2010-2011 Curriculum Choices

Oh July, when a homeschooling Mom’s heart starts to flutter with anticipation of the new school year!!  The choices are made (you hope), products are ordered (you hope) and the packages have started to arrive (dear God PLEASE let the packages arrive on time)!  The poor UPS guy should be met with a plate of warm cookies with each delivery.  

Lindsey will be moving into K-5 with Abeka this year.  We’re using the K-5 phonics, writing (cursive) and math product line.  This is what I used with Olivia and had wonderful results, so I’m sticking with what works!  And well, I already have all the parent/teacher portions of the curriculum.

Olivia is moving into 2nd grade.  I’ve changed everything for her this year, with the exception of math.  We’re sticking with Abeka 2 Mathematics.  Olivia has done really well with this program, and even though it’s accelerated, she enjoys it a great deal.

Language Arts is where all the big changes landed.   After reviewing All About Spelling this past year, I decided to use this as our spelling curriculum.  We’ll be speeding through Level 1 and then start Level 2 as soon as possible.   We’ll be working through First Language Lessons and Writing With Ease to round out our language arts program.

Now comes the fun part.  The things we’ll be working on together.  Lindsey is a VERY bright child for her age (heck, she’s brighter than a lot of adults I know).  So even though she’s in kindergarten, I think she can keep up with Olivia in these areas, although I’ll need to help her with some of the reading and writing until her skill level and speed improve.

We’ll continue to plug along with Cantering the Country for our geography/history study.   However, I’m going to try to move a lot faster this year, but we all know how that goes.  We’ll also be adding some unit studies to this portion of our school year as we come across interesting people, places and historical facts.

We didn’t do a great deal of science last year.  This year we’ll be working through Considering God’s Creation.  I already have some really fun projects lined up as we move through the curriculum and create our notebooks.

I’m still determined to work on Latin.   Olivia did well with it last year, but then we got too busy with all the extra things and I let it drop.  So this year we’ll be starting over with Song School Latin.

Both girls will continue in Awana this year and we’ll use that for the bulk of our Bible lessons.   Olivia will be in her 3rd year of Sparks and Lindsey will be starting her first year of Sparks

Finally, we’re going to spend time learning more about artists, and doing more art projects.  So I’m pulling out Discovering Great Artists for a guideline for us.

Now that I know what we’re using, I just have to figure out which subjects we’re doing on which days.  On to the planner!

In the mean time, head over to the Weekly Wrap Up Curriculum Edition.