Leslie thought that you might like to know what the kids are doing for school this year, so she's guest-writing this post! :)
We're starting our 5th year of homeschooling, and continuing to use Sonlight as our main curriculum. Elijah and Rebekah have finished 2 years of World History, so we're moving on to Part 1 of the 2-year Introduction to American History (called "Core 3"):
That's a lot of books, isn't it?!! I'm so glad that my kids are readers just like I am, so that I have good reason to keep buying loads of quality books! That picture represents Elijah's & Rebekah's History, Geography, Bible and Read-alouds, which they do together, and Elijah's Readers (they do their Language Arts & Math separately, on the level that best suits them).
When I bought the Core, I purchased the Grade 2 Regular Readers for Rebekah, but she read read read over the summer, and her skills have improved so much that she's already read all of the readers for the year! We get free shipping from Sonlight (by virture of having bought so much stuff from them!), so I went ahead & ordered the next level of Language Arts for her.
We're trying a few new things this year. Elijah is doing a writing course called Institute of Excellence in Writing, and I am VERY impressed. The course is on DVD, and the teacher uses great techniques to make writing interesting and fun for the student. Elijah is semi-enjoying it, and learning quickly how to become a good writer, so I am happy!
Another new thing we're doing with Elijah & Rebekah is a new Science book. In the past, we've used Sonlight's Science program, which comes with many books & activity sheets. The kids enjoyed it, but I wanted to use something more focused, so we decided to use Apologia's Elementary Science, and we chose Flying Creatures of the 5th Day and got a lab kit to go with it:
It's different from what we're used to, with Apologia being a textbook, but now that we've been doing school for a couple of weeks, we're getting into a good groove.
Joanna started Kindergarten this year! One of the virtues of homeschooling, though, is that we can school each child at his/her own pace, so we had actually started her Core earlier this year. She's using Core 4/5 "Exploring God's World" with her own K readers, and she really enjoys it. Here's what hers looks like:
This is her Social Studies, Science, Bible, Read-alouds & Readers. Here is her Language Arts:
plus a few optional workbooks (listed as optional in the I.G., but SHE doesn't know that!) She's doing really well with her reading. I think that it's a natural affinity, combined with all those hours of being read to, watching Leapfrog Word Factory DVDs, and playing on Starfall.com while I schooled the older kids!
All of our students use Math-U-See for their math. Elijah is in Delta (which he actually started at the end of our last school year):
Rebekah just started Beta:
And Joanna is using Primer (though she had picked up so much from listening to her older siblings & watching Leapfrog math videos that we started her at Lesson 9!):
When they start out with the Math-U-See program, they use these manipulatives to help them learn the concepts, though they are gradually weaned off of their use (or ditch them on their own!):
So we're off to a great start for our year, and it's only a matter of time before Rachel starts clamoring for school of her own, and I start pestering Mike to find out if there's room in the budget to purchase Core P3/4 for little ones: "Fiction, Fairy Tales & Fun for Little Learners", which I've been drooling over since they started offering it last spring!
Doesn't it look like fun?!!! :)