HomeSchool Curriculum

Friday's topic for Back to HomeSchool week is Curriculum.

What curriculum do you use? Where do you buy it? Have you found a "gem" that you must share with others? Was something in particular a complete failure for you and your kids?

Oh, a chance to get link happy!!

I was surprised to find that we are embarking into our 4th year of homeschooling. But still, in curriculum years that's not very long. Our first two years with Mini-Me, we did ABeka Academy. While it had its good points, it was very rigid. It worked well for us, but with a new baby brother in the house we quickly fell behind. Catching up was not easy. Bible memory was fast and furious and I don't think she remembers much of it any more.

Our 3rd year we opted to not do the academy, and use just ABeka Book supplies. They use the same books, they are just two different entities.

This year we are using the following:

Mini-Me:

ABeka Language, Writing Skills (though I don't know how hard we will hit this book), Arithmatic 3, and a smattering of spanish that I've picked up here.

For G:

ABeka Phonics 1, Language 1, Arithmatic 1, and Writing 1 (manuscript).

For both we'll us Adventures in My Father's World. It has History, Science and Bible lessons integrated into small, doable lessons. With this curriculum came the art program, I Can Do all Things. I have one book that says I can make copies for both the kids (as it is a consumable text).

I had also purchased reading books from Sonlight. Without getting up to look through my receipts I can't tell you which package I purchased. I really only wanted the reading books as the books seemed to go along with Adventures.

Last year, I bought KONOS. While it is a great product, it just didn't work for my family. For some reason, every time I looked at it to sit down and plan things out, I couldn't. I became convinced that it just wasn't going to work for my family at this time. Especially considering we could only do certain parts of our school work. So to me, it seemed like I was just doing the hard stuff and none of the fun stuff. When, in reality, I was getting the basics done. And that was just fine.

That falls into the category of I wish I'd known... that it is okay to just do reading, writing and 'rithmatic. Easy on the writing. :-) Even though I've got the Writing curriculum from ABeka, if it's painful for us, I'll move on to something else. Something like copy work. Mini-Me really liked copying poems from a little book that we absolutely loved. Oh, and this year, she has her very own pen-pal. I hope that will help her writing skills, too. She is beside herself with excitment.

That is our curriculum in a nutshell. I still get curriculum envy when I look about because not everthing I have is perfect. So we'll keep what works, and toss out what doesn't. (I guarantee we won't be doing all of the "seatwork" prescribed by ABeka.)

I can't wait to see what curriculum others are using.