3rd Grade Homeschool Schedule and Curriculum

The rest of our school books arrived tonight! I was one happy lady! I love getting back into the swing of things and watching my kids continue to learn and grow. This year we're changing a few things up and adding new things in. Since we moved, we have decided to not do Classical Conversations this year due to the distance. We're on a waiting list for one really close to our house but it's doubtful space will open up this Fall. We are continuing with our Thursday co-op, but not doing the morning classes. My son loved them but it's further from our house and it would mean I'd have to find something for two hours to do with my youngest every Thursday morning and we'd be gone from the house all day Thursday. Which is HARD to do, when you have little kids. I'll be sharing what I'll be doing with my younger ones in another post.

Our schedule is somewhat flexible. Meaning, it's really up to my son on how long it will take him to complete his assignments. I allowed 30 minute blocks for most subjects. Some will take 10-15 minutes to complete, others may take 45 minutes. It also depends on his willingness to get it done and whether or not he's being challenged in a particular area. We should be done by lunchtime, except for reading, which we'll do after lunch during our quiet time. I give him the option to work ahead if he's loving a subject or we'll do extra work when we know we have a field trip that week. One thing I LOVE about homeschooling is the flexibility of it. Our core schoolwork will be done Monday-Thursday. Every other Thursday afternoons my kids have co-op classes and Friday mornings my kids have co-op classes. They will be doing school work daily, but the bulk will be done 4 days a week at home. I'll go through our day(s) and what we're doing for each subject as I talk about it.

Bible

I Can Learn the Bible by Holly Hawkins Shivers (52 scriptures every kid should know), will be our reference book for our memory verses this year.

Know Your Bible for Kids by Konna K. Maltese goes over all the books of the Bible and highlights key events from each one.

Because I Said So by NotConsumed, is a Bible study we're doing on obedience. We'll do one of these each week. I also bought a few of her other studies and will do them once we're done with the others.

We'll start our day off with Bible. This is also when we eat breakfast most days. Some days my son will already be done with breakfast. He usually feeds the animals sometime between 6:30am and 7:30am. So this allows him time to get back and get ready for school.

Math

Math U See Gamma (we have the blocks, not pictured)
Learn Math Fast System Volume 1 & 2
Life of Fred books for fun - not pictured but have

By 8:30, everyone should be done with breakfast and while I'm cleaning up, my son will start on math. I found the Lean Math Fast System and ordered it due to the great reviews. However, after reading through it, I realized it will take a good amount of my time to teach each day. We used Math U See last year and are going to continue with Gamma this year. He watches a 5-7 minute lesson on Monday , which explains the week's lesson. Then he gets to work. If he has any questions, I'm here to help. He mostly can do this on his own which is great! We'll play games using Learn Math Fast as time allows as well as continue reading through Life of Fred books.

Language Arts

Spelling: Spelling You See: Americana
3rd Grade Language Lessons for Today by My Father's World
Dude Diaries
Daily 6-Trait Writing

I scheduled language arts to take approximately 45 minutes. This is not including daily reading. We are going to continue with Language Arts for Today. We're adding Daily 6-Trait Writing, and for free writing, we're using Dude Diaries, which is perfect for boys. It has good writing prompts, and comes with a lock and keys. Once we get through LA, we'll take a break and go outside for morning recess.

MORNING RECESS BREAK

Geography and Health/Social Studies

Daily Geography Practice by Evan-Moor
Health, Safety, & Manners 3 by Abeka

After our morning recess, we'll continue with Geography and Healthy/Social Studies. My son will be taking a Geography class in one of his co-ops, so we're not going to spend excessive time at home on it. That makes Daily Geography a perfect fit. There are just two questions a day, four days a week. I really like Abeka's Health, Safety, and Manners books, so we'll continue with grade 3 this year. We should be able to fit both in, in the 30-minute time frame.

History and Science




Adventures in U.S. History by My Father's World
MysteryScience.com
Magic School Bus Science Kits

Last year we did not finish our history. So we'll continue with Adventures in U.S. History by My Father's World. We have all of the supplement books that go with this curriculum and are looking forward to continuing learning about U.S. History. 

Since we only have half a year's worth of history, we'll be doing science for the other half. I'm hoping to do history twice a week and science the other half. My son will also be taking a science, technology, engineering, and math class on Fridays.

For Science, we'll be using an online science curriculum called Mystery Science. We'll also be doing some Magic School Bus Science Kits.

Handwriting and Typing

Handwriting Without Tears Cursive
Typing: Typing.com (unless I find something better)

We used A Reason for Handwriting last year but are going to go back to using Handwriting without Tears this coming year. This is the series he used in 1st grade. He got really frustrated with cursive last year and we ended up having to put it aside. This one looks like a better fit for learning. Since he's writing so much already, we'll only do handwriting twice a week and the other two days he'll be learning how to type using a free online typing program such as typing.com. 

LUNCH BREAK/OUTSIDE Time

Reading

On our bookshelf:

I Survived Series: There are 10 books in this series based on true historical events and kids who survived them. We're currently reading I Survived Hurricane Katrina. 

The Imagination Station Books: There are 6 books in this series by the same authors of Adventures in Odyssey.

God I Need to Talk to You About series by Dan Carr and Susan K. Leigh - he'll be reading these to me as we continue to work on character traits 

Who Was Ronald Reagan? by Joyce Milton and other Who Was books.

We're going to continue to get readers that are a good fit for him as well as read several series together. I noticed this last year that he retains more when he's read to. He seems to be an auditory learner. I also noticed longer books, while he could read the words, he wasn't comprehending the story-line as well when he read it. So we'll be working on reading comprehension a lot this year. There are also novels and other books we'll be reading as part of our history curriculum. It should be a good year full of interesting stories. 

In addition to the above schoolwork, my kids attend a co-op. For the co-op classes, my son will be taking: Geography, Gameschooling, PE, STEAM, Art, and Legos. He will also continue with Trail Life, as this will be his 3rd year. I'm hoping he'll get into piano lessons and he will continue to play basketball when the season comes around as well as tennis when we can make it in town. He's also showing an interest in swimming, so we might try and fit that in for a season. We have a very busy school year ahead of us!

	Daily Schedule 3rd
Time	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
8:00	Bible	Bible	Bible	Bible
8:30	Math	Math	Math	Math	Morning Co-op
9:00	Spelling	Spelling	Spelling	Spelling
9:30	LA Today;Dude Diary	LA for Today	LA for Today	Dude Diary
10:00	Daily 6-Trait Writing	Daily 6	Daily 6	Daily 6
10:15	Outside	Outside	Outside	Outside
10:30	Geography/SS	Geography/SS	Geography/SS	Geography/SS
11:00	History	Science	History	Science
11:30	Typing	Handwriting	Typing	Handwriting
12:00	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch
12:30	Outside	Outside	Outside	Afternoon co-op	Outside
1:00	Reading	Reading	Reading		Reading
2:00	catch-up	catch-up	catch-up
3:00
4:00

Homeschool Goals and Update for 2017-2018 School Year

I cannot believe I'm about to have a 3rd grader! Since we homeschool, we can decide when we go back to start. We decided that we're going to start next Monday, July 31st. A local co-op is going to meeting at our church this coming year and we joined it. It starts back up the first Friday of August, so we decided we'll start the same week. My daughter will be in preschool and my youngest with tot school. It's going to be a great year!

I don't talk about the challenges of homeschooling much. But trust me, they exist! There's a reason more people don't homeschool. Spending everyday, all day, with your children, can be quite challenging. Last year was rough! I am not going to lie. There were more days than I would like to admit that I was ready to throw in the towel and enroll my oldest in the local school. If it wasn't for my husband's encouragement, I may have! My darling son, whom I dearly love, decided to have quite an attitude and made teaching him not as fun as in the past. He started complaining and wanted to be lazy. That and having two really young kids made homeschooling very challenging. To top it off, we decided to buy an old house, have it renovated, and sell our first house that we rented out for 8 years, plus sell our house we had lived in for 5 years. It was quite a year! The whole process took a little over 6 months. We've been in the farm house now almost 3 months and are finally settling in. 

Here are my goals for this coming year:

Put my children's hearts first. My biggest goal above all is that my children grow in love and the likeness of Christ Jesus. That they know they are loved by God and are loved by their parents. I'm a pretty strict teacher, which is great in a classroom full of kids, but might not be as great when I have just a few students, who are also my children. This coming year, I'm going to try and look at the heart of the matter the most. If we're having a really bad day or a super hard day, I'm going to pray about it and see what else is going on in our lives and adjust accordingly. My kids' hearts come before academic success. My children NEED to know I LOVE them. I feel like I didn't express that enough to them last year.

Keep it fun! This was my goal when my oldest was younger. Then I got all serious and probably just worn out from all the things that come with having baby after baby and dealing with the doubling of housework. It's a shame really. School should be fun. I mean why not, right? My oldest son's personality includes wanting to have fun and wanting to make sure EVERYONE is having fun. He's a big includer like his mom and dad. A friend of mine brought up looking at gameschooling. Not gameschooling as in just playing educational games online but actually playing more educational games with one another. Games like Uno and Monopoly, but there are a ton more. Make games and songs out of the schoolwork and keep it light and fun. So I'm planning on making our school days more fun.

Host more playdates. We started inviting more people over toward the end of summer and have really enjoyed it. I'm hoping to get together with our friends more outside of co-ops than we did last year. Pretty much we stopped having people over, apart from life group, while we were getting our house ready to sell and through the selling part of it. We enjoy having people over and we want our friends and children's friends to always feel welcome when they come over.

That's pretty much it! What about academic success? That's definitely an important thing and we are going to be learning a ton. I honestly don't fear that my children won't gain all the knowledge they to succeed in life and more! I'll update you with what we're doing for each kid in a few days. And just to be extra clear, I do love homeschooling, even with all of the challenges that come with it. Each year we pray and talk about what we should do the following year. And for now, we're going to continue homeschooling.

Homeschool Schedule and First Week of 2nd Grade!

My smart and funny 2nd grader!!

I'm not going to write weekly posts of what we're doing this year. I honestly, just don't have time to do so anymore. However, I plan on posting highlights here and there.

I'm going to try and post a more detailed version of what we're using this year later this week. The short version is, Adventures in My Father's World for history, Bible, science, art, and music, and Timberdoodle's 2nd Grade for Language Arts, Math, STEM, and Thinking Skills. We're using Abeka for reading and a few of their books to accompany our history, science, and Health, Safety, and Manners.

The first week of 2nd grade went great! Honestly, it went even better than I expected. Last year, I taught Blue Rock M-W-F and he attended a part-time school two days a week full time. It got to be a battle some days for him to do his work with me. Sometimes school work seemed to drag on ALL DAY! Frankly, the curriculum just wasn't working for us. It was a great curriculum but didn't fit our personalities as well. Which got me to thinking, when we have the opportunity to really customize our child's education, why not truly customize it to fit them the best we can? Everyone is created uniquely by God. Blue Rock is gifted in a lot of things and his favorite subject is math. He tested as a 5th grader in math at the end of the year on his tests scores. The cool thing is, he's never been taught 5th grade math. He figured out multiplication and division on his own. Does this mean that this year I'm going to go ahead and move him up to 5th grade math? No. I decided to stick with his age and if he wants to continue on and test out of most of the year, we'll move forward. However, I don't want to over push him. I want him to be confident in his ability to do and understand math. I want his favorite subject to remain a favorite and him not to get bogged down in frustration. Will we do some advanced math as we go along? Absolutely! Some subjects are going to be more challenging for him. For example, he hates handwriting and we did grammar pages last year that were a beating! As someone who has a BA in English, I found it to be pointless for him to do these grammar pages. Does that mean that I believe grammar is pointless? Not at all! But for my first grader, they were. I really LOVE our language arts book this year. So far, Blue Rock loves it too. Also, Blue Rock is someone who picks up on things very quickly. If we spend more than 15-20 minute son a subject, he gets bored and I lose him. He can do short bits quickly and effectively and retains the information well. Also he needs time to move and get some exercise throughout the day. I do too for that matter! The thought of him sitting at a desk all day without being able to play outside makes me sad. So glad it doesn't have to be that way!

Here's an overview of how I set up this year.

Planning. The way I planned this year was I organized the year by weeks. I took apart the workbooks and put assignments into folders by weeks. I put the books we'll be using on one shelf in my office. I have a history binder, completed work binder, and a weekly binder. At the beginning of the week, I pull out the week's assignments and put them in the daily folders. I go over the assignments of what we're going to be doing and make sure I have everything we need. Then the night before, or morning of, I quickly review the day's agenda and we get started. So far this is working well but I'm only 1 week and 1 day in.

This year's assignments, organized neatly in this binder folder

I organized by week in these folders

I have 5 folders in this binder for each day of the week

Rough outline of his weekly assignments

How I Homeschool 3 Children. Several people have asked how can I homeschool with 3 kids? Especially, two of them being the age of 2 and under. This is what we do. First of all, I include all of my kids when possible. We start right after breakfast, sometimes during. When my oldest is done eating, it's time to start an assignment. My younger two take longer to eat so while they are eating, or I'm feeding the baby, I give instructions to my oldest and he gets started. Some things he needs very little instruction, others a little more. We usually start with Bible and that includes reading our daily scripture. When we sit down for lunch or a snack, I read through our Health and Safety book. My 7 and 2 year old are both gaining knowledge when we do this. In fact, my 2 year old loves answering the questions as well. History and science, same thing.  Most of the reading takes place before bed. It allows my husband or I to give our son one-on-one time to practice his reading and he's more relaxed to sit still at this time. Mostly because he doesn't want to go to sleep. I also save any other subjects or projects that need my undivided attention for when the baby is taking a nap. One other thing, my house does not remain spotless during the school week. I try and pick up at the end of the day but if you dropped by, you'd see my kids have a lot of fun. They can play with their toys and create fun things during their free time. We're inside more during the summer because of the heat and it's easy for my house to become a mess. It's hard letting go of this and I get really frustrated at times, but my children's hearts mean more to me than a small mess in the living room. We do try and all pick up at the end of the day. I also have a fun curriculum I do with my 2-year old so she has her own work to do so she doesn't feel left out.  She even has hers in her own binder. 

Praying that this year goes really well and that my children and I all learn a lot! May God be richly blessed through this. I am so thankful that I can raise and teach my children.

He took care of our neighbor's dogs for a few days and did great!

What does the inside of a space heater look like? With Dad.

Egg science experiment

Caden reminded me that we did this in kindergarten

He knew the answer but had fun doing it again anyway. :)

We made a timeline for history this year!

We have a 2nd grader!!

Most of the curriculum, minus a few books

I decided last Monday night that we'd go ahead and start the school year on Tuesday morning. I had originally wanted to start 2nd grade after the 4th of July but wasn't sure how it would work out. 

After Blue Rock telling us that he did not to go to soccer camp last week and just wanted to stick with tennis, we decided to go ahead with my original plans and start school. Since there was no tennis camp this week, we thought it would be a great time to start. I love the idea of taking June off for a summer break and December off for a winter break. Or basically Memorial Day through the 4th of July and Thanksgiving through New Years. Then taking time off here and there throughout the year. Blue Rock has been asking to start school and had a great first day and second day today! He did great jumping in and working hard. It was a difficult decision not to send him back to his part-time private school this coming Fall, but after praying about it and talking with him, we decided we'd rather homeschool full-time. It gives us more flexibility to travel, more money to do things, and I enjoy picking the curriculum that fits him best. Also he really wanted to join his friends in a co-op that meets on Thursdays this coming Fall. I'm also probably going to enroll him in an all day Fine Arts class for homeschoolers that meets one day a week as well. There are plenty of activities to do with friends and this gives us the most flexibility and more valuable family time as well as time with friends. We're praying for a fun year of learning! I'll do another blog post with what we're doing for each subject when I get some time. 

New Art program

Finishing up his spelling

Close up of what we're doing

2016 Spring Garden

Square foot garden

We are hobby gardeners. By hobby, I mean, we really enjoy gardening but don't produce enough to feed our family throughout the year and spend more on gardening than it would cost to purchase organic food from the store. However, it's a great learning experience and we're learning as a family how to grow things organically. As part of our homeschooling, I decided that this year, we will weigh what we harvest. This way we can keep track of how much food we're producing and get an idea of how our garden is growing and feeding our family. I'm not including the cost of seeds since most of them we either saved or bought in the past. Not to mention, seeds are pretty cheap. I also didn't include the cost of soil or any gardening supplies. My goal is to grow 25 lbs this year. At the end of the year, we'll compare the cost of organic food from the store with the cost of organic food we've grown in our garden. In the future I hope to add more details about our garden such as how long each crop took to grow, the total cost involved, and how much time daily we spent watering the garden and taking care of it. But to start, weighing the crops is enough. I was excited to finally justify the cost of a kitchen scale.

We harvested our first crops a few weeks ago and some more earlier this week. So far, we have harvested carrots and onions and are just over 4.5 lbs. If our pumpkins, cantaloupes, and watermelon grow, we might make our goal before the Fall harvest. We have harvested some kale but I didn't weigh it. We should be getting some tomatoes as well. Our tomato plant is a great example of how my husband planted an organic tomato that we got from the store, in a pot of soil. The seeds have grown and produced lovely tomato plants that have been very fruitful the past few years. 

This year, we added a two barrel compost. That along with the compost tube from our Garden Tower should really help our soil naturally. Here are some pictures of our garden. I'll start with some pictures of my family, since I know that's what my family enjoys seeing the most. Scroll down and you'll see pictures of our garden and gardening supplies. We're growing a lot of things. The Garden Tower mostly has herbs, strawberries, and greens. The square foot has pumpkins, onions, cantaloupes, peas, and potatoes. Our tomato plant is in the pot in front of our square foot. Depending on how this year goes, we may expand our garden next year. We'd love eventually become more self sufficient. On a side note, we have not had to run our sprinklers this Spring yet. Thankfully we've gotten some good rain and we've been able to use the rain from our rain barrels to water our garden, which is the best kind of water to use. Plants love rain water.  

My four loves!

This cute baby loves helping in the garden!

Three carrots we harvested.

Her first carrot to harvest.

Yum!

Harvested onions

Our cute wild bunny that lives in our yard.

Pitcher plant, to hopefully help catch all the fruit flies in our kitchen.

One of several really long onions

Such great helpers!

Compost barrels

Rain barrels

Garden Tower, filled with herbs, strawberries, and greens.

Mosquito repelling plants

Several herbs

Where we just pulled some carrots and onions.  Don't worry, new seeds have been planted.

We had to pull the kale from our Garden Tower but don't worry, there's more growing here.

MFW Preschool Unit 2: Obedience

Princess just finished Unit 2: Obedience in My Father's World, All Aboard the Animal Train. It was such a fun unit. The animal was the black bear and the character trait was obedience. We played, "Mommy says," hunted for bears, read lots of books about bears, and spent lots of time playing and singing. She memorized the "Black Bear" poem quickly and still remembers the bunny one from unit 1.  Princess loves doing her school work and picks up on things very quickly. 

We acted out the story of "The Three Bears."

We made a black table and black beds for them.

The sandbox is always fun

Trampoline Park

Backyard trampoline

A fun match the ball in the right hole game I made

We played zoo where the kids could purchase animals from me

She loved playing "hide the bear"

Coloring

Playing with her younger brother

First time to visit the dentist

Her teeth looked great!

Egg sensory bin around Easter

 

The closest thing we saw to a black bear, she was unsure of it.

Nothing beats fun in a box!