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It feels like I wrote the blog posts sharing our morning group subjects and core subjects yesterday! This school year has flown by! But here we are. As I write this year-end curriculum review we’re finishing up our last week before we take a short summer break. Looking back, I think this might have been one of our most successful school years yet. Each year is a blessing, but I think we really hit our stride this year. My kids are getting more independent and zeroing in on their interests is getting easier. Plus we’ve really embraced group learning and the conversations we’ve had have been educational for all of us, even me!
We’re gonna start this review with our “morning basket” subjects. The subjects we do together as a group each morning. This includes Bible, history, poetry/artist studies (our beauty subjects), Latin, science, and read-aloud chapter books. I’ll do a review of core grade-level subjects in a separate post.
Speaking of Morning Basket, let’s start there with this year’s curriculum review.
Bible study is always first! And we started the year just as I had planned, working our way through The 10 Minute Bible Journey. It’s an awesome book and I loved the questions and structure. Somewhere around the book of Ruth though we took a detour and never returned. There was a section of the book that skipped a few chapters I wanted to include so we put the structured reading schedule aside and just never picked it back up.
By the end of the school year, we’ve read from Genesis to 2 Kings with quick jumps to Job and then large portions of the Gospels between Easter and Christmas. We enjoyed my new Apostles Study, Holy Week Study, and Jesse Tree Study. My NASB MacArthur Study Bible commentary has been invaluable in answering questions and clarifying trickier verses. I can’t even tell you how much I have loved the simplicity of just picking up the Bible, reading a chapter, and then discussing it. So easy but so impactful! And as always, Bible time is capped off with our New City Catechism. A constant. I’ve sung it’s praises for years.
Next up was History!
We also worked our way through both volumes of Tuttle Twins American History. I can’t say enough about these books. Absolutely loved them! I learned so much alongside my kids and the story was so engaging. These books are such a fantastic and valuable way to learn our countries amazing and complicated history. I can’t wait for them to add a new volume. The only criticism I can give on the full Tuttle Twins history set is that the printable curriculum that came with it felt like more busy work than anything. I printed it the first week and then never again. We ended up doing the whole thing as a read-aloud only and it worked great for us.
Once we finished both volumes of Tuttle Twins we only had about a month of “school time” left and I didn’t want to start a whole new curriculum so we switched to full rabbit-trail mode. We followed different curiosities from the gold rush to George Washington, we just started pulling random history related story books off the shelves. We also leaned heavily on The American Patriot Almanac for daily reading. It was perfect for feeding new interests.
We ended up dropping Elementary Catechism on the Constitution of the United States for a bit. Some of the bigger questions weren’t sticking and I think they were just a bit over my kid’s heads for now. It won’t be gone forever though. We’ll pick it back up in years to come. It’s just too valuable to skip, in my opinion.
I group World Watch News in with our history studies now too. This ten minute Christ-centered daily news program has been the best addition to our homeschool day. You can read a full review of it here. It’s been such a hit with my kids and I look forward to it daily as well.
After history we move on to our beauty subject rotation.
For poetry this year we stuck with our Sing A Song Of Seasons book. A poem a day. Easy. I’d like to expand on this subject much more in the future and I had every intention on working in some Shakesapeare studies, but it just never happened and I’m ok with that.
On the days we didn’t do poetry, we did an artist study from Simply Charlotte Mason. We started the year with Monet and it was so fun to have the kids try to recreate some of his work. The artist study comes with suggested steps for enjoying and observing the included artwork. It’s very simple but always so fun to hear my kids’ reactions. Then we studied DaVinci and it was fantastic. After finishing, we read a short biography on DaVinci and my son even enjoyed building some models of his inventions. Can’t recommend these enough!
Our read-alouds were slow going this year.
Not for lack of trying, but more circumstantial. By the end of morning basket I’ve done a significant amount of reading so sometimes I could only fit in half a chapter or so more before my voice gave out. We read through the The Complete Brambley Hedge series and loved it. Especially the artwork! It inspired many drawings. Then the kids voted to try The Penderwicks series. We read through the first two books and it’s been very fun. It’s a super sweet story with lots of sibling affection. My kids get excited every time I pick it up.
That’s all the reading I could handle voice-wise, but between the ever flowing stream of audiobooks and The Man reading to the kids before bed, I’m content with it.
I’m calling science a win this year even though we only got through about half the curriculum.
This year proved to me that group science is the only way to go and I was very happy with Journey Homeschool Academy. The videos are slightly cheesy at times but in a fun and entertaining way and the simplicity of being able to pop on a short video, do a verbal “quiz”, and add in the activities we wanted was a perfect fit. After years of jumping from one science curriculum to the next I think we finally found one that works well for us and now we just need to get into a better habit with it.
Aside from a set science curriculum, we also expanded our vegetable garden, explored countless insects and small animals on our land, “grew” crystals and learned about geodes, enjoyed watching eaglets hatch and grow via web cam, and explored many other science related topics. Progress isn’t always measured in checked boxes.
Now for the sad part of this curriculum review.
My kids have officially given a definitive “no” to Latin. Or at least the boys have. There’s still hope for my daughter. I tried, friends, I really did. But as much as I wanted my kids to love Latin, they didn’t. I finally set it aside mid year and frankly morning time has been more peaceful as a result. My daughter (going into sixth grade) has requested to try it on her own next year so we’ll see how we can make that work. I might give language studies a rest for the boys though. *sad face* At least for this coming school year.
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