Our homeschool year has gotten off to a bit of a slow start. As you read this, we are finishing up packing all of our belongings for a move from Iowa to Oregon. Needless to say, school is taking a bit of a backseat for the next couple of weeks! But I still want to share the resources we’re using this year.
- Bible Time: We are using Level 1 of these Old Testament Lessons. These are part of a free Sunday School curriculum, which you can learn more about here. (There’s also New Testament Lessons, which we will start once we finish the Old Testament.) Each lesson comes with a story and some activity pages – we do the pages sometimes. We do a story for two days, with a review of both stories for the week on Fridays. I’ve been searching Pinterest for projects to go along with the stories (you can see my Bible time board here).
- Math: Saxon Math 2. Even though the boys are technically in 1st grade and kindergarten, they’re both doing 2nd grade math.
- Phonics: The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading. We started this with Jonah last year, and he’s continuing where he left off. Matthew started at the beginning this year, even though he mostly taught himself to read over the summer.
- History/Geography: Story of the World Volume 1. We only got about halfway through this last year, so we’re starting where we left off. The boys color the coloring page while I do the reading, and we do the maps to review where things are. We occasionally do an additional project to go with the chapters, but not often (mostly when we can build something out of Legos).
- Science: Elemental Science: Exploring Science with experiments from Science at Play, and Elemental Science: Intro to Science with experiments from More Mudpies to Magnets. We still have a few units left in Exploring Science from last year, and then we’ll move on to Intro to Science. I love these Elemental Science curricula for two reasons: 1) The teacher’s guide lays out exactly what to do for a 2 or 5 day week, and 2) You have the option when purchasing to order a second student workbook at a discount.
My homeschool “brain” is my binder, which you can read more about here.
- Handwriting: Bible passages that go along with our lessons. We have a few notepads similar to these, so I’ve had the boys copy down Bible passages and sometimes draw coordinating pictures as one of our Bible time activities.
- Art: Projects that go along with Bible lessons, History, or Science
- Music: We work on a hymn verse in the mornings for two weeks at a time, and we will be starting piano lessons after we move.
- Read Aloud: For picture books, we read those that coordinate with our History and Science, as well as some that focus on specific vowel sounds to go along with our Phonics lessons. Since we’re not doing Letter of the Week with anyone this year, we don’t have quite as many “school books” floating around, but we still try to read at least a couple shorter books each day.
For chapter books, we started this year with Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. The boys have also been reading the Magic Tree House series during afternoon rest time. - Life Skills: The boys have daily and weekly chores, but their big skill they’re working on right now is tying their shoes! We take life skills one at a time.
Our schedule is pretty similar to last year’s, with most of our core subjects in the morning, and History and Science in the afternoons.
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We use the same science curriculum! Just excited to find someone else who uses it. *high five* (Pardon me while I comment on a bunch of your posts…)