1st Grade

First grade is really when homeschool gets rolling.  You add a bunch of curriculum that you didn’t cover in kindergarten or preschool.  You spend more time learning in each specific subject area.  There is a lot of growing and stretching that happens this 1st grade year.  It’s the transition year between fun kindergarten and the next 12 years of focused learning.  Children are excited to be growing up but we have to be conscience as parents to encourage their curiosity and thirst for knowledge.  Too much school can squash that thirst and it’s a fine line.

For us in 1st grade we add history, science, literature, spelling, grammar, memorization, art/music history, and some computer work.  That’s in addition to the reading, writing, math, and piano that we established in kindergarten.  It’s quite the adjustment for the child.  For a first child they are usually excited to be learning new things.  For a younger sibling they are big like their big brother/sister and get to do that work now!  They’re excited!

Science, history, and literature are great stories that the child probably hasn’t heard before.  The children are eager to hear these wonderful stories about new exciting things.  The major growth with those subjects in 1st grade is that the child has to really hear the story and answer questions about what they heard.  That’s a new skill that usually takes a couple months.  For us, in history, I will have the child listen to the audio story several times.  The first time they get to color the accompanying coloring sheet while they listen with headphones.  When they can’t answer any questions then they listen again without coloring.  If they still don’t know the answers, I will play the lesson out loud, and pause it after the answer to each question is given.  By the middle of 1st grade the child has learned what is expected in the lesson and tries to pay close attention to find the answers the first time.

Grammar and memorization are new in 1st grade too.  For example memorizing the definition of a noun, and poems about the days in the months.  Children are actually very good at memorizing things and our grammar lessons are short and sweet and the repetition is just right.  I also have my children pick out a poem to memorize in 1st grade.  My oldest son picked The Crocodile by Lewis Carole.  My second son has chosen A Visit by St. Nicolas by Clement Clarke Moore(he’s 1/4 through having it memorized and possibly regretting choosing such a long poem).  We have them preform their chosen poem in front of family around the end of the school year.

Spelling is a natural progression from learning phonograms and beginning reading.  We have a really long list of spelling words(with their rules explained) to complete over several years.  We do 10 words at a time.  We go over each word, and the sound each letter makes in that word.  We review any spelling rules we come across and the child copies these into his note book.  Next, I have uploaded a spelling app that allows custom spelling lists.  It has a study test option which shows the words and plays my voice using the word in a sentence.  It also has a word search and word scramble.  There is a testing feature that has smiley hints.  My children will review their spelling words in this app for several days until they feel confident to take their spelling test.  My 3rd grader is moving through his spelling lists at a quick rate while my 1st grader takes his time.  But that’s okay.  We are working on spelling mastery not an extensive 1st grade vocabulary.  Whichever words they miss on their spelling test I will add onto their next list of 10 words.

Also in addition to reading verbally with mom/dad, we start a required 30 minutes of independent reading.  At first we called it silent reading so that the child understood the difference.  But now we call it fun reading.  It’s child’s choice of which books they would like to read at this time.  But they have to choose out of a basket with books appropriate for their actual reading level, or they may look through books we got at the library that week, or follow along with an audio book.

For art/music history we try to include stories from artists and musicians from the past, pictures of their creations, or audios of their masterpieces.  We visit museums, play classical music while doing math, we do art lessons from Artistic Pursuits, and watch Little Einsteins.

We do math drills on the computer at xtramath.org and that has been a nice intro to the number pad on the computer.  The boys also do supervised google searches for special interest coloring pages.  I have a typing program that I need to get setup on a desktop for them to use that I just haven’t gotten to yet.  Typing will be part of my younger children’s 1st grade experience in the future.

2nd, 3rd, & 4th Grades

We basically continue the above pattern through fourth grade.  In 2nd or 3rd grade we will add cursive handwriting and latin.  At what point in time we add it depends on the child’s level of development.  I introduced cursive to my second grader last year and it was tears and just awful.  So we only did that one lesson(and switched curriculum).  By fall of this year it was easy peasy.  He’s flown through his Cursive Without Tears book basically all by himself.  We just purchased him a new cursive book of Bible verses that he’ll start next week.  I’m looking forward to starting latin and I would have introduced it right after Christmas break but I’m waiting for the spring conference sale.  At Mardel’s last week I decided I liked Prima Latin best so I will be picking that up on April 4th!

In 3rd grade the required reading time also increased from 30 minutes to one hour.  That’s time that has to be spent reading chapter books of the child’s choice.  I feel that it is imperative that these books be of interest to the child.  If one series doesn’t work try a different one.  Our son was intimidated by books without pictures so we started with the Geronimo series.  It was goofy and about dinosaurs.  Perfect for an 8 year-old-boy.  He’s been reading through those at a faster and faster rate which is so exciting.  This past Saturday we picked out a new Christian series that is from Odyssey that he’s interested in.  He calls it a cross between Odyssey and Magic Tree House.  I want all my children to have a love of literature.  I strive to read to them daily and often change my voice for each character.  I’m personally so grateful to my 3rd grade teacher for gifting me with a love of reading.

I haven’t taught 4th grade yet but that is our plan above.  These first four years are called the “Grammar Stage,” in classical education.  It’s when children are little sponges.  These are the years in which the building blocks for all other learning are laid.  Grades 5-8 are called the “Logic Stage,” is a time when the child begins to pay attention to cause and effect, to the relationships between different fields of knowledge relate, to the way facts fit together into a logical framework.  And grades 9-12 are called the “Rhetoric Stage,” where a student learns to write and speak with force and originality. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses his conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language.  At this point you also focus on special interests and training for the future.  (Source)

Check out my curriculum post for this 2013-2014 school year for a full list of what we use.  And here are links for information on how I teach preschool and kindergarten.