I have a secret crush on new homeschool curriculum. Okay, it’s not such a secret. I think every teacher, whether a home educator or not, gets a passionate thrill when the new books show up in the mail. It’s crack to us. I’ve had so many people ask us what we use and why, and what our day looks like, so I decided to write a blog post about it. So here is the answer, and I’ll answer in the following order:
1. Rod and Staff
2. Classical Conversations
3. A Beka math
4. Singapore math
5. The Story of the World
6. Song School
7. The Bible
8. A Child’s Garden of Verses
1. We use Rod and Staff as our core curriculum. http://www.milestonebooks.com/
We use every single subject except music and math, though I am considering switching from Singapore to Rod and Staff math. More on that later.
Why? First, because every single lesson is infused with high quality, challenging, theologically-infused material such that your child spends the entire day focusing mainly on learning who God is, why we ought to serve Him, and what a pure heart looks like, and then, secondarily, focuses on the subject at hand. The curriculum uses stories, rules, and repetition to teach subjects, and this fits squarely into the trivium framework. Third, we like that each core subject is divided into 150 school days, so you really have a 30-week school year laid out for you with virtually no time spent up front pouring over how to divide the work up each day. This is 6 weeks shorter than most other curricula so yes, you do move a bit faster, but each lesson is so focused and successive lessons so well-related to the previous lessons that the pace is not problematic for normal children. Fourth, R&S requires that children become detail oriented, logical, caring individuals from the very beginning. This speaks to my old, unshakable European roots. Fifth, we love the simple format. No flashy pictures. All pictures are line drawings, if there are pictures at all. This means the books are very inexpensive, and the pictures are not distracting. Again, this fits squarely in the trivium framework where education is not the same as entertainment, and the distractions of technology and annoying cartoon pictures are so unnecessary. Sixth, simplicity is such an important discipline for the well-formed character in the virtuous life, and we wanted a curriculum emulating those values. Seventh, with R&S, it is easy to form your child into an independent learner. This is SO important when you have more than one child. The Little Magpie is in 2nd grade and does easily 80% of her work on her own. I basically teach her new concepts each day, set her to her tasks, and then check her work when she is finished. R&S does not have a formal kindergarten program. I come from the old school, Ramond More home school movement of the 80’s where kids are allowed to learn at their own pace, and if they want to begin when they are 4, they begin when they are 4. If they want to begin when they are 7, they begin when they are 7. So R&S really begins in grade 1, and any kid growing with free access to play and parents who read to them and answer their curiosities about numbers and letters will be able to handle this curriculum. We did very little with respect to writing or learning letters prior to embarking on the Grade 1 curriculum, and by the end of 1st grade, Little Magpie was reading easy chapter books, and by the middle of second grade she is reading at a 3rd grade level. We love this “later is better” approach. Bonus reason: Spending an hour hobnobbing with amazing, kind, quiet Amish women and children at the R&S booth at the curriculum fair is food for my soul and the highlight of my year!
Reading: Stories About God’s People.
We do one lesson each day.
We have used this for first and second grade. Children learn to read by both sight words and a strong phonics foundation. As the child learns to write the letters, he will learn the sounds, and the reading will focus on words containing only the current and previous sight words, and letters learned that week. ALL reading is either scripture verses or detailed re-telling of Bible stories. The curriculum begins with Genesis and works on from there. Each lesson has a reading, a workbook page or pages teaching reading for details and comprehension, and a phonics page. There are fine motor worksheets for 1st grade, but we skipped these, as my kids have free access to art supplies and use them on a daily basis, so I didn’t see a need for structured cutting and pasting and coloring. The best thing about this reading program is that it kills two birds with one stone. It is Bible and Reading all in one. Nice.
The awesome thing is that the reading skills translate into other, non R&S books. She can read anything at all, and has learned to really care about comprehension (NOT something she naturally cares about) through the habituation process of this method.
Phonics
We do one lesson each day.
I love this phonics program. Why? Because I am a terrible speller. This program uses phonics to make spelling generally easy. After learning the phonics rules my daughter has learned in 2nd grade, I actually know how to spell more words…what? Great unintended consequence! Also, Little Magpie has proven to be an amazing speller, and I find that she recalls her phonics rules to help her with it. Also, the phonics program requires that kids memorize what things like a dipthong, a modified vowel, and a diagraph are. Why is this important to their little lives? Well, again, it helps with spelling.
Beyond spelling, though, the phonics program has allowed Little Magpie to read without fear. She is not naturally detail oriented, nor does she naturally love reading. She is a gross motor person, and sitting down to read is a task to be achieved as quickly as possible, not as perfectly as possible. But, again, the program is a method in habituation, and so she is slowly but surely coming to care about perfection in her reading and comprehension. While she reads, she does not fear big words, but sounds them out, and when she gets caught up on a difficult or unknown word, she can work through it with a few phonics prompts from me. And while she initially skipped over words she didn’t know, it now bugs her when she doesn’t know a word, and she comes to ask me.
Habituation in scholastic perfection…yeah, I’d say that’s a trivium value!
Grammar
We do one lesson each day.
I can’t say enough good things about R&S grammar. First, a lot of time is spent on teaching kids that the words we say mean important things, they are either true or false, and we must take care that our words are true and good, just as God’s are. Therefore, we should care that our sentences are also true and good, not only with respect to the subject, but with respect to the form the sentences take. They JUSTIFY caring about good grammar! Wow! By then end of second grade they have studied nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives (We use our Winston Grammar cards along with R&S for extra emphasis, but this is only because I LOVE Winston Grammar so much, not because R&S needs supplementation.). Then in the last 25 lessons of 2nd grade, they introduce writing paragraphs. Up until this point, the most a child will have written are a few sentences each day, but not a huge emphasis on writing. Again, this is in line with the “later is better” method. Also, R&S tends to focus on art to teach fine motor rather than actual writing. The occupational therapist in me gets chills of approval!!!! No struggle during writing lessons because the kids don’t actually do writing samples until they are 7-8 years old. Perfect. Love it. They should be spending their time playing and exploring, not composing paragraphs!
Spelling
We do one lesson each week. Day 1, Exercise A, Day 2, Exercise B, Day 3 copy each word once, write each word once without copying when prompted, day 4 spelling test. Day 5 can be added, if an extra day is needed on a particular week.
Spelling loosely follows what is learned in phonics that week.
Science
We do one lesson each week, reading and filling in blanks on the same day.
We are a family that is in love with science, so I like the gentle approach and story-based science lessons in R&S, and again, the discussion is bathed in the knowledge and understanding that God created things just as He wanted them and each thing perfectly and for a purpose. It trains science into them as part of their education without making them into formal scientists yet. I still want my kids to explore creation on their own without educational restrictions, so this makes me happy. There is one lesson per week, starting in 2nd grade, and there are about 10 questions to fill out for each lesson. They learn things like what kinds of animals are on a farm, how they compare to wild animals, what weeds are, why we have seasons, and all kinds of other simple science concepts. We have so many other science books for them ranging from anatomy books to books about life cycles and dinosaurs and volcanoes on their kids bookshelf, alongside Dr. Seuss and My First Baby Animal picture books, so science has been a normal part of their lives from birth. I’m not worried about a formal science training right now. They’ll get that in later years. For now we just read a LOT to our kids from all kinds of books, including the ones discussing the parts of the eye ball and what happens in the dark trenches of the ocean.
Geography
We do one lesson each week, reading one day, filling in blanks for the lesson on another day.
Geography begins in second grade and is a very gentle, story-based introduction to history and geography. The history and geography curriculum eventually merge into one. Second grade focuses on the main countries in the world, the continents, types of land (mountains, prairies, hill country, etc.) animals unique to each continent, and the waters of the world.
Health and manners
We do one lesson each week.
This is very overt character formation within the framework of the Christian life and community. There are chapters on things like why you ought not tale bear, why we ought to help the elderly carry things and give up our chair to them, how we should treat those who look different than us, how to treat our siblings, how to view household chores, the place of a child in the home, the importance of silence…We really love this book!
Art
We do 1-2 projects each week.
This art program is aimed at increasing a child’s awareness of color, lines, the difference between dark and light, attention to what one’s hand is doing at any one time, and very fine motor skills. We use art rather than copious writing, as mentioned before. I really think it is the occupational therapy in me surfacing, but it is way more fun than writing paragraphs!
We also listen to The Story of the World, and the kids draw pictures of the history lesson while listening.
2. We use Classical Conversations for some memory work
We memorize one cycle each week.
Why? We began to use it because people told us how great it was, how much their kids learned, and how easy it is to use. It is true, it is easy to use. It is true that kids memorize some really valuable pieces of information, but I am not having a passionate love affair with it. Here is why we continue to use it, with reservations. First, we are not part of a Classical Conversations (CC) community because they are not accepting of homeschool moms who work outside of the home and will not allow a sitter or tutor to accompany the child to the CC community if it conflicts with the mother’s work schedule. I find this to be unthinkable cliquishness for a Christian community, the kind of discrimination academic Christians have faced for centuries. But I find that the subject matter is VERY easy to figure out each week, so we don’t suffer from the lack of a day spent with the community. So it’s nice that it really is that easy to figure out. Second, kids memorize a history timeline, history facts, bits of Latin, quite a bit of geography, some great science facts, math facts, and grammar facts. I like the concept of memory pegs. Kids don’t really understand all of the concepts they are memorizing, but they will one day, and when they do, they will already have those concepts memorized from early childhood. More importantly, I have found, is the habit of memorization. We memorize a LOT each week. Third, the memory work goes hand in hand with The Story of the World, which we use for History. Fourth, all memory work is presented in both song and spoken word on a CD, so you can do this memory work in the car, and every single child in the family learns it together such that the 3-year-old sings about the Greek and Roman gods in line at the grocery store. That’s about it. There is a science experiment portion, a music portion, and an art portion, but we do Rod and Staff for art and science, and we use other methods for music, so we don’t feel this aspect of CC is needed as an add-on. There are some MAJOR drawbacks with CC. Our main problem with it is it is not overtly bathed in the Word of God on a daily basis. Our secondary issue with it is the corporate feel it has. The supplies are SO EXPENSIVE!!! I easily spend as much on just the CD’s and timeline cards as I spend on all my R&S curriculum combined! Then, if you are part of a community, you spend another $350 per child per year ON TOP OF any other extra fees. This is not an umbrella school. They don’t file your legal state paperwork for you or anything like that. It’s just one morning each week where “tutors” who have less knowledge about the subject than I do present the information to the kids. No thanks. I’ll do it myself and spend that $350/kid on Disneyland annual passes. Now THAT is a great educational place! (LOL!!!)
I go back and forth on this. If I did not teach during the community time, we’d likely join just for the socialization aspect, but I’d be disgruntled, I know!
3. A Beka math
We do 20 pages every 2 weeks (12 one week, 8 the next) for a 36-week school year.
I like A Beka. It is straightforward. It is not difficult, and it does not make things more complex than they really are. It is old-fashioned arithmetic. We have used A Beka for K-2 so far and really like it. Little Magpie CRAVES math, so we use 2 curricula but for a child who is terrible at math or has some learning difficulties, I’d only use A Beka, or R&S as Singapore (below) would be far too challenging, I think. The story problems in R&S are theological in nature, so that is a plus. It is very easy to teach A Beka math at the lower grades, although I don’t know about the upper grades. I like that the kindergarten math book is not all about cutting and coloring and teaching shapes, as other math programs are. My kids already know all of those things by the time they are 4 and would think a math book focused on that is dumb. I never want to waste their time in school! By the end of kindergarten, kids know simple addition and subtraction by the end of the year, and are very familiar with story problems, telling time, reading temperature, simple division and measurement by inches and centimeters, and pounds and ounces. By the end of 2nd grade they have covered multiplication, division, fractions, and they have fully mastered time, money, temperature, etc.
4. Singapore math
We do about 10 pages per week in the text book and 10 pages per week in the work book.
This is the only subject book I need to go through and divide the pages up for so I know how much to present each day. We use it to supplement A Beka math for our little math-lover, and while it is divided up into 18 weeks, and each week is divided up nicely into 4-5 days for you, we fit the entire week’s worth of work into 2 days, so I have to go through and customize the lesson lengths. We have used this for 1st and 2nd grade. I really like that this math curriculum is challenging and shows the reason behind arithmetic operations. I do find that there are way too many problems for each lesson. This is fine, since I just assign a certain number of problems, and there are always more if she needs more practice in something. I love the way the teacher’s manual shows you how to break things down step-by-step if you are not fresh on your math skills. You will need to purchase or make manipulatives for this program, but that’s not a big deal. If you have a printer and a place to laminate, it’s cheap and easy, and the teacher manual tells what you need for the lesson. No guessing. If I had a child who was NOT a math wiz like Little Magpie, but is still good at and likes math, I’d use Singapore and not A Beka, I think.
The main issue I have with Singapore is it costs a FORTUNE!!! However, charter schools will pay for it, and only the work book is consumable, so it will be cheaper for the second and third kids.
5. The Story of the World
We go through 1-2 chapters each week for a 36 week school year.
There are 3 items for each of the four units of this program. 1. the text book, 2. the textbook on CD, 3. the activity and workbook. We mainly use the CD’s for our kids, as it saves me time because I can do something else during history lessons. The reader’s voice is captivating, and the subjects covered are very interesting, even for my 3-year-old. By 4, kids can actually follow the stories well, and by 5, they are asking for particular topics to be played over and over again. Yes, kids love this curriculum. It can be used through 6th grade, easily, and only the workbook is consumable, so it is well worth the money you spend because you’ll use all of it for all your kids, and if you have a scanner/printer, you can just copy the pages you need from the workbook, and only buy one set for your entire family. We like it that the reader has other CD’s with supplemental stories you can buy. We have several of the other CD’s, and the kids LOVE them! We won’t use anything else for many, many years, if ever!
While the kids listen to the chapters, I require that they draw a picture, or a series of pictures, of what they are learning about. They really love this, and it gives me some work to put into their binders in case we are ever investigated. I always want to keep a paper trail to show what we do.
6. Song School Latin, Greek, and Spanish.
We listen to a few songs each day from each language and review vocabulary for those songs.
We bought all three language programs from Song School, and we are SO HAPPY we did! It is a very gentle introduction to these languages through song. This is particularly nice because, again, the little ones are learning along with Little Magpie. By the time the Mighty Lion begins 1st grade, he’ll already know most of the vocabulary, or he will at least be familiar with the basics of these languages. Most language programs don’t get serious until 3rd of 4th grade, maybe second grade, and this is the best program I have found for the younger years. It is far more serious than Putumayo’s CD’s (Fun, but not educational, per se), and not ridiculous and insulting, like Dora or the common DVD programs that are out there. We are going through the lessons in each book simultaneously so they learn the same vocab in each language each week, which has proven useful!
Along with this, Little Magpie writes a few Greek letters each week, as they are different than the letters the other languages use. I started her on this in 2nd grade, but wish I’d started it in 1st grade right after she was very familiar with the English alphabet. Song School Greek has letter-writing pages, but I just write the letters a few times for her, she copies them, and then finishes out the row herself.
7. The Bible
We memorize about 5 verses each week by 2nd grade.
We are also reading through Taylor’s Bible stories for kids, which is a nice alternative so all of the kids can understand the stories. Little Magpie is learning her way around the Bible through memorization, and we also attend BSF, so she is learning to find her way around while reading her lessons. We memorize large chunks of Scripture at once, rather than verse by verse. The reason we do this is I want her to know that verses have a specific context, as I don’t want her interpreting scripture as she wishes according to her whims, as is so common among churches in our era.
8. A Child’s Garden of Verses
We memorize 1-2 stanzas of a poem each week.
I love this collection of poems, as well as the fun, vintage pictures that go with it! We focus on diction and poise, as well as performance in front of an audience (whoever we can gather together!), and for a kid like Little Magpie who is not a perfectionist about anything, forming habits of proper diction is very important.
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So that is what we use and why we use it, and how much we do each week. In kindergarten we spent 30-60 minutes once or twice each week, or whenever Little Magpie wanted to do some school. By 1st grade we were spending about 90 minutes each day on school, and then in 2nd grade we spend about 4 hours each day, including 2 20-minute breaks. By 2nd grade, though, I spend only about 1 hour with Little Magpie with school, and she does the rest on her own.
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