It took us a while to settle back into school this year. We worked through a fair part of the summer, I did a ton of planning…and then I was all burnt out! We’ve settled in, made some adjustments, and have been working well for a while now. So – what are we using and why? Daisy is 6.5/first grade and Fungirl is 9/4th grade.
Language:
Daisy will be working through much of the Montessori mechanics sequence, using printable work from Sustainable Montessori and activities typed up from my albums. She’ll also be looking at some Reading Analysis work. We did a lot of grammar box work last year, but do have a couple of boxes to finish up later in the year.
Fungirl is going to be working with upper elementary sentence analysis materials from Alison’s Montessori. She’ll also be doing verb tense work from the Open Door Press Language Album.
A huge change this year involves adding in units from Core Knowledge. We started the year using Core Knowledge’s 3rd grade Ancient Rome unit for our history studies. I love that it makes our writing content based. We are currently trying out a first grade unit comparing and writing about fairy tales from different cultures and a fourth grade poetry unit. It’s going really well. I plan to use their 3rd grade Viking unit soon. I don’t know exactly where our writing and literature curriculum with go, but I do think Core Knowledge will be a big part of it.
Math:
Both girls will be continuing with a Montessori approach to mathematics. Fungirl will pick up where she left off – working through binomials, heading into squaring work, and we’ll see where she goes after that. I’d like to see her do some work with bases, but we’ll see. We have a variety of Math books from the Key to and Challenge Math series that we’ll be using for additional practice and problems solving work. Daisy will continue working through her operations, math facts, and problem solving. I picked up some Singapore Math Primary Additional Practice books from our school curriculum library. Both girls are using these books a few times per week, a few problems at a time for consistent review/practice.
In Geometry we will begin the year looking at measurement. Daisy will then move on to the study of polygons while Fungirl will look at area and perimeter of polygons.
Science:
We will continue to do weekly science work with our homeschool buddies. This year we are using Pandia Press’ RSO Life curriculum. I’m really excited because we also have a subscription to Science Matters. Science Matters contains video lessons for many of the elementary geography and science sequences, plus follow up experiments and follow up research options. Since I have charter school funds to spend this year, I sprung for the full option and had them send me the ready to go kit with all the experiment materials. We’re having fun supplementing our geography lessons and I love that the kids can mostly follow along by themselves.
We’ll skim through the Montessori First Great Lesson this year, but we will dive into animal stories work,the study of life and the tree of life after the Second Great Lesson. Along with our RSO Life curriculum we’ll be doing a lot of work in both the plant and animal kingdoms.
Social Sciences
We will continue to use Pandia Press’ History Quest curriculum for the sequence of our History study. However we’ll be slowing the pace down and doing unit studies at least on Ancient Rome and the Vikings. Our core content for those units will come from CoreKnowledge.org. I’d like to add another history unit, but I haven’t determined the topic yet. We always tie what we’re learning back to the fundamental needs charts and the history question charts.
I scored the full set of pin it maps (!!!!) from our school curriculum library. Daisy will be starting with the land and waterform map, working towards the world map. Fungirl requested starting with the map of Europe. I’d like her to move to North America afterwards, but she can pick.
We’ll also be looking at the interdependence of humans lessons and the series of lessons on either the rains, the winds, or maybe both.
This year I’ve laid out more of a path for us than last year. However within the topics I have a lot of space to work with the kids’ preferences and specific rabbit holes.