After going on and on about Sonlight, I'm finally ready to share the rest of my choices for this year, and provide a brief explanation for why I went with each one. My girls are all very different in personalities along with learning styles, so you will see some overlap, but not much. Yes, this keeps me hopping, but that's homeschooling, right? :) In order to keep posts within a reasonable size, I'll break them down by girls. I'll start with the oldest, Bug, who just turned 9 and is in 4th grade.
Math:
Singapore 4A&B, textbook and workbook. I don't purchase the teacher's guide because I won't use it. I know that there is a ton of great stuff in there. I'm just one of those, "Less can be more," kind of people and as long as she's doing well with just the textbook and workbook, I'm counting my blessings and running with that. :) Math was a challenge during first grade. The content wasn't hard. Getting her to sit relatively still and complete the page without me losing my cool was. She would sing and dance around the room, run over and write and answer, and then dance away. I had a few friends of mine were using Singapore and I decided to give it a try for second grade. The simple directions, black and white workbook pages, and absolute void of manipulatives (aka: complete and utter distractions) made math time enjoyable! Bug was calm, focused, and began to really understand what she was doing. I really think the colorful and busy pages were just too much visual stimulation for her. Simpler = better for Bug. This year she has already finished Chapter 1 and I'm constantly impressed with how much mental math she can do, and how quickly and effortlessly she can think outside the box to figure out an answer.
Language Arts:
I use Evan Moor's Daily Language Review for Bug's grammar. That's it. Again, less can be more, and DLR is getting the job done. She corrects two sentences and we talk about the mistakes that were made and explain why she made the corrections she did. Then there are three to four more questions that deal with anything from identifying the adjective in a sentence to completing an analogy. I feel that having to remember various grammar rules and terms in a variety of settings and with no forewarning works better than spending a few days in each topic and then moving on.
After trying and flaming out with Sonlight's Language Arts, I switched to Evan Moor's Daily 6 Trait Writing. It breaks writing down to definable skills and then focuses on each skill, building to a complete finished product by the end of the year. Bug loves to write on her own, but getting her to do it for school was often difficult. I realized that it was all because she didn't like the editing and rewriting process. She would shy away from larger words, stress over sentence formation, and work to keep her essay as short as possible. To try to keep writing enjoyable, and still work on the skills, I decided that the first four writing assignments for each skill would just be for fun. I read them over for content, but don't say a thing about spelling or minor improvements. After the fifth, and final, week for each trait she will spend a week on the writing assignment, breaking the essay down into its components and doing some serious editing, followed by a rewrite in her best handwriting. As I hoped, she's loving the free writing days. We will see how the final unit essay goes in a few weeks.
Spelling workbooks weren't working for Bug. She would memorize the ten words just fine, but there was no carry over to writing, and she wasn't learning how to take her knowledge of how one word was spelled and apply it to others. I found Sequential Spelling and absolutely love this program. It teaches spelling patterns, so once a pattern is learned it can be applied to a variety of words. There are lists every day, knocking out the busy work of playing around with the words and such. It's simply, "Here's the pattern. Use it." This week, for example, used the "fer" pattern. It started with "confer" on Monday, moving up to "conferring" and "conference" by Thursday. Big words are no longer scary because she knows how to break them down and then spell the sounds.
Reading is done with a two pronged approach. Bug has to read a short story and do the accompanying worksheet in her Spectrum Reading book each day. That covers vocabulary, word skills (prefixes, compound words, possessives), comprehension, and study skill (graphs, alphabetical order, using an index). Then she gets to move on to reading whatever she wants, for how long she wants to. There are book lists provided by Evan Moor's How to Report on Books program, and along with books that relate to what she's studying in history and science, there are a lot for her to choose from. I fill up a square laundry basket with books and she is free to pick from there. When she's done for the day she comes and tells me about what she read, and when she finishes the book she does a book report. I use for the forms and themes from HWBR. Our library lets you check out books for three weeks at a time, so our themes go in three week stretches. We just finished focusing on use of setting in a story and have moved on to character development.
Social Studies:
I felt that I was dropping the ball when it came to geography, but I didn't have the time to do a comprehensive, literature inclusive, program. Instead I've settled for Evan Moor's Daily Geography. It's sufficient. I'm not blown away by it, but it gets the job done. Bug finds it enjoyable and will do the whole week on Monday, freeing up time in the rest of the week.
This year Bug is studying CA history. I love Sonlight and so I went looking for a literature based program similar to Sonlight that would cover CA history and found it in Beautiful Feet. The questions that go along with the stories are wonderful, and there are great writing and drawing assignments. Bug is going to have a wonderful journal at the end to use to review all she has learned. I love the timeline characters too. They are so big that when we are done I can hang it on the wall and we won't have any trouble reading it. There are some gaps in it though, as there will be in any completely literature program. There just aren't enough historical fiction books for every detail. Sonlight uses textbooks as spines to fill in the gap, and I decided to use the 4th grade textbook provided by the home ed. program we go through. There is a lesson a day and then a corresponding workbook page. Bug is able to do this part independently. When we come to the end of a unit we switch over to BF for their lesson on that time period. It matched up amazingly well and fit perfectly into 40 weeks.
Science:
This has been my Waterloo. I just can't pull off experiments/activities consistently during the school year. Two years ago science fell out of my lesson plan book completely in December and never made its way back in. I spent the summer catching up and realized that I had found something that worked for me. :) I decided I would use a bare minimum, make sure they are getting some knowledge, program for the school year and then really delve into something during the summer. Last year we used Evan Moor's Daily Science and it fit the bill. It was simple, covered state standards, and threw in an experiment every five weeks. Then we did Sonlight's Science 2 over the summer, doing a week's worth of lessons in a day. This year we are back to Evan Moor, but I'm planning on using Apologia's Astronomy for the summer. As much as the girls love Professor Justin, I'm ready to really sink my teeth into a field and Sonlight jumps around too much for me. Apologia looks substantial, and yet approachable, and I'm hoping they'll love it.
If you made it through all that, my hat's off to you. You must be a fellow curriculum junkie. :) And yes, I use a lot of Evan Moor. It just works so well for my family. And, like I said earlier, when I find something that works, I stick with it. :)
I've linked up with the Heart of the Matter's Not Back to School: Curriculum Week Blog Hop. There are over 100 links full of curriculum reviews. It's worth checking out. :)
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