1st Grade - It's In the Books!

Our Baby Girl's 1st Grade year is IN THE BOOKS! 

Figuratively and literally - IN THE BOOKS! I guess we were kind of expecting that. We knew that 1st grade is just one year and we use a literature based method for homeschooling :) And what a success it has been!! Baby Girl loves to read, loves to hear a good story and has become even more passionate about animals this year, especially birds.

We continued following the Charlotte Mason method, mainly using Ambleside Online Year 1 as our guide. What exactly does that mean?  As with any curriculum, it is best to use it as a guide, standard, criterion and not as the end all to be all!!  A curriculum should be a servant to the user, not a slave driver :)  Throughout the school year, we tweak, adjust, add and subtract things that may or may not be working for us.

****Updated 7/29/2017**** Homeschool Helper is no longer available.****

The Homeschool Helper team is retired from app development.

When we started creating apps in 2011 as a husband and wife team, apps and the platforms were much simpler. Over the years, the complexity and pace of change with apps has been a struggle to keep up with. Quite frankly it has outpaced our technical abilities, therefore we have retired from app development.

Our newest addition was a homeschool planning app for the iPad called Homeschool Helper.  It's listed as one of the 10 Best Homeschooling Apps and I couldn't agree more! After spending an exorbitant amount (ok, maybe more than I normally do) on a much touted planner, I found out it did NOT work for us.  A friend of mine suggested the Homeschool Helper.  It is an inexpensive app (read - much less than the planner I had purchased), can be used with multiple students and has batch entry and gradebook tools!  MMBoy and Baby Girl also enjoyed keeping track of their own attendance and checking off their tasks each day. Oh, and the fact that it's a one time purchase means I don't need to go out looking for the "perfect planner" again this year.

Homeschool Helper

So, what did work for us this year?  Pretty much everything!! For those of you who have homeschooled boys and then have homeschooled girls, were you amazed by how differently they learn?? In Baby Girl's case, she has always been pretty much ready to go, excited to learn new things and has kept me on my toes by wanting more to do than the regular schedule.  We found this particularly true with the spacing out of many of the living books we used.  Ambleside Online has a great week by week schedule.  They have many book where only 1 chapter is read each week.  This was almost torture for Baby Girl.  I have found it helps to slow the learning process down some and allows for greater absorption and retention of the material.

Our 1st Grade Schedule:

Morning Time!!  I have previously mentioned and discussed Morning Time and how much it has added to our schooling and gotten us off to a great start each day.  We had a few minor tweaks for this year.

Monday

Prayer 

Bible - Devotional Books by Sally Michael

Memory Work - Verse (we continued working on these verses from Ann Voskamp) & Co-op Verse

Poetry - Children's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson/When We Were Young by A. A. Milne

Prepositions

Read Aloud - Shakespeare (We read through 3 different stories this year: The Winter's Tale, The Merchant of Venice, Othello)

Copywork

Tuesday

Prayer

Bible-Psalms & Proverbs

Memory Work - Verse and Co-op Verse

Math Time Sheets - Addition for Baby Girl, Multiplication; Division for MMBoy

Read Aloud - Life of Fred, Math series

Copywork

Thursday

Prayer

Bible -Devotional Books by Sally Michael

Memory Work - Verse and Co-op Verse

Poetry - Children's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson/When We Were Young by A. A. Milne

Parts of Speech (printables found here)

Read Aloud - Life of Fred, Language Arts series

Copywork

Friday

Prayer

Bible - Psalms & Proverbs

Memory Work - Verse and Co-op Verse

Read Aloud - Fiction

Copywork

I also broke down our daily routine by days of the week.  

Daily Tasks  

Math (Math-U-See Alpha) 

Reading, Writing, Spelling & Phonics (McRuffy Press 1st Grade Phonics Reading)

Copywork - Handwriting Without Tears (My Printing Book),

Here is what we added to each day:

Monday

Nature Study - Burgess Bird Book for Children by Thornton Burgess (1 chapter/bird each week with a bird coloring page to go with it)

Tuesday

Literature - Aesops Fables by Milo Winter (2 each week)

Science - Apologia Flying Creatures  Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures

History - (1 story each week) 50 Famous Stories by James Baldwin; Viking Tales by Jennie Hall; biographies by Ingri D'Aulaire:  Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Buffalo Bill (spaced each biography over 12 weeks).

Wednesday
Co-op

Thursday
Science - Apologia Flying Creatures 
Geography -Paddle to the Sea by Holling C. Holling (Every other week with occasional map work)
Literature- (I spaced these out each semester so we only did 1 each week, but some weeks we didn't do any);Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling,The Blue Fairy Book

Friday
Literature - James Herriot's Treasury for Children

We added in play time, free time, field trips, helping take care of an infant 1/week and she even started piano lessons.  It's been a great year and now we are off to enjoy summer!!

Rita