School starts in a couple of weeks so I've been working on homeschool stuff... I spent this afternoon working on my schedule for the first couple of weeks just to keep myself on track.
So... I thought I would do a run-down of our curriculum for this year, but before I do... here's the verdict on what we did last school year (Alex 1st grade, Clara preschool)...
Both Alex and Clara:
Sonlight Core K with advanced readers (for Alex) - loved Sonlight this year! I freaked out early on trying to strictly adhere to their schedule, but once I lightened up a bit we LOVED it!
La Clase Divertida Level 1 for our Spanish. The kids loved it and I loved that the kit includes EVERYTHING for two kids... but with the move, it got lost in the shuffle. We will restart again this school year.
Atelier for art. This is just an AMAZING program... we thoroughly enjoyed it! We didn't get through the whole set that we have so we'll continue on this year.
Lollipop Logic and First Time Analogies for thinking skills. Enjoyed these... but got lost in the shuffle of the move.
A Reason for Handwriting - Alex was doing A and Clara was doing K. UGH!!! Alex HATED the beginning portion of his book... so much that we had tears. So, I skipped the review and went straight into the lessons... he enjoyed them more but his handwriting is still not so good... so we're trying something different this year. Clara enjoyed her book but she has handwriting issues (not like Alex's messiness issues... but true issues) so we're doing something different for her as well.
Math-U-See - Totally in love with Math-U-See!!! No complaints here... still love it! Alex finished up his first grade book early spring and is now almost halfway through his second grade book.... he randomly announces that he's going to do math even though we're not doing school during the summer. What more could you want from a math program???
Stories of the Great Composers for Music Appreciation. Ummmm.... never got to it... oops.
Just Alex:
Explode the Code - Still like these.... we ended up adding book 3 1/2 after book 3 instead of going straight to book 4.
A Reason for Spelling - Another great big UGH!!! This so did not work for Alex... it was a total disaster for him. We discovered this year that Alex needs to know the reasons behind spelling rules instead of just having a list of words to practice and memorize. This just didn't work. Unfortunately I was a little zealous in my ordering last year and ordered grade 2.... hello ebay!
Learning Language Arts through Literature - Blue Book. The blue book states that it's for first grade... but I don't buy it. I think it is more appropriate for the K level. We put it away and Clara will be using it this year.
Just Clara:
Mountainwood Talking Letters - she enjoyed this but I'm not sure if I really "get" it. She did much better just watching the Leap Frog DVDs, I think.
Seems like we did more... but I guess that was it. Once we moved to Chicago we did TONS of field trips so maybe that's why it feels like we did so much more.
Okay... hopefully I'll get to the new curriculum post after dinner.
I'm going to have to try that art program ---it sounds interesting! I wanted to get core K, but since the two older ones would be doing a different core, I didn't think I'd be able to handle doing 2 cores. Oh, and I've been doing so much better since I've lightened up on the schedule too. Congrats again on MM! (i'm just throwing everything into one post here) :)
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