As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, in early January our homeschool plans went through a MAJOR overhaul. Before I really delve into giving you guys all the details on that though, I wanted to tell you about the curricula and products we were using during the beginning of the year because I really do love them and think they are fantastic resources, they just weren’t working for us right now.
For those of you who didn’t follow my original homeschool blog, I’ll bring you up to speed on what kind of planner I am- an intense one! I spent hours and weeks last summer planning! I had our basic routine planned and our daily school schedule for every. single. day. of the school year planned. I had big aspirations of meshing two amazing curricula together (both of which had unique aspects I really liked) as our core. Then I had a bunch of other things in addition that I planned on using and incorporating throughout our day.
Here is the shocker- I over-planned! Gasp! I was teaching a kindergartener- a kindergarten boy to be exact. He was not ready for the scope and volume for which I had ambitiously anticipated! Our first week went ok from the sheer excitement of starting school, but we both quickly burned out. We were trying to sit there for too many hours and “do school.” Rhythm quickly began to dread it and I dreaded trying to coax him to get the work done. He is a live-wire kind of kid, full of energy, easily distracted if he isn’t completely engaged- school time was torture for us both.
Within about a month we had eliminated all the extras and we were down to just the basics- Bible, reading, writing and math. But for the most part, even those weren’t going well (aside from Bible! You can’t go wrong with Grapevine!). Math was especially painful and was taking us an hour or more to get through one worksheet, front and back.
So, before I keep rattling on about all this, I want to go through what we were using, subject by subject and resource by resource and tell you what I liked and why we decided to move on. This post will include the basic subjects and I will cover all the rest in Part 2, for sake of length! I hope this is helpful!
Bible- Grapevine Studies! Pretty much the only thing that stayed the same! Bible is Rhythm’s absolute favorite subject. We won’t be letting go of Grapevine any time soon!
Reading- Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons- I liked this book for a variety of reasons: the lessons were short, it has a big focus on comprehension, there is lots of repetition, the child reads the story without looking at the picture so they don’t just rely on guessing, it has a systematic way of teaching blending and rhyming, and it was affordable. What I didn’t like was mostly the characters they use above letters to clue the child into what sound the letter makes (it was becoming a handicap) and the similarity of all the lessons was becoming a little draining on Rhythm.
Although we did move on from this book I am glad we used it because I really think it strengthened Rhythm’s comprehension and blending skills and helped him get a good basis to begin reading from. Now that we have moved on to a program that doesn’t use any symbols with the letters (and I will be getting into what we are using now in a different post) he has been going through it pretty quickly since Teach Your Child to Read had prepped him. I would consider using it again or partially in conjunction with the program we are using now, or at least using some of it’s ideas.
You Can Read- I think this is a great program for sight word learning and it has a lot of fun components (as always- it’s from Carisa at 1+1+1=1, after all!). The reason we have eliminated this part of our day has nothing to do with the curriculum itself, it more came down to not really having the time to fit it in and the fact that the reading curriculum we switched to includes sight words. I could definitely see using this with Lion Cub in preschool though, when we don’t have a bunch of other reading work to do also.
Math- Horizons K workbooks- Rhythm soared through the first 3 weeks of worksheets that were pretty familiar to him. However, past that we did not have good luck with this program. It relied heavily on the number line, which he was having trouble picking up on, and the whole proram was moving along more quickly than he was mastering concepts. It had moved on to adding double digits before he had gotten really comfortable with the basics. I think a lot of it just came down to him needing a more hands-on program. Since we have left Horizons, things have gone much more smoothly, although I still go back and look at it from time to time to make sure we are covering everything we need to in Kindergarten math and we may pull out some of the worksheets here or there for practice of certain concepts.
Ok- we’ll stop there for now! I’ll hit you with the rest tomorrow, but if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask!
