We are entering our 3rd year of homeschooling (which is also hard to believe!). This year I'm going to try to document our journey just a little bit...if for no other purpose than for me to remember what we did!
A little bit of history...Our first year we did Heart of Dakota which I loved and found to be the perfect beginning place for our homeschooling adventure. Everything was very much "open and go" and there wasn't much planning involved--perfect for a newbie. But for our second year I wanted Grace to be able to tag along with whatever Hannah was doing, and if I continued to the next guide in HOD Grace would have eventually been left behind. HOD's method is to teach to the youngest child and then "beef it up" for the older children rather than starting harder and "watering it down" for the younger. I actually love this approach.
Last year we chose My Father's World Adventures just as a stand-in year until we could get back to Heart of Dakota. It worked really well as a way to combine the two kids. I had Hannah do the writing assignments and more advanced things and Grace just listened. They each do their own age-appropriate language arts and math, but they share science, history, art, etc.
But this we are back to Heart of Dakota. We chose to start with a guide that, on its own, would be too easy for Hannah. This year we are doing Beyond Little Hearts For His Glory and it is a guide meant for ages 6-8, which our kids current ages but I do think most people use this guide for grades 1st or 2nd, and Hannah will be in 3rd. I was a little nervous about it not being hard enough for Hannah but felt like if we could just make it through this guide going forward would be a lot easier for our family. Following this guide HOD includes built in "extensions" for upper grades. So this year I decided to make my own "extensions" to make the curriculum more appropriate for Hannah while Grace just does it "as written". And now I'm actually more excited about the curriculum because I think Hannah will just love the extra books she gets to read.
To be sure that Hannah gets in depth enough with her history we've added a slew of "living books" for her to read. Most of them are from the "My America" series which are the "diaries" of children who lived in that era. She's also going to be doing additional history notebook pages that I found online.
Science was another area I was nervous about. I wanted to make sure that she gets plenty of science. I think that is probably one of the weaker areas of the early HOD guides. The science it a little light. So we decided to add Sassafras Science Adventures to go along with the Liberty Press God's Wonderful Works that is included within Beyond. We'll do that for two days a week. I also added some notebooking pages to accompany the HOD science.
Other than those subjects, Beyond will also cover art, poetry, Bible, and geography within their guides. We're adding a Map Skills workbook for Hannah to do in addition to the geography in the guide.
We chose our own phonics, math, and language arts (other than what HOD suggested). Grace will be doing Modern Curriculum Press math for this year. We've found this to be an affordable, fairly basic curriculum that works pretty well for us.
We've decided to try something different for Hannah this year, though. She has never been a big fan of MCP and so this year we decided to try Teaching Textbooks which is a computer-based math curriculum. She's very excited to try this and I'm hoping maybe she'll dread math a little less this way!
Grace is doing a mishmash of language arts. Last year she completed her kindergarten phonics program and still just need a bit more and so we started First Start Reading. We need to complete this program before we can move on to the next. Once she's finished that we will begin Hooked on Phonics for 1st grade accompanied by MCP's Phonics. We'll be reading through some BOB books, too, just so that we can work on fluency.
She also gets to do Handwriting and Thinking Skills this year. We opted to go with Pentime Handwriting and are going to use Rod & Staff's thinking skills books as recommended by HOD. She's very excited to do these books!
Hannah's Language Arts program is a little more complicated. She will be doing Growing With Grammar, Cheerful Cursive, Building Spelling Skills, and also Comprehension Plus. These are all new this year (with the exception of Comprehension Plus) so I'm hopeful that they'll work out well. For reading I will be choose some good literature for her to read and she'll write out a report when she completes them.
And finally, this year we decided to add in a Spanish class! As I have zero experience with Spanish this isn't a subject I can teach, but we are going to do La Clase Divertida which is a DVD curriculum that they are very excited to do.
That about sums up our curriculum for this year! School starts next Tuesday and though not all of my students are as excited as others, I'm starting to feel like I'm ready for things to get started again!
