Subject planning and resources, part 1

I recently received a complaint from my mother about the lack of pictures on here, so I'll go wildly in the opposite direction now. ;)

I have the large bulk of my planning for the first nine weeks done.I also think that I have our daily schedule planned.

I intend to start with the subjects that my girls will do together- Bible, Catechism, and french.


My goal for Bible work this year is to make it through the major points of the Old Testament, with one story worked on per week for the full week. I used Child's Garden of Bible Stories to pick what to do. We'll also be reading it from other sources, as well as the actual Bible, so I think we'll preserve accuracy.


At the end of the week I'll have Sweet Pea write a sentence or two in her own words about the story and have Little Bird narrate her thoughts. The next day I'll have them both make a picture about the story and we'll put them into book form so each girl has a book about each story. We'll also work through the pages of the Child's Garden of Bible stories workbook.


Just for fun, here are some of our "supporting texts". My main goal was resources on level for both kids.


We're also using CPH's Arch Books series.

To coordinate it all I planned out nine weeks of lessons, with five days of work for each lesson. I didn't date anything on purpose- we can work in vacations and sick time without altering the time line this way.


Same format, only math here. I put together Singapore Primary Mathematics 1a (standards) with Math Mammoth Addition 1 and Subtraction 1.


I've put together a preliminary course of study- it looks like a lot all together! Form from Donna Young, my favorite home-school organization site.

Next, I'm guilty of jumping on the current trend of file folder organization. Here's the folder for week one.

Contents of week one- everything but the textbooks. I've already done all the printing I need for the lessons so no running to the computer for worksheets!


And the checklists. A big goal for the year for me is to get Sweet Pea working a little more independently and starting to take some responsibility for time management. To that end I'm putting a weekly list in each week's folder so she can see and mark off everything as it gets finished. I hope this'll help her see what is done and needs to be done.


Week one has a slightly different checklist since we aren't starting all subjects the first week.


And that's where I'm at currently!

I still need a start date. ;)

Science

What is everyone doing for science next year? How important is science in the elementary years? Is nature study like Charlotte Mason advocated enough? What about experiments vs. book work?

Thoughts??

A planning we will go...

Alright. Ready. I think.

I've started mapping out, week by week, our next year!

Right now I'm working on religion. For both kids I'm going to use a Child's Garden of Bible Stories as a spine, along with the Old Testament workbook. Since it's only 28 lessons we'll also do a week long study of 8 Feasts or big church holidays mixed in.

Along with the Garden of Bible stories for Sweet Pea we'll also use Ergermeier's Bible Stories, the Early Reader's Bible, and the Bible (we're using An American Translation for her).

For Little Bird I'll add in the Rhyme Bible for Toddlers.

For both kids we'll also be drawing heavily from our complete collection of the Arch Books.

We'll also be using My First Catechism and the workbook for Sweet Pea.

If anyone is interested in my weekly schedule for the Child's Garden with the add ins, let me know!

Planning

Is it already time for this insanity again? YES!
This year I already have compiled what I want, what I need, and what I already have. I've got in my hands nearly everything we'll need and now I just need to figure out how much of what we're doing when.
It'd be a lot easier to get everything set if I had a few hours free of other concerns and kids, but that's a hard thing to manage! Pictures soon of the madness.

Two weeks, really?

I'm offline for the most part right now- my husband is gone on church business and I am visiting family. My husband's grandmother also just passed away, so we're funeral planning.

I am very excited to say that Sweet Pea has FINISHED the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading! Finished! Woohoo! We're going back through and rereading some of the sentences for fun and review, but she knows all the material! I'm so pleased with this program and how easy to made the whole learning to read process. It was a really parent friendly way to work through phonics and has produced a cheerful, proficient reader.

Little Bird is making some fun progress with learning her ABCs now! She now knows A,B,C,D,E,F,G,I,M,O, and U. That's 11 out of 26 letters! We'll continue working on recognition and sounds. Right now we're doing 100% of our work on a white board with dry erase markers. Little Bird really loves that- when she knows a letter or sound she gets to erase it and she thinks that's just thrilling.

Otherwise I plan to resume the regular blabbering I do early next week.

Writing and math

We're still here, chugging along. Enjoying the hot weather. ;) By hot of course I mean tepid, but that's beside the point.

I've just started Sweet Pea on Math Mammoth's Subtraction 1. I'm really a fan of Math Mammoth and the way you can buy it- by topic or level or both. It's a hit.


We've worked almost all the way through the Addition 1 and we are working on subtraction in Singapore now, so I thought the time was right. It's going well!
We're also doing a little bit of gentle drill on math facts 0-10. Sweet Pea knows them, we're just working on increasing speed now that the concepts are firm.


Rod and Staff English continues to be a good choice. We're doing all of the exercises on paper. I know that a lot of people end up doing portions of it orally, but I like the actual pencil on paper practice that this is giving Sweet Pea.

That being said, I don't know if this will be our long term Language Arts solution or not. I'm constantly tweaking Language Arts- for some reason it's easier for me to just let math be and stick with what we are using but I'm constantly reading and researching about LA. We'll see!

Literary Work in Progress

Sweet Pea's current interest is in creating "books". I'm excited to see this because she wasn't writing very much recently. Some of her spelling is a little creative and her plot has a few holes, but I'm pretty impressed.
The title of her book is, "Silly and Willy".


The next part reads, "Silly went to Willy's hous(e) to see what he was doing today. it was a vare (very) nise (nice)...


...out. The son (sun) was shine-ing brite. Thehes (this's) garden.


Willy came and ran into silly's house.


And that's what she got so far.