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!