have been reading One White Dolphin this week.  Let me rephrase that.  We have read 60% of said book TODAY, and we finished the last chapter on the way to book club!!! It was a great book, and I look the Read Aloud time together!

It was a small group this month, but the girls discussed their favorite parts of the book. Then they each built a boat.  Lauren named her boat the "Mona" just like in the book.

After everyone was finished, we gathered at the fountain to see if the boats would sail.  THEY DID!  Our boatbuilders did a great job!

Gymnastics EOY Programs

 The girl attend gymnastics classes twice a week at the Armory.  They love to go run, roll, and jump!  Tonight they performed in the end-of-year program.

They all three preformed their routines for the crowd.  They did a great job!

Simple Machines with K-nex Lab

We finished our Apologia Botany book a few weeks ago.  We could have just "closed the book" on science, but then we would have missed out on a lot of fun!  We launched into a unit on Simple Machines.  We read books on each of the 6 categories--1 a day.  Then the girls found images of that category and added them to wall chart.

 We did fun activities like use the see-saw that Papa made to demonstrate levers, fulcrum, load and effort.  Then the girls busted out the K-nex to build a simple machine to demonstrate!

The girls absolutely loved building with K-Nex.  This came as no surprise because all 3 girls are Lego Builders during every free moment of time!  K-nex really helped us demonstrate how each simple machine worked.  SO. MUCH. FUN.

Lauren was invited to attend a K-Nex Lab with our homeschool group.  They built a tow truck the first session and completed a few experiments with the tow truck.

 During the second lab, the groups built incline planes.  Then they calculated how the incline (which they lowered each time) affected the speed of the ball rolling down.  Lots of math involved this week!

 Lyndsey had never studied simple machines, so this was a great introduction for her.  Lauren had studied simple machines when she was at Eastwood, so the labs enhanced and furthered her learning on simple machines.  I love it when unit studies come together this easy!!!