End of 3rd Grade Curriculum Review

Here is the end of year review for my 3rd grader.  She is on the young side for her grade as she would not have made the public school cut off for the year she started kinder, so if in public school, she would have only been 2nd grade this year.

MATH
For Math she has been using Math Lessons for a Living Education since level 1.  This year she did level 3.  She still struggles with remembering addition facts and is struggling a bit with multiplication, but I am hoping to do some review with this throughout the summer.  We plan to continue with this curriculum.

LANGUAGE ARTS
Shay started Language Lessons for a Living Education level 2 last year and did level 3 this year.  I do really like this curriculum because she can work on a lot of it very independently.  This curriculum has her doing different activities different days of the week (we double up one day to finish in 4 days a week).  Exercise 1 is reading, we read the story together, it highlights what the kids should read.  Exercises 2 & 3 are usually grammar and she can often do these on her own with the examples they provide.  Exercise 4 is a Bible story from 101 Favorite Bible Stories, we read together, alternating paragraphs.  Exercise 5 is spelling, and this is the one thing I struggle with on this curriculum, mostly because with her I did not stay on top of spelling earlier on like I did with my son.  It did take her a bit longer to start reading (We use All About Reading) and so I held off a bit longer on All About Spelling and then I have not been as consistent with it because it is teacher intensive, and with having busy foster littles the last 2 years, I have dropped the ball a bit with spelling.  So I supplemented some with All About Spelling this year.  She has finished level 1 and has done a bit of level 2.  I plan to focus on finishing level 2 and maybe doing level 3 in the summer, and starting a new spelling program in the fall.  We will also do All About Reading Level 4 in the summer, while we are breaking from most of the rest of our curriculum. Then she will continue Language Lessons next year along with another spelling program to supplement.

SCIENCE
She did Zoology along with big brother this year, I did not have her do all the worksheets for the Big Book of Animals, because it was a lot of fill in the blank, and it would take her a long time to write it all.  She enjoyed the coloring/dot-to-dots, etc worksheets especially for the Complete Zoo and Complete Aquarium books.  Now she is working on God's Design for Life for Beginner's.  She still listens to the lessons I read from big brother's Life text, but she only has to do the pages and answer question for the beginner level, which I think works much better for her.

HISTORY
She has done America's Story 2 & 3 with big brother.  She listens and helps answer questions as we discuss the chapters.  She does not always recall a lot, but hopefully it will be a trigger when she learns the information again later.  She does do the sketching and map activities on the worksheets, but she struggles a lot with the review worksheets.  She will also be doing a LEGO timeline for her final history project.

BIBLE
She did More Than Words level 1 from Master Books for the Bible.  I have enjoyed this curriculum for them, and it was a pretty good level for her.

ART
Shay wants to be an artist, and spends a lot of time drawing, coloring, painting, cutting and taping paper creations together.  She also really enjoys Art Hub for Kids videos.  She has enjoyed the Living Art Lessons, but I struggle with staying on a schedule for regular instructed art practice.  Hopefully next year they will get to take an in person art class.

Aside from their regular school work, we try to sometimes watch videos or documentaries that go along with what we are learning.  We try to also incorporate games, but with a little one around, that has not happened nearly as often as I would like.  They have also done some typing practice online when I remember to remind them to do that.  Both kids enjoy Prodigy game for math and Shay enjoys Math Seeds and Reading Eggspress.

End of 5th Grade Homeschool Curriculum Review

Every year we are always excited to see all the new curriculum everyone is using, which all looks so promising, but we all know that many times the curriculum doesn't work as we expected or hoped.  So this is my end of year 5th grade curriculum review sharing what we used and whether or not we liked it.
MATH
This was Mason's 3rd year using Master Books Math Lessons of for a Living Education I believe.  This year he did level 5.  He is not a fan of math, and we struggled through several curriculum in the early years trying to find something that fit.  We still really love MLFLE, it is the only math curriculum that doesn't end in tears on a regular basis.  The story style and short lessons really work best for Mason who gets overwhelmed at a large amount of problems on one page.  We still struggle a bit with memorizing the multiplication facts, but aside from that, I think he has done pretty well with this curriculum and we will continue with it.

LANGUAGE ARTS
This year Mason's language arts consisted of Fix It Grammar (The Nose Tree book) and this was his 2nd year of IEW writing class with another homeschool mom.  For Fix It Grammar it was quick and easy enough, thankful he had already had 1 year of IEW writing, so he knew most of the terms and was able to actually write the sentences.  Had I tried this curriculum before that, I know it would have resulted in meltdowns, because before that even copying 1 sentence was torture to him.  I don't feel like he consistently labeled everything necessarily, but I really don't know how important I feel that is.  We will be switching this up next year.

The IEW writing class however has done wonders for Mason's writing.  He has improved and I think it has been a tremendous help that it was not taught by me.  I feel like if I had been teaching it, it wouldn't have gone nearly as well.  He can now sit down and write a 3 paragraph paper!  I am amazed!  However because he really does not want to continue taking the class, we are going to do writing at home next year and see how it goes.  He will know that if he gives me a hard time over it, he will be put back in writing class.

Spelling - Mason's spelling is usually ok, but I decided to add in spelling practice about halfway through the fall, so I just got some 5th grade spelling lists online.  I let him look at the list and then give him a test on Monday, if he makes a 100 (only happened once) he is done with spelling for the week.  If he missed any, then during the week he writes the words he missed and we re-test on Thursday.  Any words he misses Thursday, get tacked onto his list the next week, until he gets them all right.  Not sure this is really the best way, he often gets different words wrong on Thursday, that he spelled correctly on Monday.  So we are probably going to change this up next year.

Reading - he is a voracious reader, so I don't worry about this.  We do read some read-alouds all together and we listened to a lot of audiobooks when we were driving back and forth to all of our activities this year.

SCIENCE

We started the year with Zoology from Master Books.  This was both my kids absolute favorite curriculum of the year.  They both love animals, so this was a great fit!  We finished this about March, so we started God's Design for Life.  We are working through the plant unit right now.  I plan to continue with it throughout the summer because I feel like we are behind having not ever done a unit on the human body before.  So we will do that unit, and since my kids love animals, I am sure they will enjoy that unit also.

HISTORY

Our history this year was also Master Books.  We continued with America's Story 2 that we had started towards the end of last year, finished around Christmas and are doing America's Story 3 this semester.  We are speeding it up faster than the schedule because I want them to move on to World History next year because my kids have not really had any world history yet.  America's Story has a text book, written directly to the student in a more story like manner which we enjoy.  We do not do all the worksheets.  Most chapters all have a sketching or art activity and a map activity.  They generally do those, but they don't write out answers, we just discuss the chapters. They also include timeline pictures, so we add those and a few other events to our timeline.  He will be doing a timeline history project with LEGO for the end of year final project.

BIBLE
We have been using More Than Words Level 1 from Master Books this year.  It is quite easy for my 5th grader, but I wanted him to be on the same level as his sister, so that we could do it together.  We will move to level 2 next year and I think it will be tremendously helpful to be reviewing the same topics again in a higher level.  Mason also enjoys reading his Action Bible.

ART

Unfortunately I never seem to stick with a regular schedule for Art.  We having Living Art Lessons from Master Books, and we have done about 12 weeks out of it I think.  Mason spends a lot of time drawing on his own though and enjoys making his own comics.

ELECTIVES

I am counting this as an elective because I think it is a pretty neat skill to work on.  Mason has been obsessed with LEGO since he was 3, now this is ALL he asks for at birthdays and Christmas.  He has been interested in making stop motion videos the last year, so he has been working on this pretty often.  He wanted to share his videos, so I have made a YouTube channel for the kids to share their LEGO videos.  He has even created a series where he plans to release an episode once a week.

Kinder Curriculum for 2014-2015

OK let's try this again.

I can't believe it is August already.  I wait all winter for summer to arrive and it is gone in the blink of an eye.  Not to say I don't love fall, because really fall has become my favorite season, the temperatures, the holidays, the colors.  I just don't love how quickly the warm seasons pass and how long the winter seems to draw out.

However, now that August has arrived, I am in even more of a panic about getting ready to officially start homeschooling!  I plan to start on August 25 and aiming for a 4 day school week Mon-Thurs, with Friday being Co-op day.

I am mostly prepared for M's kinder curriculum, although I will have to put together some science and social studies activities as we go.  I am planning to start some theme and LOTW activities with my little one who is almost 3!  I still have some things printed from when M was little, but I am still trying to put all of her stuff together and figure out how I am going to do school with Mason and keep her occupied.  

Here is what I have planned for M's Kinder Curriculum for 2014-2015

Reading

All About Reading Level 1

ReadingEggs
ClickNRead

Teach Your Monster to Read
And of course lots and lots of books.

Handwriting

Handwriting Without Tears Letters and Numbers for Me.  

Math

MUS Primer and I have Alpha if I feel like he gets ready for it

Bible

Continuing Positive Action Preschool Exploring God's Love

Social Studies

I am going to try to go over the topics in What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know

Evan-Moore Beginning Geography

Science

Also trying to cover topics in What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know

Art

Draw Write Now books

Spanish
We will just be reviewing vocabulary he learned in his Spanish class this summer and a book called Hide & Speak Spanish

After we get started I will also try to make a post each week sharing what we used for our Tot school that week.

Linking to: http://www.ihomeschoolnetwork.com/not-back-to-school-blog-hop-curriculum-week

T is for Turtle Week

Ok, so I failed miserably at my goal of starting tot/preschool during the month of July. Between being pregnant, anemic, having contractions, having MIL in town for 2 weeks, my husband out of town for a week and my mom being here that week, spending anywhere from 1-3 days a week in doctors offices for appointments/ultrasounds/NSTs, and being generally exhausted and for some reason not really able to function between the hours of 9 - 11am, I did not even manage to get prepared for the weeks, let alone do many activities. The first week "T week" we actually managed to do the most, but after that it went all down hill from there, and mostly we only managed a couple letter matching activities and coloring sheets after that.

I also haven't gotten a whole lot more prepared for the fall, I have been printing/cutting/laminating little bits at a time, but I am so far from having anything really planned prepared.  I am not actually sure that we will start our LOTW stuff until maybe after the baby is born or maybe even January, though I am still trying to get it all printed.  I think I am just going to try to find some fun activities to do with them more during the fall until we get settled with the new baby.  I think I will try to do the sensory bins still each month, and maybe some activities to go with each months theme.  I also bought the Montessori at Home e-book by John Bowman and am reading that a bit at a time to come up with some activities for the boys to do.

Here is a little bit of our "T is for Turtle" week.

We started out with the turtle size sort:

Then we did some letter matching...I ended up getting out one of a different letter for M so that he could have his own.  In order to save on laminating, I glued the lower-case and capital letter match sheets together so I could laminate them as one sheet that would be front and back.  (And for the letter matching, I couldn't find the wooden disks, but I started saving water bottle caps and used those for the letters)

Then they did some color matching with the felt popsicles I made:

That afternoon I put M down for a nap and started some of the You Can Read lessons with T.  Here is his dot to dot sheet:

The next day we started with the dot markers, which the boys liked so then I printed off some circle sheets for them to do also. 

 

Another day they did some turtle color matching and lacing:

 

I helped M put his string through the hole and then let him pull it through:

 

And the last day we made paper plate turtles:

Linking up to:

First Sensory Bin: Pond Theme

We started our tot school/preschool on July 11 and this is definitely going to be a learning process figuring out what works/what doesn't and how to do things with 2 boys at very different levels, but yet they want to do everything exactly the same!

Luckily the sensory bin was probably the greatest success of all the activities. They both loved playing with it, and asked for it several times.

I will save all the other details of our first week of tot-school for a different post, I will hopefully have that up soon.

For now I will just share our first sensory bin. I have decided to do one per month, and we will have one theme per month instead of trying to do a theme to go along with each letter of the week. We are starting with a pond theme.

In the Bin:

Blue dyed rice 

Felt lily pads

Frogs and Turtles from Safari Frogs and Turtles Toob (bought from Amazon)

Dragonflies from Animal Planet Bugs in a Tube (bought at Toys R Us)

Fish from Circo Underwater Life Collection Tube (bought at Target)

Snail aquarium decoration I had because many years ago it lived in a hermit crab tank

Cards from the Pond Preschool Pack at Homeschool Creations

We did a little matching of the objects with the cards:

They didn't play with it long that day because their neighbor friend came to the door wanting them to play outside.

The next pictures are from a different day.  I had found these M&M cups at Walmart and thought they would be great for sorting activities and such.  So I gave them each a cup and a plastic spoon and they scooped the rice into the cups.

This is what the bin looked like when they were done.  They ended up with all 5 cups in there and they (mostly T) sorted the objects by color putting the green turtle in the green cup and so on.

I'd say we made if a good 15-20 minutes before the rice started ending up outside the bin in large quantities.  I think they had a great time with it, and I really look forward to putting these together for all the themes I have planned for the next few months!

Linking up to:

Organizing for Preschool: Part 1

I still have a ton of organizing to do along with a lot of printing and laminating, and figuring out where everything will go, but I thought I would go ahead and share the start of my organizing process for all the letter printables and such I am collecting.

I started with a 1 inch binder for homeschool stuff, but then decided that I need to split up "my" homeschool info from the actual printouts.  So I am keeping the 1 inch binder for keeping a calendar and resources, I haven't gotten the tabs and such on it yet, I will try to get pictures of it, when I get it ready.  Then I had a 3 inch binder sitting in the closet luckily, so I decided to use that for storing all the printouts.  It may not work for everything, and I actually got a little set of plastic drawers for storing the flash cards and such, but here it is so far.

A section for colors:

 I have a page protector storing the color game pages I laminated for the different LOTW color matching.

 A section for shapes:

 A section for numbers/counting/math:

 My section for each letter, I bought alphabet tabs ready made for this:

Examples of the T section, I punched holes in the laminated full pages and put some tracing pages in a page protector:

I used a page protector to store the smaller cut out activities, this is what may have to change as I start getting more and more of these printed out, because it will make my binder huge!

 This is my alphabet review section, for anything that isn't specified to 1 letter of the alphabet:

My You Can Read section:

Some are in page protectors, others laminated with hole punches, or the coloring pages are just hole punched since those won't be laminated:  So far I have only printed out Unit 1, but am thinking about how I am going to separate the different units. 

I am linking up to:

Planning and Printing

I have been spending nearly every free moment planning for tot/preschool the past week or 2.  My new black ink cartridge is already screaming it's going on empty!  I am going to try getting them refilled at Walgreen's and hoping they can do that so that I don't have to order a new cartridge every time.  I also have a laminator on order from Amazon!  Can't wait for it to come in!  I already have stacks of papers to be laminated as soon as I get it out of the box!

So what will I be using?  I decided that it would be easiest on me to go ahead and use curriculums and printables that are out there for the most part (though I do have a few ideas of my own that I am hoping to be able to make soon!).  So I went ahead and purchased Confessions of a Homeschooler's LOTW curriculum, and her K4 expansion.  I also purchased access to 1+1+1=1's You Can Read Bonus section.

I have 3 - 1 inch binders, one for each of the boys and 1 for me.  I did create a cover page for T's You Can Read section and a cover page for a School Tools section for my binder.  That is about all I have accomplished for that so far.  Once I get more done, I plan to take pics to share.  And if I can figure out how to share printables, I will make the cover pages I made available for download.

I had no idea how addicting planning for homeschooling could be!