Curriculum 2013/2014

Like I said in one of my previous posts, picking a curriculum is HARD!  I would never have imagined there would be so many choices to choose from.  You can really drive yourself crazy trying to figure out which one to use, Trust me I know!!  With much prayer and the help of the spirit I believe I was guided to the curriculum that would work best for us.  Every time I would close the web page and start looking at other curricula, I would always end up back at My Father's world's web page and the feeling I got was that this was the right choice for us and that was enough for me to commit.

Here is our curriculum breakdown.
My Father's World (MFW)

Batman
Adventures in U.S. History by MFW

My daily learning notebook from Confessions of a homeschooler
Bible: MFW (Modified to Kings James Version)
Spelling: Rod and Staff  Spelling by Sound and Structure
English: Primary Language lessons
History/Geography: MFW
Science: MFW
Math: Singapore Math-Primary Mathematics 1B and 2A with Intensive Practice and Math Sprints
Reading: Library books
Art and Music: MFW
Health: Rod and Staff-Proper manners and health habits
Spanish: Rosetta Stone
Typing: Typing Instructor for kids 5
Read Aloud: Read by Mom

Tinkerbell
Learning God's Story-complete First Grade Curriculum by MFW

My daily learning notebook from Confessions of a homeschooler
Bible: MFW (Modified to Kings James Version)
Reading/L.A.: MFW
Math/Geometry: MFW and Complete book of math
Reading review: Library books
History/Geography:  Adventures with Cameron
Science: Adventures with Cameron
Art and Music: Adventures with Cameron
Health: Rod and Staff-Proper manners and health habits 
Spanish: Rosetta Stone
Typing: Typing Instructor for kids 5
Read Aloud: Read by Mom

We were doing "Handwriting Without Tears" but there is a lot of writing already in our curriculum so I decided to take it out.  We tried "Song School Spanish" but decided it wasn't really working out and switched to Rosetta Stone.

Getting settled and our school room

After three months of moving around I am very happy to be getting settled into our new home. A great thing about our new home is that we are able to have a school room instead of having to do school in my son's room.  I always felt bad for him because I would never let him play in his room because I was too afraid they would mess with the school stuff.  We no longer have to worry about that problem.

                                                                  

Our school room last year

Our school room this year.  Loving that the kids have their own desks.

 

We started workboxes this year and we are loving them!

All our supplies

Each of the kids have shutters to hang pictures.  The string is our timeline for this year.

We are still using our behavior chart and it works great.  We also have the school rules up, our Hand writing without tears chart and my first calendar.

New Beginnings

The kid and I have been on the move since the beginning of May thus the reason for not really blogging much.  We have gone from Florida to Colorado to Utah to Idaho then to Washington and back down to Utah and then back up to Idaho and back to Utah again.  Makes me tired just writing it.  Our final destination is Nebraska and we will hopefully be there by the end of the month.   I'm sure you're wondering why we would do all that crazy driving. Well, my husband is in the Air Force and we sold our house a lot faster then we thought was possible so we went on a road trip to visit family from the time we sold our house to the time my husband could leave.  It has been fun but I am ready to have my own home again and to start our new school year in our new home.

Since we are starting our 2nd year homeschooling I thought it would be fun to name our school.  With the help of my amazing sister-in-law, we were able to make a logo with our new school name:  Goldennrod Academy.  Goldenrod is the state flower of Nebraka.  We are excited about our new name and plan on getting embroidered T-shirts for field trips and bags for library books.

Scripture Study

We try to do our Scripture study nightly as a family. We use a program called Gospel Principles Study Guide for Young Children.

Here is the link.
http://www.schoolofabraham.com/html/gospelprinciples.htm#Lesson 1: Our Father in Heaven. 

The kids have loved this program.  They love the songs and the pictures. They also learn to memorize the articles of faith as well as other scriptures.  We have the articles of faith on the wall as well as a little booklet I made them. 

Here is the link for the printable articles of faith.
 http://images.search.yahoo.com/r/_ylt=A0PDoQ2vK2RRExUAivyjzbkF;_ylu=X3oDMTBtdXBkbHJyBHNlYwNmcC1hdHRyaWIEc2xrA3J1cmw-/SIG=12rbp0i4c/EXP=1365548079/**http%3a//www.simplyfreshdesigns.com/2010/10/lds-prints-articles-of-faith/

 

Do you really need another reason??

Do you really need another reason why I love homeschooling?  Probably not but I'm going to give you one anyways. :-)  Field Trips!!  

How can you not love being able to take your kids to museums, an aquarium or a fire station whenever you want.  This year, so far, we have gone to all three.

Atlanta Aquarium

This was an unplanned trip but my kids have always loved ocean animals.

 

 

  

 

Fire station

The firemen were very nice and let the kids climb in the truck and wear their jackets.  Batman would just shout out all the answers to the fireman's questions. It was alot of fun!

 

Wonderworks

This was a field trip scheduled by Florida Virtual school.  I'm so glad we went. I think I had more fun than the kids. If you have never been, I highly recommend it.

Curriculum

I never realized how much homeschool curriculum is out there. Talk about overwhelming. When we first started homeschooling we were using a program called time 4 learning. It is a computer based program so most of the work was online and then we would need library books to complete the lesson. Most of the time the library wouldn't have the library books I needed so I felt the program was really lacking for what I wanted for the kids. So then starts the massive search of all the programs and what we want to use. Considering we were already half way through the year I didn't feel good about buying a whole curriculum so I started looking at Florida virtual school. This is the curriculum we are using right now and let's just say we will not be using it again. It is a very complete program but I hate having to follow another persons schedule and I would honesty like to do school all year long and be able to take breaks as needed through out the year.  So once again I have to start the search of curriculums. Thank goodness we have the internet and I  can do tons of research and see many reviews of all the programs.  there is a homeschool convention in April that I am going to so I can check out all the curriculum.  I am really leaning towards one called My Fathers World but we will see how I feel after the convention.

Recess

Did you know in 2nd grade here they are no longer given recess, they have quiet indoor time.  Batman would always come home and say "mom they never let me get my energy out".  I truly feel this was one reason he had such a hard time in school.  Needless to say, we don't have that problem at home.  We can take a recess whenever we need.  We have been having alot of rain lately so for "recess" the kids wanted to play in the water.  They had a blast!!

Rules

Because every classroom needs some good rules.  If the rules are not followed they have to write sentences.  They hate writing sentences, so lets just say they don't have to do it very often.  My favorite is #9.

Strides of Improvement

 As I said in the previous post, while Batman was in public school the teacher was having a girl in class dictate for him.  Due to the lack of strength in his hands he would get very frustrated with writing.  In general, he had a hard time remembering how to form letters correctly.  He has been doing lots of practice with writing his words correctly and neatly.  I never thought I would see his handwriting this neat.  Because of how he wrote this poem, he was so proud of himself and I was so proud of him for trying so hard today.

 

Why we started homeschooling

To really understand why we started homeschooling, I'm going to have to take you back to when Batman was in 1st grade in the public school system.  He started the school year out well, but about a month into it, the teacher came to us and recommended we take him to the doctor to talk about controlling what she suspected was ADHD.  So like any "good" parent we took him to the doctor and had him evaluated.  He was diagnosed with ADHD, and trying to do the best for our child, we followed the doctor's recommendations and put him on Concerta, a form of Ritalin.

The first time I gave him that pill I cried like a baby, I didn't want my child to be drugged. The first couple days were really hard as he started having anxiety over things he never had before and as time went on things didn't get any better. He stopped eating, sleeping, growing, and his anger was getting out of control. Our house was turning into a war zone, but he was doing better at school. There were still some areas of concern stemming from trying all school year to get him help but the administration continually refused to help him because he wasn't failing.  After about 8 months, at the end of the school year, we finally decided to take him off the drugs because of the increased anger issues he was displaying. Once we took him off the drugs it didn't take long for me to get my sweet, albeit hyper little boy back.  I loved it!!  I told my husband that I would never put him back on any form of Ritalin again because it turned him into someone so fundamentally un-Batman.  We had a fun summer, and maybe this is just being used to his craziness, but I really enjoyed having my child back to his normal self. 

Then 2nd grade started. We had already made the decision to not put Batman on medicine, and let's just say the school was not happy about that. After talking with his teacher many times, I got the feeling from her that the only way to help Batman was to put him back on some form of Ritalin.  I kept asking her how putting him on drugs was going to help the fact that, for some reason he didn't seem to know anything that was being taught.  He was getting straight Fs in all his classes except for PE and Music.  Surprise, Surprise!  We were spending at least 3-4 hours every night on homework and it just seemed to me that he didn't retain anything he had learned last year. His teacher was continually asking me if he knew how to read because he refused, for whatever reason, to read to her. The teacher also had asked a girl in his class to dictate for him because he would get very frustrated with the writing due the lack of strength in his hands; an impediment for which he was seeing an occupational therapist.  He was continually coming home calling himself an idiot, dumb and stupid; and when I would ask him where he was hearing those words he would tell me kids from school were calling him that.

I remember when we went to his school open house how sad I was to see that his desk had been pushed up all the way against the chalkboard away from everyone else, and when I looked through it, I saw all the broken pencils he had, (once he stabbed himself pretty bad) and feeling the sense of frustration he must have been feeling.  I told her that night that we were considering homeschooling him and she said she thought that would be the best for him because it would give him one on one attention.  We continued trying to get help for him and seeing if they could roll him back into first grade but they told us he would have to stay in second and struggle all year and then have to repeat if he didn't catch on.

Also during the year, one thing that made our decision easy to pull him out of school was that he was put on the wrong bus 3 times and each time we were told it was his fault and he should have known which bus he should have taken.  One of the times, he got home and a woman who picked up other children from the bus stop picked him up and took him home.  After she called the school to let them know of the dilema, the school called me and asked if it would be ok for him to just stay at this "stranger's" house.  That in particular was one of the most unnerving experiences we had.

As time went on, he was continually failing to bring home his homework and his teacher didn't seem to care.  We had him tested for learning disabilities and were told that he still wouldn't be able to get help even if he had some disabilities, and it would only serve for making the teacher aware.  With all these things considered, we decided it would be best to remove him from the public school environment and teach him at home where he would get the caring and attention he needed.