Not Back to School Blog Hop -week 1- Curriculum choice

Not Back to School Blog Hop link up

Curriculum Picks:  2012 

Approx. 5th/6th grade 

on most stuff for our son
(our last student of 4-first time in
 over 18 yrs to have only one student!)

We are continuing on with the Heart of Dakota: Creation to Christ program that we started this past spring. We made it to week 8, so we'll do a quick review the first week, then move on to week nine's lessons.  I have several posts referring to our experience up to about week 6 so you can check those out too, if you'd like.  I have those links at the bottom for ya.  

HOD C to C covers his science, history, geography and Bible.  I chose to do my own math, Lang. Arts and writing programs over what is listed. Well I will use a bit of the writing b/cuz I have the material from reviewing it a few years back but he simply is not ready for much of this....

Math is a mix up this year, as he'll wrap up his Abeka 4th grade math and then most likely I will switch him into the Saxon 54 that I have or I may be able to put him in the 65-I will know once we get to that point.  It all depends on his progress.  This age is tough because I do not want to skip over the building blocks for the higher math-just to say we're at a certain grade level.  I want to be sure he knows those basics inside and out before moving on. 

Language Arts Mix and Match:  I am doing a mix of a couple things for his lang. arts this year.  I usually hold off on formal lang. arts until the reading skills are sufficient but due to my son's dyslexia, we're a bit behind.  He will still be working on his reading comprehension and fluency (we'll prob'ly keep using the Phonics Road to Spelling and Reading level 1 flash cards and word lists until he has a much better recall of what the sounds are). Anyway, we'll be using these goodies (and I may be able to jump him into the purple after we touch upon some of the subject matter in the orange) for his lang. arts-

Learning Language Arts Through Literature-Orange, 

Italic Handwriting D* and  Italic Handwriting F**
*linked to my Amazon Affiliate link

Additional goodies:

Keeping with our Charlotte Mason methods-we'll also being doing Nature Study (using all the guides/books I have already), hopefully 2 artists and 2 great musician studies (we need to do Renoir because we simply didn't get to him last semester, still undecided about the other artist), and I haven't figured out the composers yet but will probably do Brahms and Mozart because I have the material sitting on the shelf and am trying to not buy more than I have to. 

Science is covered in the HOD study, and originally he didn't want to cover the human body, but I am going to go ahead and cover what the study does. In addition to the Apologia Land Animals (set with ST and NTBK) study, we'll continue using the rest of the snippets from the Considering God's Creation workbook (notebooking pages and some mini-lapbook components) to add in some hands-on activities which relate to the critters (and I have some things I have made which will also be another post down the road).  I will also use the Great Science Adventure Human Body and Senses to create a nice lapbook to go with the human body study.

  

Considering God's Creation image from Eagle's Wings Website

for typing skills-I am pulling this off the shelf for him to use.

Dr. Fry's Computer Keyboarding

Copywork will be a part of the LLATL and poetry from the HOD study but I will also have him work on the 

Nature lessons for Copywork

(which obviously will be a part of his NS)

Extra Geography:

the states are done, so we're moving to world geo

I revamped the geography center board from the states material to world continents/countries. We'll be starting in Asia/Europe due to the connection with the HOD C to C curriculum.  The science work I made to match the animals of the world will also be a part of this since it requires placing critters on the continents they are most usually found (I hope to have the specifics are posted on my What's in the Box? blog soon but the geo board post is up)....and BTW, I have oodles of ideas and other links on this blog-you don't need to be a workboxing fam to use these ideas....:)

OK, well this is really long.  I will do more posts on what we're using as the year progresses.  Here is the link to the 3 other HOD posts for those who are interested.

Links to all three of them

Thanks for stopping by!

**And yes, some of the links are affiliate links to Amazon.  Not all are.  Anytime you purchase thru our affiliate link-we earn a wee bit and will take that $ and donate it to an orphan/their forever family. Thanks.