Back in September, at the beginning of our school year, I wrote this post about how well our homeschooling was going. Of course it was the beginning of the year and all the things were new and we were having so much fun and doing so much cool stuff and going on so. many. field trips.
Things are still going fine, but I must admit, our homeschool year has lost some of its shine. We’ve gotten a bit more into some humdrum-ness and haven’t had a field trip in months (though I’m planning some big things to finish out the year). I mentioned in the September post that I wasn’t really loving our math curriculum, Math-U-See. I tried to make it work for several months after writing that, but I have at this point completely abandoned it. It just wasn’t for us, so I’m now piecing together other sources to round out Miss’s math knowledge for the rest of this year.
This year was pretty much my try-some-stuff-and-see-what-works year. Because it’s just kindergarten, and really I’m not even officially homeschooling yet, according to the powers that be, who don’t require me to register my child until she starts first grade.
But next year is first grade.
So now I’m at the point of trying to decide what worked from this year and what didn’t, what I want to keep and what I want to change. Obviously, we need a new math curriculum. I posted on Facebook a week or two ago that I was looking for suggestions, and I got some really great responses. I narrowed down the options to Horizons or Saxon.
I think.
While I was looking at Horizons and Saxon on the Sonlight website, I found myself checking out the full package curriculum they offer and thinking that maybe that would be a good option to try for next year. This is really odd to me, because last year I was feeling pretty strongly that I did not want to get a “curriculum in a box” and wanted to be able to be flexible and piece together the things I wanted to do and determine the time in which I wanted to do them.
But check this out:
It’s the Sonlight curriculum package for first grade. Doesn’t that just look beautiful?
It has pretty much everything I’d need for the whole year to do pretty much all the subjects I need to do. I’d need to add some Catholic learning to the religion part, but other than that, this is pretty complete.
But I’m still not sure, so I started looking around for some other ideas of complete curricula, like the Rainbow Curriculum package, Catholic Heritage Curricula, and even this distance education school, the Mother of Divine Grace School.
Now I’m just not sure what to do. I’m either going to scrap what we did last year and get one of these packaged curricula, or I’m going to keep the things we did from last year that worked well, like our reading curriculum All About Reading and the literature-based package we used that we loved, Five in a Row, and add in one of the two math options I mentioned above.
On the one hand, I think it might be really nice to have a packaged curriculum that covers all the subjects I need and lays everything out with a plan and schedule so I don’t miss any of the important stuff.
On the other hand, the creative side of me thinks I would really miss the time that I spend looking for fun things to do, coming up with unit studies on things my girls are interested in, picking field trips to match what we’re reading about, finding art and science projects on Pinterest, and so forth.
The problem with continuing with what we did last year, is that I feel like I might have been a little lax in the areas of social studies and science and art. We did some of these things, for sure, but I wasn’t really systematic about it. Five in a Row includes some activities for these subjects, but I don’t think it’s enough on its own as Miss gets older. So I guess if I stay with what I did last year, I’ll have to add in a science curriculum and a social studies curriculum and maybe art and religion (to improve what I’ve already been doing in those areas).
OR, I could just get a big fat package and be done with it.
What’s a mama to do?
Help me out here dear readers. I’d love to hear what you do, what works, what you love, and why.
Pretty please??
So, I taught public high school and middle school, which it is not at all the same. But, teaching experience is teaching experience, and I can tell you that packaged curriculum doesn’t squash creativity. I had some packaged reading programs from Scholastic and they were FABULOUS! I had another from some other lame company and they were horrible. I also drew up everything from scratch a couple of years (a lot of this was up to “the powers that be”).
Anyway, I think that packaged curriculum looks beautiful and it almost makes me want to homeschool and I think if you bought it you’d still be able to add ideas from pinterest. Whew, that was all one breathe. Good luck!
Ben pretty much said the same thing, and I think you’re both right. I’m leaning towards getting that package and adding in our reading curriculum and some beautiful art stuff and of course, lots of Pinterest stuff. Thanks for your perspective on this, Liz.
I have a daughter in K, we’ve not done much formal schooling as she’s reading above grade level (self taught) and ready for first grade so we are having a few last months of play and fun with her younger brothers. I am going to use Kolbe for next year which is believe is slightly less exspensive than MODG. that’s about the only determining factor for me. MODG is very popular in my group because we are in SoCal near The birthplace of MODG, I am with you I love the idea of researching super cool highly targeted learning experiences, but I will get completed overwhelmed by this. I think I will insert one or two days here and there for those sorts of things, maybe a spring break/Christmas break sort of thing. Maybe something for summer. Maybe I’ll layer in my own theme each month. That will be enough to satisfy my itch of being personalized. And will liberate me from hours and hours of designing lesson plans and searching out the cheapest resources.
Hi! I haven’t commented before, but I’ve been following your blog since last summer. We have an almost 6 yr old, 3 year old, and 11 month old. I haven’t done any formal homeschooling yet. I was very interested in the sonlight packages at first. But one of my friends uses Sonlight and she said it is impossible (at least for her and her 2 girls) to get through all the materials. My plans are to use All About Reading, FIAR, and Math U See. But I am not sure what else I want to use. Where we live we don’t have to keep records or turn in reports on our homeschooling. It’s a mixed blessing, because I can be lazy and unorganized, but it’s a wonderful freedom to just do whatever we want to.
Thanks for your blog. I really enjoy it. God Bless.
That’s exactly what we used last year! I Love AAR and FIAR, but my daughter and I weren’t crazy about Math U See. It just wasn’t a good fit for us, though a lot of people really seem to love it. I’m glad you made that comment about Sonlight. I am seriously considering it, and I’ve gotten great feedback from some people, but I’ll have to get some more info from people who use it, I think. I don’t want something I’m going to stress about getting done every day!
Thanks a lot for reading and for your comment Kara!