Checking in On Our Curriculum

This school year I am juggling 8 students with a 3 and 1 year old keeping life interesting. One of my students is just a Kindergartener, which at my house is a very relaxed introduction to school. Between the kids we are using several different curricula. Today I'm sharing my thoughts on some of them. I will sort these by subject area.

Handwriting 

Handwriting Without Tears - Mason and Samuel both have used the chalkboard for practice and Samuel worked in the Letters and Numbers for Me book. Mason did that book last year. I really love the chalkboards and writing cues this uses when teaching kids to write letters. I wish it started with lowercase letters I understand why it doesn't, but kids see and use lowercase letters so much more in day to day reading and writing. This curriculum was essential for Mason's Kindergarten year. His fine motor skills lag behind as a side effect of several things related to his medical issues. Last year he couldn't draw a line, much less a curve, circle, or slanted line. HWT made fine motor practice fun with the wet-dry-try method on the chalkboards. By the end of the year he was ready to do more traditional handwriting on paper.

The Good and the Beautiful Handwriting - Mason, Caleb, Oliver, Daniel, and Joseph use or used these. My feelings on these are mixed. I love that the PDFs are easy to print out for my large family. Some I got free when they were released and a few I picked up on sale. I can just give each child a stack to work through. The kids appreciate that most pages also have a picture to color or area to draw. I feel like the overall pacing is weird. They spend a very long time on individual letters instead of moving quickly to writing short words, so my elementary kids got bored. A little cursive is randomly introduced in 3. Half the cursive alphabet is introduced slowly in Book 4 while continuing to practice a lot of print writing. In Book 5 you learn the second half of the cursive alphabet in the first two pages, which feels too fast. Mason switched to Draw Write Now for second semester and Joseph dropped handwriting all together, as he was content with the improvement he had made. The other boys chose to stick with this handwriting for now.

Draw Write Now - I love this series of non-consumable books. Each two-page spread teaches you to draw something with clearly illustrated steps, as well as showing a completed and colored picture with four lines of copywork. It works well after kids have learned to form print letters. For Mason we break it up over the week. On day 1 he draws the picture. The rest of the week has him writing 1 sentence of the copywork per day. Some of my older kids have already used this and done most of the 8 book series.

Math

Math U See - I love Math U See! This year Mason, Caleb, Oliver, and Daniel are using the following levels: Alpha, Beta, Delta, Zeta. The manipulatives work well, the teacher manual and dvd are there if I need them, and each week's pages in the workbook include pages focused on the new concept (3 pages) and pages of mixed review (3 pages) as well as an application page with different ways to use math concepts (1 page). Joseph and Emma took a break from MUS this year to allow them to wait one more year before doing Algebra 1. I wanted their basic math and pre-algebra skills solid. Instead of repeating a MUS level they used CTC Math.

CTC Math - This is an online math subscription site. For one family fee I can have as many students as I wish use CTC Math. There are video lessons and the option of online questions to answer or worksheets to print and do, then transfer your answers to the computer. This year Makayla, Joseph, and Emma have tried it, and our experience has been mixed. Makayla and I have found some lessons in the upper level courses will not teach a concept that is essential to doing the worksheet. This was especially true in the Trigonometry course and the Algebra 2 course. We had to reach out to the company, have them track down a mathematician who understood the math level, and then wait for them to send an explanation (while also trying to find our own answers online elsewhere). It was frustrating. The company is also based in Australia, so they use some different wording/terms for math, such as indices instead of exponents. While my kids adjusted, I think this could be a drawback down the road when they are doing ACT or SAT testing and the Aussie wording is not used. The biggest positives for our family were that kids can do any level of material - age/grade does not matter, and that they could do math lessons independently. If they did not pass a set of questions they could re-watch the video lesson and try again. Then they were free to get me for help if it was still needed. We probably will not use CTC Math again.

Science

Apologia's Exploring Creation with Physical Science by Jay Wile - Joseph and Emma are using this, and Makayla used it in middle school years ago. Overall, I like Apologia science. In middle school I like to have my kids make the transition from a more relaxed science exploration to this textbook and lab series. It is a learning experience working through a textbook, taking notes, studying, keeping a lab notebook, and learning how to set up and perform science experiments formally. The kids always find the textbook a bit dry and challenging with the depth of information and application questions in the beginning, but find their footing as the first year goes on.

Discovering Design with Chemistry by Jay Wile - Makayla is using this book. While we love Apologia, when Jay Wile, the author of many of their upper level textbooks, moved to a different publishing company they chose to have someone else rewrite a new edition of the chemistry book. We chose to follow the original author to the new publisher, where he published an updated chemistry book, Discovering Design with Chemistry. It is just as high quality as his other textbooks, with clear explanations and great labs.

The Good and the Beautiful Science Units - I actually don't have much to say about this yet, but I am about to begin some of these units with my 5th grade and under crew for the rest of the school year. Up first is Kingdoms and Classification, followed by Marine Biology. I will update more later.

History

The Good and the Beautiful History 1 - All of my children except Makayla used this together. We chose to do history more often to finish the entire year's work early, and finished this week. In this curriculum the teacher's manual has things for me to read aloud, audio tracks we can listen to for some lessons, printables for some activities like a room to room walk exploring battles of the American Revolution, an illustrated story book for some lessons, hands on craft or activity suggestions, chapter book read aloud suggestions, a card game, and student explorer notebook pages for four different grade ranges that also include more reading material for upper grades built in.

Overall, we have loved it! The day to day lessons vary on what pieces are used so each day of a week is just a little bit different. TGTB decided to create a history curriculum that goes from Creation to modern times each year and will ultimately be History 1 through 4 (1, 2, and 3 are available currently). The idea of covering the full span of history is that you stop off in different times and meet different people and events in each year, but get the continuity of the big picture span.

If I was using this with a high school student I might want to assign some more research and independent reading on topics of interest, above the extras in the high school Student Explorer. I like personalizing their high school studies to reflect their interests, so that is something I would likely do with any curriculum.

The only thing I would like to see improved are the Student Explorers. The notebooking pages include coloring pages and maps to color even in upper levels sometimes, and do not include notebooking pages for every lesson. I would love to see them available for every lesson so we can pick and choose which ones to do. I also would like to see more writing prompts or essay ideas for the middle school and high school student explorers and no coloring pages or simple maps to color at those levels.

Language Arts

All About Reading - This is my favorite curriculum for teaching a child to read. I have four children at various levels right now. We don't use the letter tiles and rarely use the word cards. Instead we use the teacher's manual, activity pages, fluency pages, and readers. I put each lesson's activities and fluency pages into page protectors in a binder. The kids play the games and do the activities often, and they read. Ta Da. I love that it is reusable for all my kids, it is sequential, fun, and thorough.

The Good and the Beautiful Language Arts - This is our first year with TGTB and I choose to use it for kids who are already proficient readers. We have not used younger levels. This year I have kids using level 4 (Daniel), 5 (Emma and Joseph), and High School 1 (Makayla). The language arts program contains a lot of subjects in one convenient course, including writing, reading, literature, grammar, geography, art appreciation and making art with drawing, pastels, and watercolors, spelling, editing, sentence diagramming, poetry memorization, and vocabulary. The high school level also includes Greek and Latin roots. It is also fairly independent from level 4 on up, with kids needing me for short sections of their daily work and for help if they have questions. The courses are very thorough at teaching the material and so I am more coach and encourager, as well as chief brainstorm buddy on writing assignments.

Each level is slightly different in its setup so kids have a bit of variety year to year from level 1-7. For a simple example spelling in level 4 has written practice, movement and spelling, and focuses on commonly misspelled words. In level 5 spelling is handled through sentence dictation exercises. Each page of sentences focuses on specific spelling, punctuation, and grammar rules and the child practices several sentences at a time until they can write them without mistakes when dictated aloud. Each level has a course book that is spiral bound. Four days a week the student does one lesson and it will include some mix of the many subjects I listed in the previous paragraph.

The high school level is set up a bit differently. The course is printed as 10 booklets and unscheduled. They leave the scheduling to the student. This is probably the only thing we haven't liked about it! We created a schedule for each booklet and printed it so Makayla knew what to work on each day.

The kids like this and we will use it again next year.

That's all I have time to share for now. If you have a specific question about how I teach or what I use to teach my children something be sure to ask in a comment!