Starting next month, this will be our 2nd year officially homeschooling. Last fall Sage would have started Kindergarten, and Mallie pre-K. I spent a ton of time trying to find something that would work for both of them, making it fun for them to work together, and a lot easier for me. After looking..what felt like forever I found something perfect for us and we will keep using a lot of it this year! When you first start looking at homeschooling things it is very overwhelming. So many choices. I requested a catalog to look though to get ideas from a bigger homeschool company.... the catalog probably weighed as much as me. I didn't even attempt to look though it. I spent a lot of time in homeschool groups on facebook stalking posts and googling everything everyone said they were using, asking a million questions, (thank you for everyone that helped!) and pinterest, ok a lot on pinterest. Pinterest is kind of amazing for homeschoolers. There is a million ideas for teachers and homeschoolers for every topic you can think of. Just search the grade and you find billion ideas, unit studies, worksheets, projects..and most are free! What we ended up going with was Sassafras Science Zoology for our science unit. It is a chapter book that follows twins learning about science. The first one is all about animals and habitats. Each chapter talks about a new habitat they travel to on invisible zip lines. Each chapter is broken into 2 sections, talking about 2 animals each. Since the kids in the book travel the world to learn about all of this, I put a world map up and we use push pins and yarn to track them. Not only does it help teach animals, habitats, but if you add the map, map skills too! Its easy to add in cultures and what its like in all the different places to live. We matched it with a few animal books and the Wild Kratts TV show and the kids did amazing with it. If you need a little help on what to teach when, projects to go with it, books that pair with it, they have a great Teachers Guide. There is also a Log book to go with it. If your kid, like mine, are not ready to write themselves yet, *I* personally think it still works great. I would help them fill out the short parts, name of habitat, animal name..ect. However In the large box I would have them tell me the facts they want to add about each topic and fill it in for them, and let them draw pictures of what they now know about it. Since our Science unit covered so many topics there wasn't much more to work on. We really like Reading Eggs (and are still using it this year) to help with reading. Math Seeds is really fun for the kids too. We picked up a ton of workbooks from 5 below to work on handwriting and other little things. One of my favorite workbooks has been the BIG workbooks. I find the best prices on Amazon for them. It covers a bunch of topics and reviews them a few times throughout the book. Since my Step-Daughter, Zak, stays with us during the summer we break our school year up to follow her school years. We still go all year but the summer months are a lot more hands on learning, big focus on reading and a lot slower pace. This summer we continued on with the Sassafras Science and are now on book 2 Anatomy. (They are still traveling the world so a lot more push pins!) We also are sticking with the BIG workbooks and Sage and Mallie are working on their 1st Grade Workbook and Zak is working on her 2nd Grade Workbook. This fall we are starting "1st grade". Its tricky with what grade we are in. Mallie really should just be starting Kindergarten this fall but we just work where the kids are. Sage is doing some 2nd grade work already, and Mallie is still at Pre-K level and K for a lot of things. Shes also pretty far ahead for a few subjects too. Mostly we pick a grade just so we have an answer when people ask..
A little long, but that is our school year! This is a huge reason why most homeschool parents are a little the over top excited when they are finally done with planing the next school year, it is a good bit of work! Plus we are always looking into other ideas, either to go with what we are using or maybe switch. If you want please share what you are using to give everyone ideas!
*I linked a lot of the books myself to Amazon. If you use my link to buy anything I get a (very) small percentage that will help go towards our school needs! Thank you for considering it! <3
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AuthorTrina: Mom, Wife, Person. Archives
August 2017
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