This marks my third year homeschooling. With the passage of time, I find myself easing into a rhythm and a better understanding of my oldest child’s learning styles. We do school four days a week which naturally allows us to switch days around with other life celebrations, events or appointments. Our sweet spot has been schooling mid-August to mid-May with our only break being the month of December. My five year old, started his kindergarten year, so it felt like a good time to round out more social studies and science topics while tailoring them to meet his natural interests. We also added a third child to our family around the holidays, so that meant skipping our normal Christmas schooling to allow for more healing and family bonding time. 

Language Arts & Handwriting

This is our third year using The Good and The Beautiful’s Language Arts curriculum. We used Level 1 this year. While we had worked ahead through many of the Level 1 booster cards the previous year, we spent the beginning of the school year reviewing them to ensure a solid base. Once finished we moved onto the Level 2 booster cards (as recommended by the curriculum). We love the quick lessons and have been very happy with the foundation this curriculum has built. We have hit summer break but my newly six year old is confidently reading chapter books independently and more than anything is loving reading. Stay tuned for a blog on our favorite books for this level! 

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In addition to The Good and The Beautiful curriculum we added in a few additional things that technically fit into the Language Arts bucket, but with our eldest, the intention has been more focused on building hand strength and a sense of comfort in writing words this year. We added in Explode the Code (Book 1) and Evan Moor Daily Spelling (Grade 1). The Explode the Code level was much easier than the rest of his Language Arts curriculum. I would say it was one level lower in content (Kindergarten level of TGATB). We did one page a day for the workbook and finished up earlier than the rest of the subjects. The timing of this worked out well and helped ease up our school year just as the weather started to turn nicer - giving us the sense of a slight break. The spelling workbook was great for building familiarity with works and especially with writing letters together to form works. Many other handwriting books at this level just have the children practicing the letters, which while helpful was a mental block for my son when it came time to write sentences. The Evan Moor workbook slowly built up to longer words as the weeks went by. Our focus of using the book wasn’t for the mastery of the words, but rather for the practice of writing them with the different daily activities. With the goal of building hand strength, we opted out of doing a Friday spelling test. 

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For formal handwriting practice we rotated between both The Good and The Beautiful handwriting as well as Handwriting Without Tears. Each school day, the expectation was to complete two pages, which required several books to fit through the school year. My oldest isn’t a big fan of coloring, so activity pages that required this were sometimes difficult. My goal is to pull out the PlayDoh this summer to help maintain as much of that strength as possible! 

 

Math

This was our second year using The Good and The Beautiful’s Math curriculum. We used Level 1 this year. My son went into the start of the school year with Math as his favorite subject, but ended it being much less of a favorite than Language Arts. We walk the fine line of subjects moving to slow vs. needing extra practice. We still aren’t sure which was the case for this year’s math. We continue to love games to help solidify skills at this point. 

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Science

For Science this year, we actually blended two curriculums together for a year full of all things outer space!  We used a hybrid curriculum between The Good and The Beautiful’s Little Hearts and Hands Sparks and Starts and Little School of Smith’s My Place in Space! This hybrid approach worked great for both of us this year. The Good and The Beautiful does a fantastic job being open and go - something as a mom with other littles can appreciate. However some of my son’s (and mine) favorite memories are with more of the hands on activities. That is where Little School of Smith’s curriculum always shines. This hybrid approach worked excellent and actually shifted our plans towards the end of the year, when the Sparks and Starts curricula moves onto some basic engineering principals. It inspired us to check out our local library for books on the topics and dig through some new YouTube channels to help find some engaging videos to build our our own supplementation for our second science day each week. 

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Social Studies

Social Studies continues to be an area that I struggle to find a great fit for our family long term. This year’s attempt was to utilized Gather Round’s Mini Study options to help mix up what we were learning about while also keeping it lower prep on myself to juggle the demands of pregnancy, postpartum and the newborn phases. With 2024 being an election year, starting in September, we began Gather Rounds’ U.S. Government Unit. This was a great twenty unit course that worked great for us two days a week. We completed this heavily on the go - from home to the library to doctors office waiting rooms. I love the flexibility of the curriculum by age and can see rotating back around to it in four years but at different levels. In November we did the Gather Round Thanksgiving mini unit. This was our second time through it, and we loved it just as much as we did last year! Its a great mix of reading and activities which helped enrich not just our schoolroom but our family’s focus on gratitude for the entire month of November! 

While I had planned to move onto additional Gather Round unit studies, after the new year, we needed a change to our social studies curriculum. We needed something that put some fresh spark into our homeschool. With the new demands of a newborn and a toddler, we opted instead for a read aloud from the “What Was” series. I allowed my child to pick out topics that he found most interesting to read through. This was just the change we needed to give us a little less formal schedule into our day and bring back a little bit more joy into learning what we find most interesting! 

We wrapped the school year of social studies with the Easter Gather Round Mini Unit. This was our second time through this course and we both took away new things this year. It was a great addition to our Lenten season traditions and also helped balance hands on activities with sit down work. 

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End of School Year Review

This year when we finished up with all of our subjects, we still had a good chunk of our handwriting book left and about two months before local schools were finished. Due to our new family addition, we didn’t get to our planned unit study in December of Christmas Around the World, so instead we opted to do an Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Geography Book (Grade 1) during this time period. We did roughly a unit a day and were able to condense the work into three weeks. Following the Math assessment, we realized that while coin counting was at the level they expected, for our family we wanted some additional practice so that it could feel a bit more effortless. We added in a quick “Counting Coins” book from Amazon to help build this confidence. This was the perfect way to keep up a little mental stimulation while getting a refresh from our typical workbooks. This would also be a great combination to do over the summer as well!

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Stay tuned for a blog of my favorite educational iPad apps that help reinforce these concepts in a fun way!