This year was a significant departure from the last two years, where we largely used AmblesideOnline (Y1 review, Y2 review). I’ve been listening to the Delectable Education podcasts just about from the beginning, and I’ve found them extremely helpful, encouraging, and useful. They have vastly improved our homeschool and I have grown significantly as a homeschooling educator and mother.
In planning the 2016-2017 school year, I decided to use the scheduling cards from the ladies at Delectable Education and designed my schedule using them. I treated each card as a bucket that I need to fill with some resource and pulled from a variety of places to fill my buckets.
Some areas are studied as a family, including composer study, nature study, and picture study. You can read more about our selections and our year of family studies in my previous post.
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| Checkers are always better with an audience, don't you think? |
Subject Areas
These subject areas are from the scheduling cards I used to plan our year, not including the subjects we did as a family.
Bible
For a number of years I’ve considered our time spent reading, narrating and discussing the daily Mass readings as our Bible study time, particularly for the younger kids. However, over time I could see that while the younger children knew individuals and certain events in the Bible and the Gospels reasonably well, they lacked a coherent overview of the Bible. So in the second term I added 15 minutes a day to Nathan and Gregory’s where we read systematically through the Old Testament (Joshua, Judges, Ruth and part of First Samuel this year) and the Gospel of Luke (we’re about half-way through) We’ve really enjoyed this time together, and I can see how their knowledge and appreciation for the story of the Old Testament has grown dramatically, as well as their knowledge of Biblical locations.Resources
Bible
Student Bible Atlas
Sacred Art Series: The Holy Gospels of St. Luke and St. John (Beautiful book!)
Copywork
Copywork was sort of a hodgepodge this year, a combination of pages from Classical Copywork, the Simply Charlotte Mason print to cursive book, and copywork assigned from his recitation work. I continued to make copywork books with my ProClick, which worked well.Resources
Classical Copywork
Simply Charlotte Mason Print to Cursive Proverbs
ProClick
Literature
I read all of these out loud, except for the Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Young Folks.Resources
D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths
Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children
American Tall Tales
Uncle Tom's Cabin: Young Folks' Edition
Jungle Book
American History
This year I decided to switch Nathan’s history to an American focus and I lined up his historical period with his older brother’s. We used to study the same historical time period as a family, and that’s one of the things I’ve missed in the two years we spent largely following AmblesideOnline. I don’t think it has to be this way, but it is definitely our family’s preference. This was scheduled twice a week, and once a week he would read from the spine, and the other from one of the other books listed (in succession). Each history block also included narration, mapwork as appropriate, and occasionally a drawn narration.This is the second time I've used American History Stories as a spine, and while there are some things I like about it, namely the quality of the writing and the variety of stories included, I feel like it also can be a little long-winded and it definitely contains some inappropriate references to people of other races. Like last time I skipped some chapters and it worked out reasonably well.
I read aloud American History Stories in the first and second terms, then let Nathan read it to himself in term 3. He read all the other ones himself. It was a little challenging to find good books at his reading level, particularly since his reading level changed so dramatically over the course of the year.
Resources
American History Stories, Vol. 3 (partial) & Vol. 4 - spine
Sacajawea
Walking the Road to Freedom
Riding the Pony Express
Abraham Lincoln: For the People
Gettysburg: Tad Lincoln's Story by F.N. Monjo
Stonewall Jackson
Geography
This was scheduled twice a week, and for the first two terms I read from Elementary Geography in one session and we did hands-on geography activities in the other. In our hands on session, we explored local maps, political maps, terrain maps, and the globe through discussion and exercises. In the third term, we finished Elementary Geography and I had him read, narrate and do mapwork with Paddle to the Sea.Resources
Elementary Geography by Charlotte Mason
Illustrated Atlas for Young America
Various maps and a globe
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| Cataloguing everything he could see within a circle of string in his nature journal |
Natural History
This year Nathan read through A Drop of Water and did the experiments in the first half of the year and then focused on astronomy in the second half of the year. In his astronomy study, he made drawn narrations as well as oral narrations, and towards the end of the year I had him add a sentence, either copied or composed, to his drawn narrations.Nathan also read several nature lore books over the course of the year as well.
Resources
A Drop of Water
Fun with Astronomy by Mae and Ira Freeman
Our Solar System by Seymour Simon (not my favorite planets book, but the best of what I had - I’d like to find a better one though!)
Trees and Shrubs
Plant Life in Field and Garden
Pagoo
Secrets of the Woods
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| Working on Logic Links with our shop receipts in the foreground |
Math
This is another area where I made significant changes. Over the summer I heard Sonya Schafer speak about Richele Baburina’s book, Mathematics: An Instrument for Living Teaching and demonstrate what living math instruction can look like. I was incredibly impressed and decided that this is what I needed to do with Nathan and Gregory. I had been using MEP, but I found it difficult to break away from the worksheet mentality of it. Nathan was largely plodding along, not really stimulated or engaged because the material was too easy for him. But I didn’t really know how to jump him forward in MEP or how to make that program work for him.We spent the first part of the year solidifying our math foundations using techniques in Baburina’s book and running a store where the boys were practicing with a variety of math operations as well as writing receipts and keeping financial records. After the first term, it became obvious that I needed to separate the boys for math, because my 5th grader made a huge leap forward (more on that in his post!) and I started doing that subject individually.
In the third term I started using the Strayer-Upton book to make it easier to come up with practice problems and such. Pregnancy was taking a toll on my on-the-fly creativity, and I really appreciated having a straight-forward resource that I could easily pick and choose problems from as needed.
We also included some logic work a few times a week using a couple different resources.
Resources
Mathematics: An Instrument for Living Teaching
Play Money
Coins (including lots of pennies)
Strayer-Upton, Book 1
Logic Links
Tangoes
Recitation
As I mentioned in my family studies post, we added recitation into the boys’ schedule about halfway through the school year.Selections
Lucy Gray by Willam Wordsworth
Bivouac on a Mountain Side by Walt Whitman
Psalm 67
Psalm 33
John 15:1-11
John 10:1-16
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| Reading with his beloved guinea pigs, Portia and Bianca |
Reading
Nathan made the jump into reading fluency this year (hooray!!) and went from moping around in November, complaining, “why does Gregory want to read all the time? Why won’t he play?” to by March being so deeply immersed in whatever he was reading that he could tune out everything around him. At this point I’m having to set limits on how much time he reads, otherwise he’d barely put the book down!Modern Language (Spanish)
This is an area where we’ve had a lot of transition over the course of the year. We started with just using Speaking Spanish with Miss Mason and François, Volume 1 and including a song, a poem, and prayers in Spanish and then added in other activities such as building dictated sentences with picture cards, calendar work, vocabulary games like Simon Says, rhymes and increasing the number of songs we learned. I’ve learned a lot from Celeste Cruz, particularly from her talk at the Conference in the Redwoods in February, and I’m looking forward to continuing to improve in this area.Resources
Speaking Spanish with Miss Mason and François, Volume 1
De Colores and Other Latin-American Folk Songs for Children
Pio Peep!
Singing
This is another area that has seen a lot of growth. I have been focusing on developing the boys’ sense of rhythm and beat using a variety of means. I have done a little Sol-fa with them, but largely trying to reinforce what they are learning through the Hoffman Academy. As an aside, Hoffman Academy has been wonderful for the boys! We signed up for their subscription service and it is well worth the expense. They are learning a lot, enjoying the lessons, and the scripted practice sessions are so helpful. They have a great ear training game as well which has been a very helpful addition to their music studies.Resources
Music at Home
Hoffman Academy
Physical Education/Drill
This was going to be the year I learned about Swedish Drill through Dawn Duran’s series… and, then, well, it didn’t happen. This is definitely an area that needs improvement. |
| Working on making an insulated sleeve for his backpacking mug |
Handicraft/Work
We started doing Sloyd this year, which has been a great success. I am coming to appreciate the importance of Sloyd in the curriculum, so much so that I’ll be speaking about Sloyd at the CMI Western Conference in July.Nathan was also introduced to crochet and whittling, and we spent some time improving his sewing skills as well. Even though handicrafts is supposed to be in the morning schedule for a Form 1 student, I found it easier to do this in the afternoon with his older brother. I have also started to include more dry brush work in Nathan’s work, assigning that as the medium for a drawn narration or a nature journal entry.
Resources
Paper Sloyd for Primary Grades - if you are going to use this book, I highly recommend printing the PDF. The book isn't that long, and if you print the PDF the illustrations in the book will not be stretched.
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| Getting ready to start a paper sloyd project |
Drawing Practice
I started the year using Bruce McIntyre’s Drawing Textbook as we were using that last year, but Nathan really disliked it. I finally decided to switch to some other drawing books we owned, because it didn’t seem like that book was worth making him dread drawing practice time. Since we switched this has been a much more successful and happier experience for both of us. |
| Nathan reading to his two younger siblings |
Favorite Free Reads
I also like to include a few favorites from the year's reading. I try to record all the books the kids read throughout the year by having them place completed books on my desk. I also try and capture ebooks and audiobooks, but without that physical place to put the books they sometimes slip through the cracks.This has been a big year for series for Nathan, as he's gained reading fluency. Some favorites:
- Happy Hollisters
- Boxcar Children
- Bobbsey Twins
- Harry Potter (Books 1-4)
- Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle
- Cleary's Ralph books
- Enright's Melendy books
- And in May he fell into a Redwall hole and read very little else since then!
Some non-series favorites
- Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
- Frankel Mouse
- Civil War Spies
- The Monitor and the Merrimac
- Black Ships Before Troy
- The Green Ember & Ember Falls
- Ginger Pye and Pinky Pye
- Babe: The Gallant Pig
I enjoyed your write up and look forward to the rest!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jennifer! The next one is getting close to being done - I still need to add pictures and links.
DeleteHey! That's me! So funny that you commented on the latest Drill post today and I made time to read your post just now after having it sit in my inbox for 24 hours:).
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued about how you organized your math with the "running a store" method. We, too, use MEP but I find myself slowing way down in order to really solidify concepts before moving forward. As a result, I don't feel that we run into that too "textbook'y" feel you described, but I could definitely use more ideas on how to keep that up. I, too, love Richele B's book - and need to pull it out for another read. Thanks for the reminder!
The store thing was somewhat complicated because it grew over time - it was actually a craft fair, and the boys could buy tools that would give them a certain number of points of effort that they could use to buy the ability to make different items to sell. As it developed, they also had to pay rent on their workshop, buy materials, pay taxes (and get penalized if they didn't keep good records!) as well as buy new tools and the ability to make new items. We had a reoccurring costs phase, a craft fair buying phase, a materials and tools buying phase, and then a final reckoning phase where they paid their taxes and figured out their profits. We did one time through each time we did math, and it took about 10-15 min. Then I would do place value exercises, skip counting, mental arithmetic, that sort of thing for about 10-15 min, then there'd be about 5 min where they would do Logic Links or Tangrams.
DeleteI should see if they'd like to break out the game now - it would be a good summer occupation!
Thanks for your comment!
Wow, Amber. That sounds magnificent! Thanks for explaining it. It sounds like an excellent approach for us to try in future. Inspired by your post I turned an online purchasing experience this morning into our math lesson for the day. The boys have been wanting to order wooden swords and battle axes with their own money from J Cremps for several days. This morning they counted out their money, added the costs of the items they wanted, and figured out tax and shipping costs to determine if they had enough money to make the purchase. Fortunately they did:).
Delete