Curriculum 2011-2012

Welcome to the NOT back to school blog hop! If you are here from Heart of the Matter, welcome. I hope you stop and say hi!

I'm really excited about our upcoming 3rd grade year!  Raelee is at a whole new place in her learning style this year with her new found reading skills and better visual memory abilities.  Up until this point, I haven't tried much Grammar/Language Arts with her because she simply couldn't do it. I didn't know why until we got her diagnosis with her eyes. Now that we are attacking those problems head on, things are a lot different!  For her 1st and 2nd grade year, I was just trying to find my groove. Find what worked for us, and trying to get her to read fluently.  Reading and Math were my focus for those years. If we got nothing else done during our school day, Phonics and Math were done. Everything else took the back burner. I was not ok with that then, but now I know I was doing what was right for her.

This year, our focus is going to be on Language Arts (grammar, spelling, writing, etc). She is ready for it. She asks me to teach her how to write a better sentence. She asks me to teach her how to spell better. The kid writes books. Every day, she writes a chapter in a book. It is fun to see her progression through them.  She longs to be more 'understandable' with her words and how she presents them.  Well, there you have it...Language Arts it is!

Of course, we'll still get all of the other subjects in too...but I went heavy on the LA curriculum this year.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with my freshly sharpened pencils, my fresh planning book, my stack of curriculum and my computer. My friend Kellie and I like to plan 'together' online. I helps us to bounce ideas and schedules off of each other. I look forward to when we are both in planning mode. It took me hours and hours over the course of several days to come up with a 4 week schedule and now I think I have to re-do it. I made our short day a Thursday when I need it to be a Monday. *sigh*

I won't show you what the erasers look like! I had to get new pencils twice b/c I used the entire eraser!

Here is my official plan:

For Grammar, we will be doing Growing With Grammar 3. I'm encouraged by this curriculum. I have looked through it a lot and think it'll be a good fit for us. It's not too fast paced. It doesn't assume you have already had 2 years of grammar, but it also doesn't start from the ground up. It's just about right were Raelee is in relation to her Grammar knowledge.

Writing...I struggled with this one. In the past, I have tried Write Shop and while it's laid out very well, it just wasn't for us. Maybe it was where she was at with her writing, maybe it was my frame of mind, I don't know. I just never looked forward to teaching it. It was way too fru fru for my taste.  I was digging around on the Growing with Grammar website and saw that they just released a writing program. I looked at it and decided we would try that one. I decided to order Winning With Writing. It starts off a bit slower than I would like, but it really needs to set up what a good sentence is. I think it'll be a good fit for us too. By the second book, she will be writing biographies, letters, opinion letters, etc.

She also needs help with comprehension when listening to a story (this is also part of her eye problem. Visual memory is required here and her's was at a 4 year old level in February). Learning how to listen to a story and recall information is an important thing to know.  I decided to try Writing With Ease 2. It's simply listening to a passage and narrating it to me while I write it down. It has copywork (once a week) and narration, etc.  I think it'll help with her visual memory.

I think doing all 3 of those programs every day will take her about 15-20 minutes. It LOOKS like a lot, but it's not terrible.

Spelling. I am struggling with spelling.  We did All About Spelling 2 last year. It teaches phonics and spelling rules all at once. She did well for the 'tests' but never applied what she learned.  I think this year though..maybe things will be different? I think I will redo the whole level 2 book. AAS is recommended for kids with visual processing disorders anyway. I just need to stick with it and try it again.

She will be doing 1 sentence a day copywork from The Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales book for cursive practice. I already have it all printed out. :)

She will also get (outside of school..on her own time) a journal topic every day. This will help with her critical thinking skills.

On to other things now.  History. I have tried Story of the World 1 before. Most people start it in 1st grade. I have tried it then, it didn't work. It relies heavily on listening to a reading passages and then doing activities that go along with it. I'm going to try it again this year. I'm hoping for a better year with it.  We'll be using lots of outside books (she seems to get a lot out of a short library book) and activities too. I have high hopes for it this year.

Science will be REAL Science Odyssey Life. We have been doing this one for a while now and we are really loving it. You read a passage about what you are leaning about and it's followed by a project. I'm shooting for 2 lessons a week. I'm hoping to be on the Earth and Space one by the spring.

For math, we are using Horizons 3. We used it last year and were thrilled with it. I'm excited to be coming back to it this year. It looks tough, but I think she's up for it.

She is learning her times tables as we speak using Times Tales. If you have a child struggling with his/her times tables, I highly suggest this book. It helps them to form pictures in their heads with stories about that particular fact. Raelee has learned most of her facts this way in just one week. It works great!!!

She will be learning to type with Talking Fingers. This will also be on her own time (not school time). It's something she wanted to do so I'm letting her. She is learning one key at a time and I think that's the perfect pace for her.

I'm pretty proud of myself. I sat down and figured out my target number of days I wanted to fit in this year. I figured out how many days a month I need to homeschool her, etc. I am thinking that it'll take us 3 hours a day. I would like to get started by 9 which means waking Raelee by 7:30. I think we can do that. I HOPE we can do that. My problem in the past is that she sleeps till 9 or 9:30 then we don't get started till 10:30 or 11. My whole day is shot!

So that just about wraps up what we are doing this year.  If you have stuck with me this far, thank you!  I'm excited about this year and nervous all at the same time. It's a LOT of stuff to cover, but I think we are up for it!

Next Monday will be our homeschool room pictures! I did a MAJOR clean out last week.