Planning for First Grade

It's been awhile since I've been on the blog here. Life has been happening and keeping me pretty busy. Blogging is just one of those things that has fallen on the backburner.

We are getting close to wrapping up our first homeschool year. It is so crazy to think that we have four weeks left of Classical Conversations (CC) and Claire is 9 lessons away from being finished with her math curriculum. We are closer to completing the Sonlight Kindergarten curriculum we've been using, too.

I've learned so much! This first year of homeschooling kindergarten has been an incredibly journey. It hasn't always been easy; but I can say with certainty that I believe my husband and I made the best decision for our family. It's not for the faint of heart that's for sure! And I will not deny that, in the beginning, many times I felt immense fear and especially discouraged. But God is so good! Following our Christmas vacation, Claire surprised me by being incredibly focused and excited about school. Perhaps our vacation was something we all desperately needed!

We have used Sonlight and the CC curriculum this year. While using Sonlight for Kindergarten has been fantastic for our first year, it has at times felt like just too much to do both. That being said, there is much to love about Sonlight . . .I did love how it was just open the book and GO! And the literature they recommend is what really drew me to their curriculum in the first place, but Classical Conversations is just a beautiful, rich curriculum. We have also thoroughly enjoyed our community days (although, there were some struggles with that, too, in the beginning). I am very impressed with all that we both are learning that I feel led to focus on CC for first grade and supplement with a separate Language Arts and Math program.

I've included below our plans for the 2016-2017 school year:

First Grade

Bible: We will use Egermeier's Bible Story Book that came with our Sonlight Kindergarten package again for first grade as well as Children's Cathechisms.

History/Geography: Classical Conversations Cycle 2 and Story of the World

Math: Horizons First Grade Math

Science: Classical Conversations Cycle 2 supplemented with books we own or that are available from the library on the subjects we will be learning about.

Language Arts: We will be trying First Language Lessons, All About Spelling, and reading review from The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. We also plan to use Sonlight's recommended reading list which includes a few titles we have already read; but will read again such as Charlotte's Web.

Fine Arts: Classical Conversations Cycle 2, as well as, violin lessons, attending concerts, visiting museums, and participating in art classes through a local co-cop.

This summer we will continue with math and reading. Specifically, we plan to use Life of Fred Math. We have been using the Life of Fred readers that I bought from educents.com, which both kids really enjoy. Claire and William will both do swimming lessons and Claire will have summer dance and art classes at the Joslyn to look forward to as well as plenty of time for play!