Year End Curriculum Review For Second Grade + Kindergarten

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We wrapped up Squeaks second grade year and (most of) Little Dude’s Kindergarten year a few weeks ago! It flew by! I’ve never done a year end curriculum review before, but as I went back to my curriculum picks post from the beginning of the year, I realized a good amount had changed.

I think I tend to start our school year with more things planned than necessary. Not on purpose, just too much enthusiasm for my own good. I suppose it can be a good thing too. I’d rather have too many resources than be lacking in an area. Although, can that even happen with tools like YouTube and the library in existence? Probably not. So really I’m just rationalizing my tendency to hoard school supplies and curriculum. I don’t have a problem. I have a collection. 😉

Anyway, lets get into this year end review and see what cut the mustard for our second grade/Kindergarten year.

It’s hard to believe we started this school year with the intention of continuing Classical Conversations at home. It feels like that season of our homeschool life was so long ago! When I look back at how we modified CC to fit our needs without a community day I’m not at all sad that it didn’t work out. In fact I believe we gained habits and knowledge from the CC curriculum that we’ll carry with us for years.

If you’re familiar with CC you know that it covers every subject except math (if you don’t count the skip counting memorization), and reading (although grammar and reading “rules” are covered). The information is solid and valuable, but there’s really no other way to describe the end of our CC journey other than…it just fizzled out. Slowly but surely each subject started to feel redundant and placed to the side as we focused on our Master Books curriculum.

Each morning as we gathered in the living room for morning basket, Bible continually won out as the best way to start great conversation over the repetitive memorization of facts. So our Morning basket started to drift away from Classical Conversations and more toward our daily Proverb, good devotionals, our catechism, and reading aloud.

Then we added in The Story of The World for history and completely fell in love with it! (More on this in my post on next year’s curriculum picks. Stay tuned!)

Morning time turned into our favorite time of the day and I realized CC had become stale. There’s a handful of things we just won’t let go of though. The famous Timeline Song is still played at the end of morning time, along with several other CC classics (states and capitals, books of the Bible, the presidents song) and that skip counting practice was invaluable to Squeaks as we started multiplication and division this year. So I guess we kept the the parts we needed and grew out of the rest.

The rest of our year end curriculum review is pretty much a lot of “it worked great for the season we were in!” with maybe one or two exceptions.

Master Books worked just fine for Squeaks…right up until the end.

Master books was great for second grade. Squeaks used it for math (Math Lessons for a Living Education, level 3), language arts (Language Lessons for a Living Education, level 2), and science (God’s Design for Life for Beginners). I feel like these books took us as far as we could have hoped for them to, but now that Squeaks is getting older and subjects are getting more advanced, I feel like the Master Books design (open and go, all in one book) just tries to fit too much in and it results in a watered down approach in the older grades.

The math book continued the story format that Squeaks loved in the beginning, but as the story continued it frankly started to make our teeth hurt. The sickeningly sweet after school special vibes got to both of us and by the end of the year we pretty much just skipped the story aspect and got straight to the math. I understand what the writers were trying to do, and it may just be us, but sometimes you just wanna do math.

It’s a bit of the same with Language Lessons.

Trying to pack narration, memorization, grammar, spelling, picture studies, Bible lessons, sentence structure, and reading into one curriculum works for awhile, but we reached the limit this year. I think it did a great job teaching grammar and spelling, and Squeaks story comprehension and narration abilities did improve. However I found the picture studies to be trite and the writing prompts boring. We ended up skipping those pages and using my writing journal (free when you sign up for my newsletter) along with Draw Write Now books and our own collection of picture books.

Master Books science is the only curriculum from them we will be continuing with next year. The God’s Design series has been a great way to incorporate a consistent science lesson that sparks interest into our school week, without feeling overwhelmed by lots of supply lists and experiments. It’s biblically based, accurate, and easy to use. All things I (a science dis-enthusiast) look for in an elementary science curriculum. Each lesson left plenty of room for Squeaks to ask questions and for us to search out further knowledge when a subject sparked curiosity.

We went slow and steady with Latin this year.

Song School Latin has been sufficient up to this point for dipping our toes into the world of a new language. Song School does have an optional DVD, music CD, and flashcards along with the workbook that I purchased. However, I knew within the first few lessons the DVD wasn’t gonna last (probably about as interesting as watching paint dry). The music CD comes in handy for pronunciation, but we weren’t consistent with the songs and did just fine. The workbook and the flashcards made the lessons. Squeaks was easily able to answer questions in the workbook and we turned the flashcards into a fun memory game for occasional review.

The only book we never ended up using from last year’s curriculum picks was Cursive Kickoff from Handwriting Without Tears. The more I looked at it the more the letter formation bothered me. No natural slant, and even Squeaks said it didn’t look like “pretty writing”. We ended up getting a simple cursive workbook from Logos Press to finish out the year and next year Squeaks will work her way through my new Bible Verse Cursive book.

Our year end review for Little Dude’s kinder year is pretty straight forward.

It was all a hit! My Kindergarten journal met our needs perfectly and he loved the ABC See Hear Do books. We made it to book two and added their flashcards. He was so proud of himself for reading his first set of CVC words! We have just a handful of pages to finish in his kinder journal right now since I let him lead the frequency with which we did “table work”. We are in no rush! The ABC See Hear Do books made our Bob books redundant, but over all, our curriculum picks for kindergarten this year were a hit!

So as far as year end curriculum reviews go, not too bad. Like I said, our picks worked for the season we were in. I look forward to sharing what we’re moving onto in our upcoming new season with a third grader, first grader, and soon to be kindergartener!