What curriculum will we use for 2013-2014?

We will be schooling 4 days per week, with the fifth day a nature study, hiking, big art or science activity kind of day.  I've been blessed and found a lot of our curriculum used and am looking forward to a fresh start.


J-jo - PK4

I wanted a little more guidance for J-jo, especially in the hands-on activities department so I will be getting some help from Heart of Dakota's Little Hearts for His Glory.  I am very excited to be trying this curriculum, which I only just discovered a short while ago.  It is an all-inclusive kind of curriculum (meaning it teaches all the subjects) and J-jo's skill sets fall right into the Kindergarten level.

Math - Singapore, Miquon, and Mathematical Reasoning , activities from Heart of Dakota Little Hearts for His Glory

Reading - continue with building fluency.

History and Science will come from the Little Hearts for His Glory curriculum.


Bear - 1st grade

Heart of Dakota just looks so good.  It just looks like a better fit for us than Sonlight. Visually, I love the boxes and the daily plans (as opposed to weekly).   I really want something already planned out for me this year as I am suffering from burn out and insomnia and just feel really tired. I wanted to try it for a year for Bear.  We'll continue to do our own thing for math and language arts (see below) and we will still read Story of the World at bedtime, but for our main meat of the day, we will use Bigger Hearts for His Glory.  I found the teacher's manual used with the core history books and the rest of the books are easily found at the library.  It makes it much less expensive than Sonlight.  Plus, I think Bear will love the daily science (she's been asking for science and art) and the art activities planned into each week.

Math - Singapore Math and some Miquon to shake things up when she's tired of Singapore.

Spelling  - All About Spelling level 6 and 7 (we will probably start 6 in the summer)

Writing - Writing with Ease Level 2 and PAL writing the third part of the curriculum in which they learn to do key word outlines.  We started PAL this year but are averaging one lesson every two to three weeks so we will continue it in the fall, with the plan to move on to the other levels of IEW when Bear is in 2nd grade.

Reading - we are going to try DITHOR (Drawn into the Heart of Reading) from Heart of Dakota.  Bear will be reading whatever she wants all the time, but I wanted to direct some of the reading in a more "schoolish" sense. She just reads non-stop.  Perhaps this will slow her down a bit and make her digest those books she reads.

Grammar - First Language Lessons 3 .  We will need to finish this up and then we will do MCT Grammar Island, which we have started but will go into fully once FLL 3 is done.  I think we will decrease the amount of grammar we do anyway as Bear is so far ahead in grammar.  We currently do grammar every day and we will probably do it 2 times a week next year (which may make the rest of FLL 3 last the entire year).

History - Story of the World 3 and 4 without activities; only narrations and map work.

Fifth Day Science - Apologia Swimming Creatures (per Bear's request) and Real Science 4 Kids Physics (which we will be doing with a friend, meeting up for the experiments).

Things may change and I may have to tweak things, but this is the plan as of right now.