our morning routine.

Being a homeschooling family has been so wonderful, but it also comes with built-in "traps". Right now I'm on summer hiatus from most of my regularly scheduled morning shifts, which equals more mornings at home, which equals more opportunities to be lazy. 

Good morning routines have always been a struggle for me to get into place, especially over the last few years. With my work schedule, a tough pregnancy, a newborn, and now a 10 month old that has decided to pick up a newborn's nighttime sleep habits, it just hasn't been top priority. But now with things slowing down, at least on one front, I feel like it's a great time to get back into our morning groove. So last week, after we got back from vacation, I made a short list for myself and each of the big kids of things that need to be done first thing in the morning. Our lists are short and sweet, and are top priority.

Audrey's Daily 6

1. Get dressed

2. Brush teeth/hair

3. Vitamins

4. Drink water

5. Hamsters' water/food

6. Empty Dishwasher

Lawson's Daily 5

1. Get dressed

2. Brush teeth

3. Pajamas in hamper

4. Vitamins

5. Rikki's water/food

Jen's Daily 6

1. Get dressed (down to shoes)

2. Brush teeth

3. Vitamins

4. Drink water

5. Make bed

6. Start a load of laundry

Some of the items are super simple and quite the given, but if you have no where to be, and the kids know that you have no where to be, it's quite shocking how long each day everyone can stay in their pajamas! All of our basic lists can be done in 10-15 minutes, or less. So whether we are at home for the day, or not, they can be easily accomplished. 

I have the kids' lists posted in their bedroom (hanging on clipboards), and mine is in my room. Audrey, of course, can read hers, and Lawson, though he isn't a reader yet, is sounding out the first letters and remembering what he needs to do. With them easily accessible, and simple in the nature of the tasks, I'm not constantly hollering after the kids to get things done. All I have to do is say, "it's time for morning routines!", and they can get to it. Of course there can be a few sidetracked moments, but I digress, they're kids after all!

In choosing the chores that are on each list, I tried to come up with both the simplest, most basic tasks, and the ones that I feel give us the most bang for our buck.

All of the animals need attention daily, so I divided that between Audrey and Lawson. The chores for the dog are a bit simpler, so I gave them to Lawson.

Audrey has been in charge of emptying the dishwasher for awhile now, but adding it to her morning routine helps us in two ways -- 1. it ensures that I'm being diligent in loading and running the dishwasher every evening, and 2. it's emptied first thing, so all of our dishes during the day, starting with breakfast, can be loaded as we go, making evening clean up easier.

Making my bed and doing laundry are on my list of priority chores (along with dishes), because those three things drive me crazy. If my laundry and dishes are under control, and my bed is made, I feel much more productive and ready to accomplish other things. If they are out of control, I feel out of control and stressed out.

Oh, and on my list where it says, "get dressed", I added "down to shoes" because being fully dressed, with shoes on, does some amazing things for my productivity level. That's yet another tip I picked up from FlyLady!

So far we're doing GREAT with our new routines, and the mornings have been running more smoothly. I'm looking forward to keeping this up, and slowly adding in more good habits over the summer for us all.

the 15 minute day.

As a young newlywed (barely 20 years old!), I was completely clueless at how to maintain a house. To call my homemaking skills abysmal might be a little too harsh, but it's definitely what I felt like. Sure, I knew how to clean, but keeping any sort of routine was extremely difficult for me. I remember following my husband around in the early days of wedded bliss, cleaning up after him. As with many things in my life, I approached homemaking with an all or nothing attitude. And constantly cleaning, or straightening, could only last for so long without driving myself, or my dear husband, crazy. 

I also didn't know how to cook. Sure I could make boxed mac&cheese, scrambled eggs, and Eggo waffles with the best of them, but to actually cook a real meal was a different story. An embarrassing side note: the one class that marred my straight average in high school was Home Economics, which I pulled a high C in. *cue blushing* Bryan is actually the one who first taught me how to cook. From spaghetti, to chicken fried steak, to chicken taquitos, he's the one that showed me those basics and instilled in me the confidence that had been lacking, to take recipes, run with them, and make them mine. 

Anyways, back to my housekeeping skills, or lack there of. It's maddening, and exhausting, to keep going from keeping on top of things, to letting them slide, whether it's housekeeping, exercise, routines, etc. In time we also ended up adding a beautiful baby girl into the mix, along with a dog, ministry work at our church, and eventually a part time job for me. I felt like I was constantly failing at keeping all of my plates spinning. Enter FlyLady . I found this website a couple of years into our marriage. I've always been big into "mommy" blogs, and I'm sure I saw it mentioned on one of them. FlyLady is one of those things that has stuck with me for the last 10+ years. I don't always follow everything to a tee, and yes, I often still feel like I'm struggling to stay afloat in certain areas, but I learned some immensely helpful principles from FlyLady, that I always inevitably turn back to. I won't go into all of them in this post, but I'm sure this won't be the only time you hear FlyLady mentioned on this blog!

source

One of the biggest principles that has stuck with me is, "anyone can do anything for 15 minutes." FlyLady mainly uses that in reference to decluttering, but also shows how it can help in other areas of life. While I don't always specifically adhere to the exact 15 minutes, I've been able to tailor this principle to fit my needs. When I'm feeling overwhelmed, and like everything has gotten out of control (which with  kids, homeschooling, and a job happens far more than I'd care to admit) I lean on this principle. There have been times where I've used a timer and done specific tasks for exactly 15 minutes, but mostly I try to look at the tasks themselves. Most individual tasks don't take a super long time to complete, so I break things up into small chunks. Instead of looking at this messy home of mine, and wondering how on earth I'm going to find the time to clean it, I focus on one job at a time. I try to prioritize where I'll get the most 'bang for my buck' (dishes, laundry, and bed making are my main three), and start there. And in doing that I'm able to alternate through small tasks in many areas -- home, school, baby, self, work, etc. Of course, nothing is ever 100% done and perfect, but that's just life! However, when I have a "15 minute day", I'm able to go over my checklist, whether physical or mental, and look at all of the things that were accomplished. And while not every single thing gets done, it's more than enough to keep me sane, and life running semi-smoothly.

Now I'm off to the next task!

hello monday!

via

hello to writing again!

I've been feeling the urge to blog again. Add that to several people consistently whispering in my ear about it, and here I am! I hope to make this a more regular endeavor again. Really blogging sort of feels like cheap therapy to me, and being a working and homeschooling mama, it's nice to have a creative outlet outside of perusing Instagram and Pinterest.

hello to jumping back into life after vacation!

Last week we were fortunate enough to take a trip down to the coast with my parents and brother. It's been nearly two years since our last vacation, so it was long overdue. Five days of beach living with little to no cooking and cleaning?! Yes, please!!! It was a wonderful time filled with lovely memories, but now we're back home. I'm feeling refreshed and ready to jump back into "normal" life again.

hello to school planning!

This year has been a transitional one in our homeschooling. Honestly I started the year feeling stagnant, and kind of uninspired. Then I started listening to homeschooling podcasts. That was the jumping off point to having inspiration bubble up inside of me. So now, it's putting that all on paper. We've always pretty much been year-round schoolers, but this summer I'm ready to be even more intentional about it. So I'm currently planning out the rest of Audrey's 4th grade year, the beginning of her 5th grade year, and the beginning of Lawson's Kindergarten year!

hello to new baby adventures!

Penny turned 10 months old on Saturday! I'm dumbfounded by how fast this year has seemingly gone. As of last week she's doing more of a crawl/frog hop thing than her normal army crawling. And she's decided that she's ready to pull herself to standing. She also seems to have gotten more curious and exploratory this last week. So now there's even more of pulling her away from/off of things, picking up things that we don't want her in, and redirecting her from those things that can't easily be moved. Let the adventures of having a fully mobile and curious baby begin!

hello to more time at home!

Along with the ending of April comes the "slow" season at work. A lot of our regular meetings have ended for the summer, so that means more downtime at home for us. Work in May has slowed WAY down, and June and July look to be even slower. While this kind of sucks in the paycheck department, it also opens up time for more home-based projects to be accomplished. I'm looking forward to getting into a good routine at home with the kiddos. My kids thrive on routine! Also, since it gets SO HOT outside during Texas summers, this is the perfect time to really delve into all the nooks and crannies of schooling. Hopefully I'll also be able to get into more regular blogging, and can catch up on my reading and tv list.

AND

hello to you! 

audrey, and lawson, and penelope, oh my!

Happy Spring Break from beautiful central Texas! 

And hello, after a year long, unintentional, blogging hiatus.

I'm currently inspired and ready to dust off the ol' blog, and start writing (typing?) down some of my thoughts again. :)

First off, a little catch up -- last July we expanded our family, and excitedly welcomed a baby girl named Penelope into our lives. My pregnancy with her was full of ups and downs, including severe morning sickness, early placenta previa, gestational diabetes, and high blood pressure. But she has been a dream of a baby. She's now 8 months old, and currently in a needy stage, but overall, she's an absolute delight. Penny has been my youngest baby to get teeth, having her first two pop up just shy of turning 8 months (her brother and sister were both over 9 months old). While she sits up and rolls all around, like her big brother, she's not in a hurry to crawl or pull up. This is perfectly fine by me, as life is crazy enough as it is without adding a super mobile baby into the mix. ;) She's also my youngest baby to sleep through the night regularly. Audrey woke up a few times a night until she turned one, and don't get me started on Lawson. We finally had to sleep train him at 18 months because he STILL wanted to nurse every 2 hours. Penny generally sleeps from 8 or 9pm (with one 5 minute dream feeding before I go to bed), and wakes up to eat again around 5am. We've all been enjoying her immensely, and I'm happy to report that, so far, there hasn't been any real sibling jealousy.

Lawson -- being the middle child, and only boy could potentially be hard for a kid, but we dote on that little boy like crazy, so no middle child syndrome yet! At 4.5 years old, he is generally one of the happiest and silliest kids that I know. Definite class clown material there. He is obsessed with Thomas the Train and Disney's Cars, and has been for a couple of years now. We probably have close to 200 cars and trains, and he still constantly wants more. Lawson is also hugely into Minecraft. He loves to play the game and watch the endless videos on YouTube that feature others playing. And given that the main guy whose videos he watches is British, he's also picked up some interesting vocabulary. His current favorite word is peckish, as in, "Can you pack an apple in my backpack in case I get peckish in the car?" Correct context and all. 

Audrey -- our oldest kiddo is getting ready to hit a birthday milestone in a few weeks. In less than a month my first baby is going to be TEN YEARS OLD!!! How did that happen?! Audrey is such a sweet and kind-hearted girl. She's always thinking about others. In the past 6 months she's also really picked up a love for drawing, and she's really getting good. Her current favorite things to draw are Pokemon characters. The girl is obsessed! As always, she's doing awesome in school. She's a natural speller, most likely due in huge part to her love for reading, but she tends to enjoy doing more math related schoolwork better. As far as reading goes, she's currently reading any Babysitters Club book she can get her hands on, which makes me oh so happy! I was a giant BSC fan when I was a kid, so seeing her enjoy them too is wonderful. Last week alone she read five books, thanks to a mini spree at Half Price Books. I love watching this girl grow up, and look forward to seeing the young lady that she'll turn into.

These three kiddos bring so much light and joy to our lives!

ch, ch, ch, changes.

Wow! It's been quite some time since I've put words down in this little space of mine on the web.

As a matter of fact my blog has been on completely private setting for the last 4 or 5 months due to my indecisiveness as to what I do or don't want this space to be. 

Honestly, at this point the only blogging decision I've made is to NOT start a brand new blog.

So, we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

I guess this post will be a mini update as to what has been going on in the life of Jen in the last 9 months.

As I was thinking about life this morning and all of the many changes that have happened, and not just in this last year, but in the many years before, it hit me just how much I have to be thankful for.

Life isn't always, and definitely hasn't always been, a bed of roses, but I'm a firm believer in the fact that part of what defines us and our character and how we are in the "blessed" periods, is what we do, and how we are and act, during the thorny times.

The life that Bryan and I often talked about having leading up to marriage and during the newlywed stage is a far cry from the life that we currently have in pretty much every way, except that even with things not going as "planned" we are still so very happy.

In more recent years, our life has often lived up to the hamster wheel metaphor.

We've lived in the same 3rd floor apartment for 5+ years, we both worked super hard in jobs that we had no clue whether we would progress in, or when. We tried to add to our family with heartbreaking results, etc., etc.

But you know what? We have been HAPPY!! We were so very fortunate to learn some years back that each other, and our little family, will remain our "constant". Circumstances might change, but we're what remains. Being truly happy with what some would call a "simple" and "unexciting" life has truly been a liberating experience, at least for me. When you focus on the small blessings and happinesses (yes, I made that up), two things happen....1. bad news/circumstances seem more manageable and not quite as dire, and 2. you are THAT much more thankful when bigger blessings come along.

After continuing along like we had been, 6 months ago our "year of change" started. 

Our "original" plan had been to have me stay at home and raise a whole gaggle of kids.

But due to a variety of challenges in multiple areas, that didn't happen.

I started working part-time outside of the home when Audrey was 9 months old, which eventually led me to going back to work full-time when she was 3 years old. 

After Lawson was born I knew with all my heart that I wanted to be home with him, but I also needed to contribute significantly to our household income, so I eventually had 5 part-time childcare jobs that I could take him to, and that worked with Audrey's school schedule.

After a year and a half I got a promotion at my "main" job and was able to feel more secure in my work hours. A year and a half after that (this past August) I was offered an amazing promotion, that can only be explained as a gift from God. For the first time in 3 years I was able to pull back on my evening and weekend work hours, to be able to spend more time relaxing with my family. I am so incredibly thankful for this on a daily basis!!

The day before Thanksgiving is when we found out about the next BIG change in our lives, our rainbow baby.

Let me tell you now, the first trimester was HARD.

I was SO sick and exhausted, but I remember mentioning to Bryan that at the very least I was thankful for the time of year this sickness was happening in, as November/December are when my "on site" work hours slow down. So at least I had the extra downtime to be able to be miserable in my own bed. ;)

During this time I also had some issues with early placenta previa, which earned me two ER trips and 3 weeks of modified bedrest. Thankfully the previa has resolved itself and my second trimester has been fairly uneventful. It is really strange to think about a new family member being added in less than 5 months though. Lawson will be 4 years old when she is born, so what has been normal and typical for us for so long is about to change drastically!

After having past pregnancy issues though means that every kick, movement, or the sound of her heartbeat is that much more special to us!

On top of that, Bryan was given an amazing job opportunity in January that not only puts him in the field he really should have been in all along, but also is of huge benefit to our little family!

With all of these changes we will also be moving for the first time in more than 5 years in the very near future. We still haven't quite figured it out, as we want to make sure that we make the smartest and best decision for us that we can, but at the very least this pregnant mama will be getting off of the third floor!!

So, come July we will have had two great job opportunities, a pregnancy, a move, and a new baby, all in less than 11 months!

In all of this I've learned that being faithful with (and thankful for) the seemingly small, being willing to sacrifice for what makes you happy (my family!), and working hard and consistently to build the best (and happiest and most fulfilling) life that you can, is more than worth it!

It might not be what you had envisioned, and you might go into it kicking and screaming and asking, "why me?!", but sometimes, many times, it can lead to something even better than you had planned.

hello monday.

hello to a new way of doing things around here!

After battling Audrey off and on for well over a year 

(don't you just love when your child's will is stronger than your own?!), we have finally had success in moving Audrey and Lawson into the same bedroom.

 Which means, I finally get my living room back in the evenings!

It's only been two nights, but they've been glorious.

I might actually be able to catch up on some tv and movie watching. ;)

hello to spending some time with my mama!

My parents live only an hour and a half away, but with my normally busy schedule it can be quite some time between visits, so when my mom texted me last night to tell me that she would be in town today, I was super excited!

We were able to spend an extended lunch playing at the park, plus some time just hanging out at our place this afternoon, and there just might be some pool time tonight. :)

hello to summer school!

This one might not seem like a fun and exciting thing, but trust me, it is.

I'm currently working on getting all of the stuff in order to do a super fun 'Hogwarts Correspondence School' with my little Harry Potter nerd!

It will be lots of magical fantasy mixed in with some real life learning, and I think it will be the perfect fit for our summer.

hello to lists!

Hello, my name is Jen, and I'm a closet list maker.

With the start of summer and the current slower season of my job(s), I'm thinking about all that I can accomplish in the next few months.

From home projects to recipes to summer fun to books to read and tv shows to watch to personal goals, it's all being written down.

Honestly, I feel very much right now like I feel at the beginning of a new year.

Life i full of so many possibilities!!

hello to potty training!

As some of you know, Lawson is my stubborn child.

And if you've met Audrey, that's certainly saying something.

As we've been approaching his 3rd birthday (less than two weeks! Eep!), I've been thinking more and more about getting him trained.

Now, I'm not really worried about it, I know he'll be potty trained eventually, and I also know that pushing him will lead to nothing but frustration for the both of us,

but I still find myself hoping that he'll start showing interest sooner rather than later.

Well, this week he FINALLY PEED IN THE POTTY!!!!

It was such a huge step for him, and it gives me the extra assurance that this WILL happen. 

Also, the little lucky duck got himself three new trains out of it, so you know he's pleased. ;)

on homeschooling :: year in review :: history.

As you've probably been able to tell with my previous homeschooling posts,

history was a favorite for both Audrey and myself this year.

After reading The Well Trained Mind, I decided almost immediately to use Susan Wise Bauer's curriculum The Story of the World for history.

This curriculum is set to go over all of history, chronologically, in a four year time period.

It's also set up in a way that you can use it multiple times.

If you start from the beginning in 1st grade and go all the way through high school, you are able to cover each time period three times.

During the 2nd grade year one should "technically" be studying the Middle Ages time period, 

but since we just started this homeschooling journey at the beginning of Audrey's 2nd grade year,

I decided that it would be more beneficial to just start from the beginning, with the Ancient Times.

I figure that if we continue this homeschooling endeavor long term, she'll catch up somewhere along the way. ;)

If you're interested, the four time periods are as follows ::

*Ancient Times

*Middle Ages

*Early Modern Times

*The Modern Age

There are three available books for each time period.

A "text" book, an activity book, and a test book.

You can really use some of this at your own discretion, for example, I didn't even bother with the test book this past school year, as I felt the section reviews were enough to gauge whether anything we had read stuck.

The "text" book is also available in an audio version, if that's more up your alley.

The book is separated into chapters (42) and each chapter is separated into 1-4 sections.

Using the chapters as your guide, you can separate them out and cover 1 (or maybe 2) chapter(s) a week and it'll take you the school year to complete.

A few examples of the chapter/section breakups are as follows:

Chapter Twenty: Greece Gets Civilized Again

*Greece Gets an Alphabet

*The Stories of Homer

*The First Olympic Games

Chapter Thirty-Five: Caesar the Hero

*Caesar Fights the Celts

*Caesar Crosses the Rubicon

*Caesar and Cleopatra

*The Death of Caesar

Volume One of this curriculum covers everything from Ancient Egypt, Africa, the Jewish people, Greece, India, China, Rome, and everything in between.

Audrey's two favorite cultures to learn about were Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece.

The Activity Book is also separated out into chapters, with review questions for each section's reading.

And for each chapter the activity book has a plethora of extras that you can pick and choose from.

Each chapter has a corresponding "map work" page, so your child can get an idea of where in the world all of this was taking place; a coloring page; extra history reading and literature suggestions; projects ranging from easy to pretty impressive.

With all the different ideas in the activity book, I can see how this can be used for both younger and older grade levels. 

This year we pretty much stuck to the reviews, map work, coloring pages (like a Greek war chariot, Alexander the Great and Bucephalus, Anansi and Turtle, and the pyramids of Egypt), and extra reading, with a couple of the activities thrown in.

The projects range from making recipes (like hummus, Indian curried rice, latkes, fried plantains, and mint tea) to making purple dye to building your own Great Wall of China out of popsicle sticks to making a volcano to making your own pictograms to mummifying a chicken, and SO, SO much more!!

We did a few of the easier, more basic projects, but I definitely have plans to delve more into those this next school year, now that I feel like I've got my feet under me. :)

One of the main things we've enjoyed about this curriculum is all of the reading suggestions!!

As you can tell from all of our literature posts, we read a LOT this school year,

and had so much fun with it.

There's nothing like your child asking you if they can read more than what they are assigned because they find it so intriguing, or going to pull out a book and being met with a sheepish, "I already read it. It just looked so good!!"
We also added a bit of writing work into history by having Audrey do a "book page" for every piece of history literature that she read.
This amounted to a drawing and 4-5 sentences about the book, a good, basic way to start introducing book reports to her.

I really, really love how literature intensive this curriculum is!

All in all, I was so very impressed with this curriculum and will most definitely continue to use it.

I absolutely credit it with the fact that if you ask Audrey what her favorite subject is, she responds enthusiastically and without hesitation, "HISTORY!"

on homeschooling :: year in review :: handwriting.

This post is sure to be short and sweet, really just an overview of our curriculum.

I decided to go ahead and throw handwriting and cursive into the mix mainly because I think neat penmanship is an important thing.

I know that with computers being such a huge thing now, learning cursive isn't so much of a must,

but I'm the teacher, and what I say, goes. ;)

I chose the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum mainly because I was familiar with it, and it seems to be the most widely used.

Cursive work doesn't start until the 3rd grade level in this curriculum,

so I went ahead and ordered the Printing Power Plus set, which is for grade 2, and includes a printing book (Printing Power), and a cursive introduction book (Kick Start Cursive).

Audrey was not a fan of the printing book, but she LOVED the cursive one!
She worked through it fast and thoroughly, so we decided to jump into the grade 3 book,
 Cursive Handwriting, straight away.

I've been super impressed with how fast and well Audrey has picked up cursive.
She's comfortable enough with it at this point to use it in most of her other schoolwork,
which is good for me, because her cursive is definitely neater than her printing! ;)

 This is another curriculum that we will continue during the next school year.

For more info on our school year, check out my other 'year in review' posts.
on homeschooling :: year in review.
on homeschooling :: year in review :: spelling. 
on homeschooling :: year in review :: math.

on homeschooling :: literature :: month 9.

April was the last FULL month of literature selections for the school year,

and FULL it was!

Most of our school literature comes from our history curriculum, the Story of the World, and seeing how we only have a few more lessons left, my May literature post will be much smaller.

As I said before, we had a BIG month for history, since we finished up several subjects during April.

We learned about ancient India, China, and Rome, along with a few lessons on the Jewish people and the beginnings of Christianity in Rome.

So please, bear with me and this LONG list. :)

Savitri: A Tale of Ancient India

I Once Was a Monkey: Stories Buddha Told

Prince Siddhartha: The Story of Buddha

The Wisdom of the Crows and Other Buddhist Tales

Sacred River

Buddha

Buddha Stories

The Monkey and the Crocodile: A Jataka Tale from India

The Beggar's Magic: A Chinese Tale

The Dragon Prince: A Chinese Beauty and the Beast Tale

The Lost Horse: A Chinese Folktale

Lord of the Cranes: A Chinese Tale

Da Wei's Treasure: A Chinese Tale

Ten Suns: A Chinese Legend

The Empty Pot

Confucius: The Golden Rule

Asterix the Legionary

Cleopatra

Tales from Shakespeare

We read the play Julius Caesar from this book.

The Very First Christmas

The Miracles of Jesus

The Parables of Jesus

The Very First Easter

Miriam's Cup: A Passover Story

The Story of Shabbat

Festival of Lights: The Story of Hanukkah

And some of Audrey's "fun" reading...

The Magician's Nephew

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Whew!

That is a LOT of reading, but as I've said before, that's one of the things that I absolutely adore about this particular curriculum.

on homeschooling :: year in review :: math.

One of the subjects that I've been the most impressed with, when it comes to Audrey's performance, is math.

Even though she is a words girl like myself, she has really shown that if she puts her mind to something she will succeed.

A little over a year ago I read through the book The Well Trained Mind; I've said it once and I'll say it again, this book is basically the Bible for at-home classical education.

The authors are extremely thorough in explaining what classical education is and how to implement this style of learning at home.

One of the things that I found awesome about this book is the lists of curriculum recommendations.

Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer have been at this homeschooling thing for a very LONG time,

and have kept themselves up to date on different curricula for different subjects.

For each curriculum recommended there is a brief synopsis of the actual curriculum and what kind of teacher/student said curriculum would be best suited for.

 When it came to math, the top two recommendations were Saxon and Singapore.

After looking at both of them, it was quite obvious that they were both excellent, but Singapore definitely fit our small budget MUCH better.

With that knowledge I went onto the Singapore website to try and figure out which book would be best to start with.

Fortunately, on the website, you can view sample pages of the different books and even take a placement test, to see what book your student is on par with.

After judging what I knew Audrey to be capable of and looking over the sample pages, etc., I decided to start her out with Primary Mathematics 2A (U.S. Edition).

According to the website this book is on level with either the second part of an average 2nd grade year, or the first part of an advanced 2nd grade year.

We started working on this book pretty much as soon as her 1st grade school year ended,

and had it finished by the time summer was over.

Here is a sample page from workbook 2A::

After seeing her go through the first workbook pretty easily,

and gaining my confidence as her teacher,

I decided to only purchase the workbooks in her 2nd grade year, forgoing the textbooks.

This worked out really well for us, although I've already made the decision to do both textbooks and workbooks for 3rd grade, simply because the work gets harder, and I want to make sure that I'm explaining it the way Singapore has it set up.

Moving on from here I knew that I wanted to add in more math practice and review. 

I definitely believe that during these foundational years, the basics of math (and grammar) need to be known inside and out.

If a child doesn't have a good basic foundation in these subjects, subsequent schooling (think middle and high school) will be more challenging than necessary, and the lack of confidence and know-how, when faced with math as an adult, will be overwhelming and anxiety inducing.

And given that this book started covering borrowing and carrying numbers, and multiplication and division, this was definitely the school year to start making sure those facts and tables were good and ingrained.

After work book 2A we moved onto Intensive Practice 2A.

Some sample pages ::

After this we went directly into Primary Math 2B (U.S. Edition).

Some samples from 2B ::

This book had sections dealing with fractions, graphs, and geometry, ALL of which Audrey is a huge fan of.

There have been times while studying any one of these topics that she begs to continue on, even if she's already completed the day's work.

Uh, yeah, I won't say no to that!

From here I found a book that was simply a total level 2 Primary Math review,

so I decided to go for this instead of Intensive Practice 2B.

And, of course, some sample pages ::

Since this "technically" completed the school year, and it wasn't even February yet, I decided to, wait for it....add in even more review!!

Exciting, right?! ;)

I bought both Singapore Math Practice 2A and 2B at the same time,

and even though it's technically not part of the Primary Mathematics curriculum, 

it followed pretty closely to the things that were taught in Primary 2A and 2B.

Unfortunately, these didn't have any sample pages attached, so none for me to post here.

Some of the topics covered in this year of study have been, adding and subtracting numbers 1-1,000; multiplying and dividing by 2, 3, 4, 5, 10; graphs; fractions; money; time; length; weight; capacity; geometry; and mental calculations.

So that is 6 math workbooks completed in about 10 months.
This was done almost completely at Audrey's pace, and the most frustrating thing that we encountered was Audrey's need/want to get everything right the first time around.
We had a LOT of conversations about how school is for learning and you aren't supposed to know everything before you've actually learned it.
Oh, my little perfectionist. ;)

Audrey has also gotten into the habit of copying down her multiplication and division tables on most days, just to keep them fresh in her mind.

Singapore also offers more practice and review books like Challenging Word Problems and Math Sprints (which is basically a mental math book) that I may look into at some point.

For now I've been extremely happy with the results we've gotten from this curriculum and look forward to continuing on for the next school year. :)

*Sample pages are taken from the Singapore website, and unfortunately don't cover all of the different topics and difficulty levels in the books.

Here are the links for the previous posts in this series...
on homeschooling :: year in review.
on homeschooling :: year in review :: spelling.
on homeschooling :: year in review :: handwriting.