 Emily's school this year |  | A few months ago I came across a website that changed my life. It is called: "An Old fashioned Education". That is what we are following for our main curriculum. I have adjusted it to work for our family.
I have just finished the planning stage of our homeschool and also gathered all the books. My next stage is sceduling how often we will do each book and when. I'll try to get that up as soon as I am done.
Our homeschool is scheduled to start Sept. 10th.
Emily also goes to a co-op at our local church once a week. The co-op runs from Sept. - May.
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Emily's Stories & extra school work |  | We follow the Charlotte Mason Method. We use stories to learn and the books are called : Living books. Here is a list and links to books Emily is using this year to learn. If I find she doesn't enjoy a book we will change it and try another book.
My kids like workbooks. I don't make them do them though but they want to. So I use workbooks for school too. I call their workbooks our extra school work.
I have copied the stories my kids will learn from and put them into a nicer format than found online. I hope to get those up for you all to see and use in your own home if you wish. I did this in Microsoft Word to make the books easier for printing. I don't print out the whole book just so many chapters. I have learned that sometimes my kids do not like the story, lose interested or some like that. Plus it saves room since some books are rather long. |
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 BibleWe do bible first in our homeschool. We do this every day.
First we will read a devotional from: Keys for Kids. We get books in the mail for free. I get one for each child for them to follow along. I read the devotional then I'll have the kids take turns tell me about what they just heard. We will then talk about the devotional and apply it to our life.
Emily is to read one full story each week from a book called: A Child's Story Bible. This is a book we bought. You can find it at Amazon.com
The Child's Story Bible
We don't do any workbooks for Bible lessons. I do have a few coloring books, memory work books and such but they've enjoyed that kind of stuff. |
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Language Arts |  | We do a lot of work in language arts. We cover handwriting, grammar, literature, spelling, writing and more. I'll cover some of the other parts below in their own category.
This year she'll be learning outlining and writing book reports. We are using workbooks to help learn this.
REM 1134A Outlining grades 4-8 - I am unable to find a link online for this book. Sorry about that.
English for the Thoughtful Child, Vol. 1
We will be doing the English for the Thoughtful Child along with my other daughter. |
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Handwriting - Cursive and copywork |  | Each day Emily does work from a book called:
Handwriting without tears Cursive - http://www.hwtears.com/ We tried a few different books to teach her cursive. We went took a break for awhile be cause she just wasn't ready for it. Once we started using Handwriting without Tears though she took off. Honestly her writing is so well at times I can't tell which is already printed to show her how to write or her own writing! Seriously! It's much better than my handwriting.
Also I struggled with teaching her cursive. I had read somewhere though that some schools have dropped it from their teaching methods. A lot of people just don't use cursive these days. I thought about my own handwriting and mine is now a combination of both print and cursive. My husband is the same.
We do copywork every day too. What is copy work?? Copywork is copying a piece of well-written work, from any variety of sources, onto paper or into a notebook. The student copies from a written selection using his best penmanship to create a “perfect copy” that is properly spaced and includes all proper capitalization and punctuation marks. It is a method, that when used consistently in your homeschooling studies, will improve your child's
penmanship, grammar, & punctuation skills as well as expose him to a variety of writing styles, structures, and techniques.
I have already selected poems, quotes and bible verses for them to pick from. I have this printed out and put in their notebooks for them to choose from. Once they finish a piece of work we put it in the notebook. They are free to pass these on to family members of friends.
Also the older the child is the more copywork they do. My 7yr old will write just a few sentences of one piece but my 11yr old is expected to write more.
Each day my girls follow a schedule for their copywork. Each day they do one of the following: Poems, famous quotes, bible verses, selected work from stories they are reading and something they choose. |
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Spelling |  | Emily has struggled with spelling over the years. But last year she took a huge jump and she has now told me how she can't believe how she progressed in over a year.
I am times have personally blamed myself. I had read and been told by other parents who use the Charlotte Mason Method that kids would learn to spell through copywork. Sadly Emily didn't and we started from square one when she was 8. She was still struggling though and that was when God put into our hands a new way to look at spelling.
We started following Sequential Spelling - http://www.avko.org/sequentialspelling.html She took right off with this book. The book teaches spelling using word families.
Here is sample lesson from the book: http://www.avko.org/sequentialspellingsample.html
Now we do not do lessons in one day. Instead I started using Sequential Spelling pretty much as our spelling lists. She would do one list a week. But sometimes it less or longer depending on the words.
We use this along with a website called Spelling Time: http://www.spellingtime.com/ The website use to be free and sadly this year you must pay to use it. We plan to join and pay the yearly fee since it has made such a big difference. I love the website. You can use your own spelling lists which I do from Sequential Spelling and each day she'll log onto the site. She uses games, spelling tests and stuff like that to learn the words. I'll get reports through email of which words she struggled on plus I trust her to tell me which words we need more work on. I'll also have her write each word correctly 3 times during the day.
Following the above methods her spelling has improved so much! |
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Math |  | We have used Math U See in the past but I was very unhappy with Emily's progress in it so we have now switched to Alpha Omega Math. We are using one of the Lifepacs.
http://www.aop.com/home/ |
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Science |  | Emily loves Science. She inherited this from her dad. I have struggled with finding a good curriculum for Science.
She will be reading a book called: Wilderness Ways by William J Long. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15950
We will use workbooks too for Science. Right now we are using one called: Read and Understand Science Grades 4-6
Read and Understand Science: Grades 4-6 (Read & Understand)
We will also focus on more things too this year this is just what we are starting with right now. |
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It is a book for grades K-8 so it will work great with all grade levels in your homeschool.
