Curriculum I've Used

We were living abroad when my daughter turned five, and I really needed the convenience of an all in one package for my homeschool curriculum. I also loved the concept of literature based learning.

I ordered a complete Kindergarten set from Sonlight including history, Bible, language arts, science, and art. We also used Early Bird Singapore Math. It was a great choice! MId-way through the year, my daughter "Sprite" was reading! The language arts program worked well for her!

We read lots of fun books together, made crafts, took field trips, and had a great first year homeschool experience.

Kindergarten had worked so well that I saw no need to change. I ordered complete sets from Sonlight again for first and second grades. Core 1 and Core 2 both included science, language arts, history, art, and Bible. We were still learning through reading great books.

We continued with Singapore Math as well.

Our history studies were so fun! We started with ancient civilizations and learned about Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome. Then we shifted to the Middle Ages, learned about the Vikings, and traveled on through modern days. This broad overview of history laid the foundation for future studies that would go into more detail. We used a wall timeline so that Sprite could visually see the passage of time.

During these years, I began to research the Charlotte Mason philosophy of education. I learned a lot and began to slowly incorporate elements into our homeschool -- first artist study, then nature walks and nature journaling, Shakespeare, poetry, and composer study.

Why Shift Away from Sonlight?
Overall these two years were good, but I found some of SL's read alouds a bit too traumatic for Sprite. She's a sensitive child, and some of the books actually brought her to tears! I think that the SL philosophy is to expose children to the realities of life outside of prosperous, suburban Americana. I can appreciate that. However, we don't life that life. We live in a developing nation where we daily see the realities of poverty, oppression, and hopelessness. So we don't need depressing books to make us sensitive.

I also was starting to tire of SL's constant emphasis on animals in the science curriculum. I wanted a change, a more focused approach to science in which the experiments matched what we were reading about.

With three years of homeschooling under my belt and all the online resources at my finger tips, I was confident of picking and choosing from many different curricula to create a perfect fit for Sprite. I still wanted a literature based style, somewhat Charlotte Mason, but more gentle that Sonlight. Winter Promise was the answer!

If we'd been continuing with Sonlight, we would have been studying American history, so I chose Winter Promise's American history sets -- American Story 1 for third grade and American Story 2 for fourth grade.

So, What's So Great About Winter Promise?
Great books with gentler themes and far fewer tear jerkers (than SL).
A notebooking component integrated into the program.
Easy to use instructor's guide.
Crafts, activities, and hands-on projects are an integral part of the curriculum.
A beautiful notebook timeline.
An active forum and Yahoo Group.

If your child learns well through hands-on projects and enjoys paper crafts, Winter Promise may be a good fit for you. My Sprite enjoys crafts and projects, and I was spending a lot of time finding activities to supplement SL. With WP it's all planned out for me and included as part of the schedule.

Here are other choices I made.

• Language Arts-- Learning Language Arts Through Literature


• Science-- Noeo Physics 1


• Math-- Singapore Math

And of course, we continued with artist study, nature study, Shakespeare, poetry, and composer study.

But life doesn't always work out just as we plan, and a full calendar year after we started AS1, we were still not finished. Lots of travel and a move kept us from buckling down to homeschool that year. But we kept plugging away and continued with this flexible curriculum into the fourth grade as well. When we finally finished, we took a break with Beautiful Feet's History of the Horse unit study. At the time of writing this lens, we are in the midst of that study. My daughter is almost 10 years old and according to a regular American school system, will start fifth grade in the fall of 2009.

I finally implemented living math into our curriculum in fourth grade. It was the last hold out keeping us from the Charlotte Mason styled learning that I envisioned. It took me a LONG time to shift to this way of doing math. You can read about my math journey at Transitioning to Living Math.

For fifth grade, we'll do Winter Promise's American Story 2. Major parts of history are the Underground Railroad, Civil War, Abolition of Slavery, World Wars I and II, the Civil Rights Movement, and Space Exploration. the books are all ready, on the shelves!

Science comes from Noeo Chemistry. Although I bought level one which is now too easy, I'm beefing it up with some additional books I selected from Noeo's higher levels. Visit Chemistry Lapbook for more details.

Language Arts will be a mixture of Learning Language Arts Through Literature and my own created things for writing and grammar. I am quite familiar with teaching language arts, and so I'm quite confident to wing it. For example, you can visit my Sentence Patterns lens and my How to Teach Writing Without (Buying) a Curriculum.

We'll continue on our living math track, using Singapore Math as a textbook and workbook when needed. But games, hands-on activities, notebooking, and living books will form the core of our math instruction.

So where will we go next? I'm not sure, but I've already started planning!

SIXTH GRADE
history & science program --Winter Promise Sea & Sky

SEVENTH GRADE
history --Winter Promise Quest for the Ancient World
science -- biology