Little Man's First Grade Curriculum

Can I just tell you right now how happy I am to be able to do Five in a Row with Little Man?

This year, for the first time, I took Z-Man with me to the homeschool convention. (He loved it!) When we visited one vendor that carried a lot of the FIAR titles, they were like old friends to him. We both have such wonderful memories of learning with those great books. I'm delighted to be able to make some of those memories with Little Man this year.

Five in a Row covers art, geography, social studies, science and even a little bit of math.



Math
Life of Fred - do you ever remember laughing while reading a math book? These are genius.
Living Math books - there's a good list here.

Phonics
We'll continue to use Explode the Code and our Bob Books.

Little Man has made tremendous progress learning to read, especially given that we just found out this summer that the vision in his right eye is 20/200. Basically, that means that he can see the huge E on the top of the eye chart. He's been wearing glasses all summer and may get an eye patch on the good eye in the middle of September, which will force the right eye to work. So it's hard to know what to expect, really. We'll just keep plugging away. Say a prayer for him if you would.

The following subjects will be done together with Z-Man:

Bible
We'll be going through the TruthQuest Beginnings guide, memorizing scripture and also working on character.

Art
Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes
Artist studies, including Frederick Remington and Winslow Homer

Music
Composer studies, including Haydn and Aaron Copeland
We'll attempt to learn to play the recorder. WAY out of my comfort zone here!

History
Z-Man is going through TruthQuest American History for Young Students III, which covers the Civil War to 2000. Little Man will snuggle on the couch for picture books, so I order plenty from the library. He usually wanders off for the chapter books and says, "tell me when there's a picture." Still, it's pretty amazing what he retained from last year and he'll be going over these time periods again later.

Science
Most of Little Man's science will come from our FIAR books, but he will be welcome to participate in Z-Man's earth science and creation science also.

So there you have it! We're looking forward to getting started next week. I wish you all a wonderful school year!

2012-2013 Curriculum for sixth grade!

Wow! I don't think I've ever taken such an extended blog break since I started this blog but, thankfully, it's just because we've been busy having a great summer! I hope all of you have enjoyed this beautiful summer as much as our family has.

I'll try to post some of our summer fun pictures soon, but today I want to talk about our plans for the upcoming school year, since I'm knee-deep in planning, as I'm sure many of you are.

Z-Man will be entering sixth grade. I know I talked last year about how much we love TruthQuest History. It's simple, uses living books and points out God's hand in history. Well, listen to this: about three weeks ago, Z-Man asked me if we could start our history reading early. Start a "school" subject early. Like, in the middle of summer. Just because he likes it! Isn't that the best thing you've ever heard?!

"Yes, Honey, if you're very, very good and do all your chores without complaining, I guess we can start history early." Oh my goodness.

History:
So we've been reading pioneer stories and will be moving on to the Wild West soon with TruthQuest American History for Young Students III, which goes from the end of the Civil War to 2000.

Bible:
We will also, in our Bible time, start TruthQuest Beginnings and go through that very slowly. If we don't finish this year, no big deal.

We'll continue to work on character using a lot of resources. That might have to be a separate post.

Science:
Creation or Evolution: A Home Study Curriculum. Very excited to start this!
The Earth: Its Structure and Its Changes. We did Forces and Motion last year and I really like this series. Very hands-on.

Art:
Drawing with Children by Mona Brookes

 Draw and Write Through History: The 20th Century
Artist Study - Frederick Remington, Winslow Homer, John James Audubon and several others.

Language Arts:
Rockets, Radar and Robotics: Technology-Based Writing Lessons from IEW. Somebody gets it at IEW, that's all I can say.
Take Five Minutes: A History Fact a Day for Editing. A cool fact every single day, written by some poor soul who can't spell, punctuate or capitalize. I do believe we can help them.

Geography:
Map Skills. A very simple workbook that gets the job done.

Math:
Saxon. It works for Z-Man and we're sticking with it. There were no tears over math last year. Could just be his age but I'm not taking any chances.

Music:
Composer studies, starting with Haydn so we can listen to "Creation" while we're studying creation. I love it when things go together.
In what I'm hoping was NOT a super-collosal mistake, I bought all of us soprano recorders. We'll see how that goes. I can always put my hair over my ears to hide those little squishy earplugs.


Stay tuned for Little Man's First Grade curriculum choices very soon!