Our Curriculum

I know, I know, it's been forever. I really, really will try to be better about posting. I promise. It's just tough since I've been trying to work more. As soon as Kyle gets home in the evening I "go to work" and I'm working most of the day Sunday, so there are some things that just don't happen right now!

I know I promised to list our curriculum ages ago. Well, it's taken a little while for me to really find what I like. I think this is what's going to work for our family.

I'm still doing the workbox approach. That definitely works. But here's the actual curriculum we're using.

We discovered this wonderful monthly curriculum that is designed for use as a supplement. Teacher Book Bag puts out a monthly "Book Bag" which is divided into 3 levels: Preschool-Kindergarten, 1st-3rd, and 4th and above. They all have roughly the same theme so you can use them with a whole family, but they are all age appropriate and none of the activities overlap. You can buy a year long subscription that includes all 3 levels, a year long subscription for just one level, or you can buy it by the unit for under $3 a unit. It is incredible! The themes are great. It's quick as far as preparation goes. It's a unit that you download online and then you print the activities you want to do. Many activities in the preschool-kindergarten level are active activities that you don't necessarily have to print anything with. But for both levels that I have tried there are cutting and pasting activities, worksheets, games, and active type activities.

Here's an example of this month for us and it will just be a handful of the great activities we did. We are using both the PreK-K one and the 1st-3rd one. C does both with us and D just does the PreK one. The theme for September was communities. Through both levels we have:

• Learned what a community is and various types (suburban, urban, rural)
• Learned what a neighborhood is
• Read books about neighborhoods
• Took a walk through our neighborhood using our 5 senses
• Learned about communities around the world and made a World explorer notebook
• Made a community explorer folder and learned about our home, police, fire department, and the post office
• Learned about the instruments of the orchestra
• Worked on map reading and coordinate graphing

This curriculum includes activities for math, language arts, social studies, and science.

The next thing we're doing is RightStart Math. C is in level B this year. I love RightStart because it teaches children to think the "math way." Through RightStart the students really learn to understand math, instead of just memorize it. It is also very heavy on using games instead of flashcards and drills. It uses fewer worksheets than other math programs as well. We did level A with C and then went on to another math program that is very popular. C liked it, but it just didn't teach the way RightStart does. We will continue to use the other program as a supplement from time to time because C loves math, but we'll use RightStart as our main math program.

With Reading we've had a difficult time finding what's going to work for us. We've been using Reading Made Easy with the accompanying workbook CD which is a lovely, gentle, throrough, and economical program (you can get both the lesson PDF CD and the workbook PDF CD for $25 each). It really is a great systematic phonics program. However, it really isn't for C. She's had a difficult time being motivated to read. She loves being read to, she just doesn't want to read. So.... I'm trying something new. It's called Learning Language Arts Through Literature. We ordered both the Blue book (1st grade level) and the Red book (2nd grade level). C is really excited so I hope that this is just what we needed. I haven't received it yet so I can't comment a whole lot on it, but it looks like it has a lot of hands on type activities, instead of just reading through a book and doing worksheets (albeit fun ones that C really enjoyed) like in Reading Made Easy. We'll still of course continue the reading activities that we do with our workboxes.

That is the bulk of our curriculum for C. We had been doing Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory from Heart of Dakota for her main curriculum. HOD sells complete curriculum for each grade level which includes history, science, math, spelling, reading, and story time. We used Little Hearts for His Glory for C for kindergarten and loved it. However, while she is capable of doing Beyond... right now, Kyle and I have decided that we're going to wait and start where we left off (unit 8) in January. For now we are going to focus on reading and we'll use the TBB monthly unit studies I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we may try the TBB continent unit studies which you can also buy from Currclick.com, we'll continue listening to the Story of the World book on CD, etc. In January we're going to go back to Beyond Little Hearts. I think by then she'll be ready to really absorb everything that's in this great curriculum.

The last thing I wanted to share is the book, Slow and Steady Get Me Ready. It has activities for every week of a child's life from birth to age 5. I used this sporadically with C and it was so much fun. We're using it for D and E now. It gives a special activity for me to do with the little ones that's right at their level. We also look forward to our activity for the week.

So that's it! I've had a lot of people asking me lately what to do with preschoolers-check out the monthly book bag that I mentioned at the top and the Slow and Steady book. Both are excellent resources for our little ones.