The rest of the plans…

Well, we’ve covered my two subjects that took the most planning. Today, I’m sharing the rest of the year!

Bible

For Bible this year, I’m hoping to do a survey of sorts of the entire Bible. My goal is to give the kids an idea of its message as an entire book instead of a lot of individual stories. So, here’s how I’m trying to accomplish that with a four and a half year old kindergartner and a soon-to-be-three preschooler. One of the things I’ve picked up for Bible this year is 50 Great Bible Stories audio CD, which tells the story of the Bible in an audio book format. I’m wanting to foster a little more independence and the feel of their own quiet time with God.

Together, we’ll go through What the Bible is All About for Young Explorers. With this book, we’ll be learning the books of the Bible within each category: the books of the law, the books of history, the books of poetry, etc. I figured that broke down the task of memorizing the books of the Bible into bite-sized pieces. Also, What the Bible is All About provides great outlines, synopses of each book, and the purposes of each book within God’s greater message of the Bible. We’ll cover all of that, but probably focus on memorizing a short summary of what each book is about, or a key verse from the book. I’ll make adjustments as we go along.

Critical Thinking

This is a subject we don’t want to neglect, as part of their classical education. I have it positioned in our day right before math, and I have a few different ways I’m wanting to teach it.

We’ll start out the year in the Building Thinking Skills and add in Lollipop Logic as the year progresses. BTS starts very simple with grouping similar objects and tracing a path between objects without touching their sides. Lollipop Logic progresses to organizing a process into the right order (building a tower, picking apples from a tree) and finishing analogies. I have my son doing three pages a week from these books. On the other days, we are going to play with our teddy bears.

With the teddy bears, we’ll work on finishing patterns and get into a little bit of graphing this year. The little one will follow our routine, doing her teddy bears (working on grouping colors and sizes) on the days Brother is doing his pages. On her workbook days, she’ll have a few pages of her own from these fun books.

Phonics and Numbers

My son will be working through the A Beka Kindergarten books for this subject and reading through the A Beka little readers, as well. I’ll adjust the pace as needed, but so far he’s  done great. I’ve started in the books this summer and skipped about 60 lessons of review work. He never missed a beat. My son is the child that stays motivated by a challenge. If I have him doing the same thing for too long, he gets very bored. With that said, I’ll probably cut some of the handwriting assignments. On some days he is assigned two manuscript pages and copywork! That’s okay to keep a classroom of kids busy, but I’ve got better busy-work planned than handwriting. And handwriting is one of those skills you can incorporate into so many other areas of study. So, all that to say, I make adjustments; I don’t follow A Beka “by the book.”

For the little one, she’ll be doing Erica’s Letter of the Week curriculum. I had her doing some of the activities last year: the coloring pages, puzzles, and motor skill activities. This year, I’ll have her doing it all. She is so excited! She has really been upset with me for not filling her pockets this summer. I’m thinking she’ll be very ready to do “school” with me this fall. I’ll also have lots of her “toddler” activities interspersed to keep her busy.

And that does it for curriculum this year! Our schedule, in summary, will be about 15 minutes per activity, or about two hours a day.

See what other’s are planning at the “not back to school” blog hop, and thanks for stopping by.