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.

on homeschooling :: year in review :: spelling.

Bryan and I first started to seriously contemplate homeschooling Audrey a little over a year ago.

We had talked about it here and there throughout her toddler and preschool years,

but the desire to actually do it had never gone past the talking stages.

Throughout her kindergarten year and the first part of her 1st grade year it became increasingly apparent to us that something had to give.

I have a hard time saying that Audrey is (or was) "gifted" or "talented", but it was obvious that she had at least had a HUGE head start, educationally, in preschool.

Neither one of us had the desire to take her out of school in the middle of the year,

as we didn't want to bounce her between home and public school,

so we started looking into "afterschooling".

Basically this came down to me getting some workbooks, that she could do at home, that were more along the lines of what she needed to be able to continue to advance educationally.

We only did this in a few basic subjects, one being spelling.

Ever since she was little Audrey has loved to read.

I remember reading  Goodnight Moon and Dr. Seuss's ABC book to her over and over and over again when she was a toddler.

At 3 1/2 years old she started going to the Montessori preschool that I taught at, and there she learned how to read.

I was SO impressed with the way she was taught and how quickly she picked up this skill.

That being said, by the time she got to Kinder, she was way beyond the normal sight words that they sent home (it, is, at, etc.).

And I'm thinking because she spent so much time with her nose in books, she pretty much completely skipped phonetic spelling.

Every once in awhile she would spell something the way it sounded, but most of the time she was dead on with the correct spelling, even in harder words.

Because of this, I knew that one of the things we needed to do at home was work on advancing her reading and writing skills.

Thankfully, because she naturally loves to read and write so much, there was never an issue in getting her to do the work.

So, I did a little research and found a curriculum that looked somewhat promising and after looking at some sample pages online, decided to order the 2nd grade level book, as it seemed to be a good starting point for her.

The curriculum that we've been using for the last year is Spelling Workout.

We started out on Level B, which she quickly worked through.

Basically the curriculum is separated into 36 lessons, with a review being placed every sixth lesson.

And each lesson has a specific spelling "rule" that the list words abide by, such as -- different vowel sounds, prefixes, suffixes, consonant blends, vowel digraphs, compound words, contractions, etc.

Level B started out with 15 list words in every lesson.

To figure out how well she  knew the list words ahead of time, we'd start by giving her a quick written quiz.

Then each lesson has three workpages which include various activities.

We'd end each lesson with a final "test" of the list words.

My original goal was just to do 1 or 2 lessons a week,

but we honestly moved much faster than that, solely because Audrey could and wanted to.

By June of last year, as she was finishing up her 1st grade school year, we were moving on to the next level, C, which is 3rd grade work.

While doing this I was also sure to start increasing the difficulty level of some of the books she was reading, considering that during her last reading test of the school year she was placed at an advanced 4th grade/early 5th grade reading level.

She would pick some books from the library, picture books and easier chapter books, and I would pick out a few chapter books that I felt were more on par with her actual reading level.

In October of last year, two months after the "official" start of her 2nd grade year, and our first year homeschooling, we moved on to Level D, 4th grade.

Since then, I've done my best to slow down her completion of the material.

We've added in dictionary work, sentence work, and still do the pre-quiz and final test. 

Her word lists are now comprised of 20 words and the most that she has ever gotten wrong on a pre-quiz is 4. 

And by the time, the final test comes around that total is dropped to 1, or in most cases, 0.

Her list words in this last book have included --barrel, straight, independent, cheerfully, alphabet, knuckle, remembered, surprising, beginning, petrified, measure, perceives, restaurant, disappoint, communities, handkerchiefs, immovable, disinterested, , and cautious, among many others.

One of the ways that I've also helped her increase her reading skills is by adding in mini book reports.

I felt that along with her being able to read the words, she also needed to understand them.

By having her draw a little picture and write a small paragraph, I'm helping to ensure that she's also actually comprehending what she's reading.

She's expected to do this for every chapter book she reads and every curriculum based piece of literature she reads.

It takes her less than 15 minutes, but I've already seen the benefits from this exercise.

As an added bonus, she now comes to me when she has a question about the way something is happening in a book, or if she needs help in understanding how a specific word is being used.

As far as what the future holds for this subject, I am pretty happy with the results Spelling Workout have given us, so I will probably continue on with this curriculum for the next school year.

Before we move on though, we'll most likely go through a review period where we go over the different spelling "rules" that she has learned, just to make sure it's good and ingrained in her head. :)

If you're at all curious to read other posts in this series, just click on the following links.

on homeschooling :: year in review.
on homeschooling :: year in review :: math. 
on homeschooling :: year in review :: handwriting.

Thanks for reading!!