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UPDATE DECEMBER 1, 2009:
We’ve finished up our first Term, and are on winter break for a month!  I’ll be spending the month of December organizing our home, school, and life.  We plan on taking some field trips, creating some Christmas gifts (and baking, lots of baking!) in preparation for the Christmas season.  Below is our curriculum, with the items we have completed crossed off the list.

In our family history, we did stop homeschooling for a time. It is a long, complicated story. If you want to read the article I wrote about it, click here:
A Fox in the Henhouse: A First-Hand View of Parent Partnership Programs.

OUR SCHOOL CALENDAR

    1st Term: September-November
    2nd Term: January-March
    3rd Term: May-July
OUR CURRICULUM THROUGH JULY 2010
MATH
Math U See for the elementary grades. D1 is continuing Gamma level and D2 is working through Beta. We also bought a 3 year subscription to The Quarter Mile Math drill program. The boys love it!  We upgraded the computers to Windows 7 and had an issue with QMM… hoping it was just a glitch. I need to check it so they can play on there while they’re on break.

HANDWRITING
Handwriting Without Tears for my boys. We are all enjoying this. D1 is doing Cursive and D2 just completed Letters and Numbers for Me.  I need to order the next book for him!

PHONICS, SPELLING, & GRAMMAR
My favorite is and always has been Wanda Sanseri’s materials. I appreciate the way her method teaches phonics through spelling, and vice versa. One topic to cover which teaches phonics, reading and spelling, which I love! I own (and still use) the original Teaching Reading at Home and The WISE Guide for Spelling. Yes, one of these days I will buy Spell to Write and Read, as Mrs. Sanseri herself told me it is definitely worth the upgrade.

spellingcitylogoThe boys use Spelling City.com to practice their spelling two days a week, and they take their spelling tests on it on Fridays. If you register for a Teacher’s account, you can enter all of your spelling lists and save them, to be used as needed. You can also print handwriting worksheets from the spelling lists. I LOVE this resource, because they can work on their words without interference from me, they are retaining them, AND they really like the games too!  We have had issues with the tests, however.  When they complete a test and hit “Check Me” sometimes it bounces them out and they lose their test. I have to make sure I check their test before they hit the button.  :-\

GRAMMAR: Shurley English 2. We are working through the jingles and sentences orally, using a white board. They boys have memorized most of the jingles by now and can work through the sentence classifying. We do this two days per week.

LITERATURE, HISTORY, BIOGRAPHIES & GEOGRAPHY as well as NATURAL SCIENCES
An Old Fashioned Education, Level 3. We will follow the majority of this curriculum plan. We are altering it a bit, to fit the different periods of Ancient World History into our 3 Terms.  Book titles in bold type may be downloaded for free by clicking the title!

BIBLE: A Child’s Story of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut. This is my favorite Bible story book for kids. We have used it for many, many years. We also use the Scripture Memory System by Simply Charlotte Mason.  The boys LOVE to do the memory work, and are very good at learning verses! 
LITERATURE:

HISTORY & BIOGRAPHIES:

GEOGRAPHY: Home Geography for Primary Grades by C.C. Long

NATURAL SCIENCE:

In addition, I am loving notebook pages from The Notebooking Nook and Notebooking Pages.com. We use them for every subject. No matter what we are studying, they have a notebooking set that fits!

mommasig2