Posted in Our Home Schooling Journey
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FACE - Foundation for American Christian Education PA - Principle Approach AiG - Answers in Genesis SWR - Spell to Write and Read It's about that time again. I'm getting things ready for next year. I bought Diana Waring's Ancient History activity book (for the youngins) and her What in the World's Goin On Here? Part 1 CD set. Last year we didn't have much history going on although A is for Adam really helped in laying the foundation of a true biblical worldview of earth history. I also used my knwoeldge from reading Unwrapping the Pharoahs to continue that biblical worldview when watching ancient Egypt movies (like Prince of Egypt). This year I'm hoping to do a bit more and have it be more consistent and dedicated (I'll talk more about that in my next post). Along with Diana Waring's stuff, I'm trying to get the History Through the Ages timeline book and figures for the same time period. I like teaching history chronologically. It helps me understand it better which means I can teach it better. I went to the Homeschool Classifieds website and found a few of the figures books available. Only thing is right now I'm only able to swap stuff since funds are non-existent.  Oh well. Jesus will provide with what we need when we need it. If I don't get it I guess we'll just have to make our own for this year. That'll be real sweet! I'm sure they'll remember it more. It'll make it more fun. I wish I had learned history like that...For science I was trying to decide between Apologia's Astronomy curr. and AiG's science curr. Lo and behold, Jesus blessed me out of the blue with an older version of Considering God's Creation! I had it on my wish list at Paperback Swap (PBS) and someone wanted to swap it. It has all the worksheets and notebook page helps right in the back of the book (I think now you have to buy it separately). So my science curr. for next year is complete! I joined the yahoo group for it and there's a wealth of helps for every lesson in the files section! I'm all set! I even heard of one woman taking 3 years to finish all 36 lessons! I was just thinking we'd do one lesson a week and be finished in a year. I had no idea that curr. is that meaty that you could stretch it out that far! I'm glad about that because if this year goes bad then I can always revisit topics or even re-do the year again and it not get boring. I'm continuing to use Right Start but I'll need book B this year. We didn't finish book A, but we're more than half way through so we'll probably finish before the year ends. That's kinda good because now I don't have to scramble around trying to get everything ready for August 18 when we start back (that is kinda early, but I'm leaving room for week vacations during Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's as well as anything else that might come up). I saw a book B at that classifieds place, but again no money to buy it and the person is not wanting to swap right now... Hmmm....I'm seriously considering swapping some of those big PA books for the things I need this year. Either that or selling them. I'm trying to figure out if I'll ever go back to them. I know the Homeschool Companion I can probably swap or sell with no dire consequences as well as the reading aloud book too. I'm holding onto those couple red books I have because those are really invaluable. I'm trying to decide if I should sell the curr. guides from FACE, but I'll probably need those in the future. They are exactly what they say they are, curr. guides. They guide me in what curr. I should be doing with the children. That's key. One other thing I picked up from PBS was my daughter's new Bible. The FACE catalog has the revised NIV being used for Bible reading. My daughter is a bit advanced in her reading so she used the first grade book during her K year and will use the second grade book for her first grade year. I hope I got the right one. It looks just like a regular Bible with chapters and verses. Her Bible last year was still Bible stories written in language she could read. They were a bit long (longer than the K Bible), but she did well with comprehension and keeping her focus while reading. She's become very fluent as well. I'm hoping she has no problem with the new Bible but for me it looks kinda overwhelming. I'd like her to read through her Bible throughout the school year and I think I saw that plan on some website, but I don't know where. I'll just have to do a google search for it I guess. My son will take her old Bible and use that for his first grade year. That brings us to art. I got the book Joseph the Canada Goose for last year and was kinda disappointed. I wanted something teaching the basics but at the level of my 5 and 4 yr. old. I got something completely different and I'd swap that if I could for the I Can Do All Things book in a heartbeat if someone didn't mind that one page was taken out (my scanner was broken so I had to run the page through the printer to copy it) and one was almost all colored in (I made the mistake of starting to color on the real lesson page instead of the copy). I might put that up in Homeschool Classifieds when I find the page that was torn out. I hope I Can Do All Things can just teach us the basics of drawing and color theory. If not I'll just have to take out those Draw Write Now books and use their step-by-step drawings as well as some nice art books I got out before. My daughter really liked those fun art videos that teach you about the artists' lives. I forgot the name of them, but there's a series of them. She loved Monet's video.... We'll still be using the Premier Pas de Francais this year. It goes up to second grade so I don't have to look for anything until two years from now. I'm hoping to move on to Rosetta Stone. By that time they'll be in third grade and Rosetta I think is for fourth and up (I have to check that). Anyway, I want them to still be learning French till fourth and then we can do Latin like everyone else.  I never learned Latin and always wondered what the big deal was and why so many hs'ers were learning it. Now I know what the big deal is and am happy that FACE has decided to introduce the Latin through French for the younger children. I love French and it's been fun re-learning it and reviewing it with them. I'll be asking around about the best way to teach Latin in a few years, but for now I'm in French heaven!  We'll also be continuing with SWR again. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this program and will be using it all up! I probably won't need anything else till fourth grade. I might go straight from this to that ever so popular Institute of Writing program. I wonder if I can do that switch cleanly... Oh well. I'll hop on some hs board and get the skinny on all that. For all the other subjects (P.E., Music and Literature) I'll just be winging it again. Winging it kinda went well. My children are now choreographing steps to the Nutcracker Suite and have good sportsmanship so that went well this past year. I hope to get more into some of the sports they love to play. Maybe I'll do something like during the winter we can read about the sport and get books on the sport and then when Spring comes we'll be able to play with understanding. Music is going to be more listening again and probably get more into different genres. For literature I'm just going to read them classic books and we'll notebook about what we're learning. I really don't think I need any curr. for those subjects. Now Geography is my stumper. I have no clue what to do for this. We already learned about the continents and my children know our 50 states by sight. They have a very good grasp of compass direction so I'm kinda at a loss as to where to go next. I might just get this one book that has all these geographical terms and focus on a few terms at a time and have them notebook them and stuff like that. I could do a unit study on certain terms....yeah...this is looking doable.  So anyway, just wanted to write out a few things about getting prepared. That helps me organize things in my mind a bit. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Blessings, Violet Blogging here, there and everywhere (incuding here). You've been reading a Schooldaze post. |
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Posted by Anonymous
