Today’s blog will be a short one as I have had some lengthy ones and have more coming. Per the title, we are covering our history topics!
Our main curriculum will be Curiosity Chronicles, Medieval. This non-eurocentric comprehensive curriculum has been awesome! We are wrapping up ancient history and just love the audio and ebook and the activities are engaging and fun, but not taking so much prep from me. We pair it with the Schoolnest History Timeline notebook. You can see it all here!
We will also spend lots of time exploring Africa with books, videos and cultural digging! It baffles me how the stereotype of this vast continent continues to prevail.
Lastly, my little fact-spitter will love just learning random geography facts, so he can do that too!
That’s it! You can find the links to everything here.
I know Yesterday was a lot so I am going to keep it simple today. I promise. Well, my definition of simple.
For Bible, in addition to Awana and our church lessons, we will continue with resources from Color and kindness, devotional and prayer books, the bible, worship and serving.
Foreign Language was a bit tricky! We had a wonderful experience with our hybrid program this year but unfortunately, the instructor will be at our other location full-time. While I am trying to convince her to start a language immersion playgroup, I am going to do what I can with podcasts, vocabulary units, verbs and activity books.
Morning Starters went ahhhhhhmazing this year and we are all thrilled to continue. As you read when I shared our language arts picks, we are working with Jude, God and a host of specialists to identify and then meet his unique learning needs. With that, his morning starters will be an emotions coloring and activity book, sight word activities and hand writing practice.
James will loop geography, daily grams, test practice, writing and critical thinking workbooks.
Both will also have a journal. You can watch me explain it all here.
Boom! Told you I would keep it simple. You can find all the links here.
Let me preface this with, “we are eclectic homeschoolers”. We don’t use just one thing to teach one subject. Language arts is not the exception, it is the rule. It was very important for me to begin to expose James to the foundations of literature and to allow him space to apply literacy, grammar and comprehension concepts to literary works. I also really wanted to work on his creative writing muscles. Lastly, I wanted to formally introduce vocabulary this year. Whew!
Now that we got that out of the way, here is what we are using. I do suggest heading over to youtube to listen to how I plan on making all of this work.
Read Aloud for Literature Exploration: Black Boy Joy, 17 Stories Celebrating Black Boyhood
Reading: All About Reading, Level 4
Spelling: All About Reading, Level 2
Grammar: Kamali Academy, middle grades
Handwriting: Melanin Inspirations Cursive Practice
Creative Writing: LWT Building Writer, Usborne Books, Young and Brilliant Workbook
Vocabulary: Young and Brilliant Vocabulary Puzzles, Banish Boring Words, Word Roots Beginner, Schoolnest Vocabulary Notebook. I know that was a lot. You can see all the items here. You can read what we are doing for Jude here.
We are rolling full-steam ahead in sharing what our homeschool will use for learning for the 22-23 academic year. You can check out our math picks here if you missed them. Today is all about Science.
To be clear, I’ve never once been excited about this subject. I am so excited to share that I am for this upcoming year. Part of it was finding our stride and identifying my kids interests, another part was realizing and healing part of my traditional school trauma and another part was finding resources!
Y’all I am stoked!!! Better than that, my kids are stoked!
As we are wrapping up what we planned for this year, I asked my kids what it is they wanted to explore and having a solid grip on their interest and capabilities, I began the hunt. Jude was easy. He likes nature, rocks and robots. Sold! I’ll go hard with exploring nature with children, supplementing with other books and things he will learn at our hybrid homeschool program. We will also delve into some earth science folder games and do all the things with rocks. All of them. We recently decided to throw in some weather robots units too!
James was a bit more tricky. He was quite a bit more detailed about what he wanted to explore (muscle movement, animal life, propulsion, distance) and adamant about the things he did not (the human body systems). Great. Just great. Thanks To Erica at Melanated and Well Educated, I was introduced to Science Fusion and grabbed grade 5 and 2 grade 6-8 books. Those will be our spine and we will use other library books, videos and activities to round it out to fulfill his heart’s desires. You can get all the links for these items here.
Can we just take a minute to acknowledge how fast this year has just flown by? I mean, wasn’t I sharing curriculum picks like two weeks ago for the 21-22 school year?
Le sigh… time flies when you are having fun! That’s what we did this year and I am anticipating lots of fun for this upcoming year as well!
I won’t bore you with all the deets as this will be a series of blogs. I value your time and attention span. Today’s subject? You guessed it! Math!
True story, this was the easiest subject for me to choose. Per what we used last year, I added a few things to our math manipulative stash and quickly decided on Saxon Math 3 and Singapore Math 3 as James’ main loop and we will throw in Horizon’s math grade 2 as a review and confidence boost. Saxon and Singapore worked so incredibly well this year and I feel like the math gains were significant but they weren’t painful for us.
For Jude, we will continue with Singapore math as well and I’ll bring out our faithful Math U See Primer from demme Learning. Jude’s math gains were great but the Demme learning provides a number sense foundation that is unmatched.
You can check out our math manipulatives here and all our curriculum picks here.
We made it! We are at the end of the 2021-2022 Curriculum Picks series. Thanks for rocking with me. Today is everything for our young second grader, James. Like Jude, James’ next year will most likely be 2nd Grade 2.0 and we are so fine with that. My kids did stellar with all 2020 threw at us and yet, we still may need another year solidifying things before hitting the hard stuff of third grade. We are also preparing James for his first year of testing in addition to a full day at our local homeschool program and gymnastics. Whew!
I also would like to kinda see how much James can handle and retain well. I feel like I am always reconciling his age with his intellectual and physical abilities; not wanting to either push too hard or limit him. I think him having his own science and history time with me will work out well as his love language is quality time.
Can you see it? We are almost at the end of this series and-don’t you fret- I’ve got some awesome things lined up to share with you!
This one will be quick. This is a run down of what we are using for Jude’s Kindergarten year. We chose this as well as designed his goals (blog post coming) knowing next year would not be first grade, it would be Kindergarten 2.0 and we are 3,000% ok with that.
2020 was a doozy, yes we made it but honestly, barely. We gained so much but I really feel like another year honing skills and growing will do us all good.
We are sliding into home of this curriculum picks series and with my two favorite subjects.
Honestly, in our home, they aren’t subjects, they are foundations and pillars. Legit the first two reasons why we started homeschool and keep at it. The Word of God and the illustrious and rich history of our people are the very thread and fibers of our home, our lifestyle, our choices, actions… This list could go on forever but what I am trying to convey is that these items aren’t check marks or tasks, we involve ourselves in them in various ways all throughout the day in different ways. Below I will share some focuses and resources for this year.
For Bible, we are slowly switching gears. In the past we’ve learned about those wonderful bible stories and the great miracles of God. We have also learned some bible verses and scripture passages. We will also review them via podcasts, stories and recitation. We will also continue to learn verses and scripture as I truly believe it is armor.
Here’s the things, 2020 taught me different ways to “do it all” well. One of the ways was continuing the lovely and missional lessons from our church’s Kids curriculum. Y’all, I am so thankful I can say that my church is AWESOME and frankly, if it is ok for them to spend 1.5 hours once a week learning during church, why can’t we continue that during the week? Am I right?
We will also learn about bible subjects such as, what God’s word says about fear, the beatitudes, the Names of God and The Armor God. We will explore mini units from awesome creators like Color and Kindness and BabyDevotions. Will will review daily devotions together. I am so excited for how we are growing as a family in Christ and can’t wait for more! You can find the bible resources we love here.
Black History, for us, is 365. Yes, sometimes we will have a focus. For example James really wants to learn more about Serena Williams and Barack Obama. I also want James to practice presentations from Books and writing short stories so I definitely see some biography presentations in our future.
My kids also love reading about Black History Figures and Events as bedtime stories or choose those books for individual reading time. They will choose books about certain figures to check out at the library. Our quest to absorb all we can about our history to improve our future is just innate. It is the culture of our home and learning and applying is not dependent on me teaching. For some great books to start with, click here.
