2013-2014 Curriculum and Schedule Plan

It seems that a LOT of people are considering the jump into homeschool lately.  So I've been

getting a lot of questions about what we're planning for the next school year.  I figured, instead of typing from scratch the answer everytime, I should save it somewhere.  And why not here, where I can just refer people and others that may not know me can get ideas as well!  Our school year is much more structured then the summer, though we do school year round.  I'll post about summer school later.  In our family, we have put in order of importance - spiritual growth, worldly knowledge, and housework.

Each day we start with devotional, all of the children participate regardless of age. We start with prayer and the pledge of allegiance. Then I read aloud from the scriptures for 15 minutes. We rotate through the books (Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, Pearl of GreatPrice, Old Testament, and New Testament). Then we work on their memorizationboxes. To finish out our group part of devotional, I read for 10 minutes from whatever novel we're reading as a family.  Finally, the kids that can read do personal scripture study and record their thoughts in their scripture journal. 

 

Rachel is now five and so excited to officially start school.  The state considers her a Kindergartener. Currently, we're finishing up her alphabet - recognizing the letters and knowing their sounds. We just use flash cards and StarFall.com. Once she has that down, we're going to start using Learning to Read Using the Book ofMormon, Vol. 1 and The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading. The BoM teaches by memorizing sight words and Ordinary teaches phonics. BoM will count as her personal scripture time each day at the end of devotional. She'll also be starting Saxon math (grade K).

Rose is ten and considered a 5th grader. This fall she'll be starting Saxon math (6/5) and Learning Language Arts Through Literature (PurpleBook). I like LLATL because it rolls all the L.A. lessons into one course. She's also supposed to take an online tech class called Mobile Apps forBeginners. But she'll only be able to take that if we stay in Utah through an online charter school called My Tech High. If we move to Kansas (waiting to hear back on Dad's application), she won't be able to take that.

Rebekah will be 13 and considered to be in the 7th grade. She will be taking Saxon math ( 8/7 w/ PreAlgebra), LLATL (Green Book), and BYU-Independent Study (US History Part 1 & 2). If we stay in Utah, she'll also be taking a Robotics LEGO course through My Tech High.

All of our school age kids do science and history together.  Science is done 3x a week and history is daily.  We're using Real Science-4-Kids(Astronomy) and Story of the World (Vol. 1, Ancient Times) next year. I really would like to try the Latter Day School's Family School program. But it's a bit spendy ($500 per year) and you still have to purchase Story of the World, math and language arts. But the idea of teaching all of my children together is very appealing. Not to mention it was put together by an LDS group that runs a private school based on gospel principles in the Provo area. And everyone that has used it raves about it.

They also study Mandarin through Rosetta Stone, are learning to play piano with the LDS church's keyboard course, and we have a family pass to the local pool that we frequent several times a week. We have an hour and 15 minutes of reading time each day. Forty-five minutes is spent reading literature that I assign (I use lists from Simply Charlotte Mason, The Well Trained Mind, and Thomas Jefferson Ed). Thirty minutes is free reading.  The girls can do their individual lessons in any order they like.  We typically do the group lessons right before or after lunch.  After lunch and group lessons, we work together to get the house in order.  We also do another quick pick-up right before bed so that everything is ready for the next day.

UPDATE:  Doesn't look like Dad got the job in Kansas, so we'll be sticking with MTH for the school year.  Yay!  We changed Rebekah's history, though.  Instead of using BYU Independent Study for American History, we're going to use a combination of two programs.  We're going to do history through literature with Beautiful Feet's Early American and World History Jr. High Pack in conjunction with lapbooks from Homeschool in the Woods' Time Travelers New World Explorers bundle.

K12 Disappointments and Pleasures

Well, it’s been a long time since I wrote anything here. Life has been hectic.

But, onto school news.

K12 is definitely not the answer for my oldest daughter’s language arts. Rebekah understands the majority of her assignments and works through them steadily. Yet each day, it takes her close to three hours to complete the work! I do not recall spending three hours steadily working on any one subject while in school (the only times we spent three hours on anything was if the teacher was dealing with the lowest denominator or unruly students). And she is expected to cover all the language arts subjects (composition, grammar, usage, mechanics, spelling, vocabulary and literature) every day. I think this is ridiculous for a homeschool course! By the time she finishes math and science, she is spending 5+ hours in straight school work; this is not counting breaks, meals, etc. She has no time for being a child or extracurricular activities like sports, art, music, etc.

Part of the reason the K12 language arts lessons take so long is that the individual parts do not relate to one another at all. A streamlined program would base the spelling, vocab and composition assignments/tests on what was being studied in literature. In the K12 program, each one is completely separate and has no relation to each other. The spelling lists and vocabulary lists do not even relate.

Then there is the fact that I was misled by the local Utah K12 school on Rebekah’s language arts program. She is slightly behind in her comprehension skills (according to testing results), so it was recommended that we start her in one grade lower’s program. It was explained to us that when she finished the fourth grade program, she could immediately begin the fifth grade program and work on it through the summer. Not true. She has to finish the fourth grade program before mid-February to be allowed to start the 5th grade program before the fall of the next school year. To do this, she’d have to do double language arts lessons each day. Obviously, by the fact that each lesson is taking such an exorbitant amount of time, that’s not a feasible option.

So, Rebekah will be finishing the language arts program with K12 this year but will starting a new program next year.

Thankfully, the K12 language arts program for Rose (second grade) is not nearly as intense. But I also plan to start her in a different program next year. I don’t know when the K12 program gets so intense and don’t especially want to find out.

On the other hand, I greatly enjoy the science programs that have been provided by K12 for both children. The lessons are straight-forward and full of interesting information. There is an experiment or hands on activity for each lesson to reinforce the lesson. My kids love hands on science, so really get a kick out of this. And K12 has provided all the materials I need to complete the experiments (minus some basic household items).

We have not really had time to delve into the history program provided by K12, simply because the language arts lessons are taking up so much time. I have decided not to push it for this year, but plan to implement a history program next summer and continue it in following school years.

Math is a breeze for both of my school age children. It seemed at the beginning of the year, their math lessons were way too easy. So we decided to start simply taking the tests with the plan that if they got 100%, they could skip that chapter. If they got 80-99%, we would review the lessons that the problems they missed correlated to and retake the test. If they got below 80%, they did all lessons for the chapter. So far, Rose has skipped 45 days worth of lesson and Rebekah has skipped 25. It has been quite the eye opener for our family on just how much time is wasted in review every year in the public school system.

To help the girls develop strong math skills in the basics, we also do math fact quizzes every day. These quizzes are designed to help them memorize addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables, among other math skills. For every 20 problems they do, they get one minute to complete them. If they can finish them all correctly in the given time, they move onto the next quiz.

K12 Groove

So, our K12 language arts programs for the girls arrived last Monday and we were able to start class on Tuesday.

Rose is in the second grade and her language arts program is very straight forward. It is also very time consuming for me, as I have to be with her for every second of her lesson. It is a similar situation with her math – simple and straightforward, but I have to sit next to her and do it all with her. In total, her lessons take one and a half to three hours each day (depending on her attitude), not counting preparation time.

Rebekah’s in the fifth grade and her lessons are much more involved, taking a lot more preparation time. Thankfully, she is able to do several of her lessons, including math, on her own with my just checking over her work and answering the occasional question. This is good for two reasons. One, it means she can be completing part of her lessons on her own while I work with Rose. Secondly, it enables her to work at a faster rate. This is especially good because she is repeating 4th grade language arts. So she has double lessons in LA everyday so that she can start 5th grade LA in February and be caught up by the end of the school year.

I spend each evening with their books, reading through the lesson plans online, gathering materials, writing out Rebekah’s assignments to do on her own, and any other prep work that needs to be completed.

Our daily schedule is pretty straight forward. We get up early and have breakfast, then get dressed and start chores. At 8:30am, whether chores are done or not, we start school. When we’re finished (usually before lunch), the girls finish their chores and then have free time.

Now that we’ve had a week to get our language arts and math schedules down, we are ordering our science curriculums and will add them on when they arrive. I hope to add on history, art, Mandarin and some sort of sports later in the year.

Washington Online School Utah

Thankfully, we are finally done moving (for the time being) and I can get back into the school routine, which includes blogging time! Yay!

Well, there have been some big changes to our homeschooling life. I was trying to plan an art unit study in which we would learn about da Vinci, Monet and Picasso over a three week period. But two things were causing me a lot of headache. The local library is TERRIBLE! They didn’t have a single children’s book on any of the painters or on art in general! So I was facing the prospect of having to pay $80 a year and travel about an hour every few weeks to use the Salt Lake County library. Then there was the aspect of trying to incorporate age appropriate science into the unit study. Add that to the stress I was already experiencing due to living with family and my husband still trying to find work, and I was ready to come unglued.

Thankfully, my sister-in-law is also homeschooling. But she’s doing it through the state’s online school. She gave me all the information and I checked into it. What a relief for my first year of school! Now I’m assured that the girls will not fall behind!

So here’s the new plan. The girls are part of the Utah K12 program, Washington Online School Utah. They will start out with language arts and science. Throughout the year, we have the option of adding up to five courses per girl in history, art, music and some languages. The K12 program does have a math program, but we’ve decided to keep the girls in the Saxon math program (for which we had already bought curriculums earlier this year).

We'll still do our school journals and family reading, in addition to the regular subjects.  And we still have the flexibility of being able to travel or have field trip days when we need them.

And we haven’t given up on unit studies, either. But instead of that being the basis of our homeschool, it will be a supplemental. We’ll do mini-unit studies for holidays and special occasions. We’ll do full unit studies (like the art study I’ve already put together) during the summer. Then, if a unit study that we’re really interested in doesn’t lend itself well to certain subjects, we won’t feel guilty leaving them out.

This has taken an immense amount of stress off of me for the time being. If the girls do not respond well to their curriculum, we’ll check into others for next year. We’re starting with K12 because it’s free. But if it doesn’t work, we’ll start looking into more purchased curriculums.

Progress Is Being Made

Yay! The girls got all their chores done in two hours today! Happy days! Thus we were able to go to the library. Our library is being renovated, so harder to find things right now. But the girls were able to find books for their personal reading in the morning and I got a copy of Charlotte’s Web to read aloud as a family at night. I read it to Rebekah when she was a baby, but have not read it to any of the others. And of course, my husband has never read it. The girls got me to promise that any books we read that have movies made; we will have a family movie night and watch it when we get done with the book.

I’m at a loss for what to do about a curriculum. We got very lucky and were able to get the Saxon math programs we needed for dirt cheap from other homeschoolers that were done with them. But I haven’t had any luck with anything else. I’ve found several curriculums that I would love to try, but they’re too expensive, especially with my husband not having a full-time job yet (wonderful economy). For now, I think the best course is to use the internet to provide science lessons and experiments for us to all do together, work with the Saxon math, and then read various books from the library on other topics. Some of the books I’ll have the girls do oral reports on to the family and others write reports. Our local library has kits that have lots of picture books on a particular subject. I think we might get one of those each week this summer and check out some harder books for Rebekah on the same subject. For penmanship, I am thinking of journal and creative writing. The creative writing, I’d fill a jar with various ideas or themes. Have the girls draw one and them give them a specific amount of time to write on the subject.

Books, books and more books!

Today I am going to the library to pick up several books I’ve put on hold on different ways to homeschool. My library had a pretty lousy selection on such books (only 6!), but it at least gives me a place to start. As I read, I will comment here on things I like or dislike. Once I’m done, I’ll also add a full review of each book at Goodreads.com (I love that site).

I’m having a tough time finding a science curriculum for the girls. At 2nd and 5th grade, I don’t want a curriculum that focuses on only one science field. I’d much rather have some sort of curriculum that covers lots of types of science throughout the year. I’d also like to have something that I can do the basic lesson and experiments with both girls at the same time, but it has an option to go more in depth for my soon to be 5th grader. Suggestions would be very helpful.

I could also use some help finding some decent priced vendors for children’s videos, literature and music in Chinese. We have Rosetta stone and books to teach the girls basic vocabulary and how to write the characters. But we want something for them to listen to, watch or read to give them extra exposure to the language.

And may I say - homeschool curriculums are Expensive! I am very thankful for sites like Amazon, Ebay, Half.com, Learning Things, and Homeschool Classifieds (among others) that help me find the supplies I need for cheaper! If you know of other sites with good deals, please send them my way!