I know that just all of cyberspace is dying, just dying to know what The Boy is going to do next year in homeschool. Bwaa-haa-haa! Too bad! I'm going to tell you anyway!!
This year, The Boy worked his way through the 4th grade curriculum from the Calvert School in Baltimore. I liked using the Calvert School materials and lesson plans, because it gave me much-needed structure and scope, and because I could be reasonably sure that he’d learn “what a fourth grader should know”. While I was happy with the Calvert School homeschool curriculum, my overall impression of this year was “unremarkable”. Even my husband keeps saying that the year before was more fun.
The biggest problem with a soup-to-nuts curriculum is that (as you'd expect) everything is at the same grade level. I didn't like the Calvert math, but I could swap it out for Saxon. The spelling and grammar were way to easy, so I'd have to swap that out, too. He’s outgrowing the “survey of science” textbooks, and needs more in-depth studies. His writing skills are still a bit fractured, but coming along pretty well, using the Writing with Ease approach -- learn to understand what you read, learn to summarize what you read, learn to outline what you read, learn to write from an outline, learn to write your own outlines. I don’t think the “practice, practice, practice” approach to learning writing will work for another year.
This said, I’m not going back to Calvert next year. I appreciated how easy it was to use, but it’s not serving our purpose right now. Next year, I’m planning on mixing-and-matching.
His language arts will come from Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts: Caesar’s English, Music of the Hemispheres (poetry), Grammar Town, Practice Town (workbook). This is a “gifted” series for language arts, designed for children to love to roll in language.
We’ll continue with to Susan Wise Bauer’s Writing with Ease series, since it’s been so helpful in teaching him some organization and comprehension. I’m also learning how to teach a product named “Excellence in Writing”, which is similar, but more active.
I've bought a few literature guides for formal reading. One is for a Short Stories collected by Avi. Another is The Trojan Wars, by Olivia Coolidge. I don’t have a reading list for next year yet, but it will probably include How to Train your Dragon, Hank the Cowdog, and the Warrior series. I’ll be looking toward Harry Potter and The Hobbit as well. There are certainly plenty of reading lists out there.
Since the critical thinking work from Calvert was so helpful this year, I’ve bought one of the Critical Thinking Company’s books for him: Building Thinking Skills, Level 2 (grades 4-6). This series focuses on both visual and verbal critical thinking skills, such as analogies, Venn diagrams, opposites, relationships, exceptions to the rule, etc.
He’ll be using Life of Fred – Fractions by Stanley F. Schmidt for his math. Now that he has mastered arithmetic, it’s time to play with mathematics. This densely-packed story of a five-year-old college professor teaches fractions without all the repetitiveness that bugs The Boy so much. Review is built into each lesson. This series continues on through Calculus, but I’ve only bought this one, to see if he likes it.
He’ll be starting a weather and climate unit study from a company named Moving Beyond the Page. The instruction is from their own book Weather and Climate - A Student Directed Science Unit by Katie Durgin-Bruce. The source material is in Weather by Brian Cosgrove, and I’ve bought their Weather and Climate Kit to use in the labs. The series continues with geography, and geology, but I’ve only bought the Weather and Climate, to see if he likes it.
We finished our study of regions of the United States this year with Calvert, and I think we’ll head back to ancient history for a while. Year before last, we covered prehistory through the fall of the Minoans. We had started ancient Greece, but lost traction. We’ll head back into The Story of the World, Ancient Times by Susan Wise Bauer, picking up where we left off. I think we may fold in D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, just for fun. If we lose traction again, I may switch to the American history series History of US by Joy Hakim, which has study guides as well.
I’ll probably continue with his handwriting work. I’ll also try to find him some art and music activities, since he really does seem to enjoy it.
See? You're still reading. Now, was that so bad? ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment