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Homeschooling, Main

Grade 4 Curriculum

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Grade 4 Curriculum
Margaret is a bit more of an unknown. We did do a practice day where I borrowed her from public school for the day. I did a number of activities with her and we talked about them afterwords. We eliminated somethings and add some others. Overall I expect that I will make changes throughout the year as we figure out her learning style better.

Bible

Margaret has been in Catechism, so that will continue. At this level that would probably meet our requirements on its own but we have a couple of other things planned. One of the books she likes the look of from her practice day was Lord, Teach me to pray, For Kids. Since there was an earlier book in the series offered in the package we got How to Study Your Bible for Kids. We will also be using a kids Missal to study each weeks readings. They come with some commentary so that will help with the discussions.

English

I really liked the Student Writing Intensive for Philip. It was his weakest subject and it is not Margaret’s strongest either. The DVD lessons make it a lot easier for me and I was very impressed with Philip’s improvement last year.

For the reading portion we will be using the books that are listed in the social studies section. I like the two birds with one stone idea.

Social Studies

Our broad areas are the Early Explorers to North America, and First Nations. We also have to add some mapping to that but that we will work in to the other stuff. I plan on using a couple of living books, specifically:

The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow
Dangerous Journey : The Story of Pilgrims Progress
Indian Captive
Children of the longhouse
Lost in the Barrens

On the explorers part we have Time Travelers Series : New World Explorers. It looks interesting but it is our first exposure to their products. We will also use researching on Wikipedia.

Science

For science we have Light and Sound, Weather, Food Chains and habitats.

For the weather I would really like to get a digital weather station. Certainly we will keep a log. I also have a friend that is a meteorologist so I am hoping to get a tour of the local weather station. Beyond that I expect that we will do some research online.

I have some cool experiments for the light and sound section. We will play with prisms and shadows and maybe a diffraction grating. I plan on making a tin can phone for the sound part. We will also tie it into the weather with thunder and lightning and how to tell the distance.

For the Habitats we will be using the book One Small Square : Woods. It looks really good and will go well with keeping a journal. We are also going to use Healthy Habitats.

Math

IXL has worked well for Philip so we will start with it for Margaret as well.

Art

My wife has offered to do some music with the kids in the morning. I would like to do sketching everyday. Last year I bought Drawing with Children by Mona Brooks. I did some exercises out of it but I would like to get in to it more this year. Other than that we will wing it.

Homeschooling, Main, Uncategorized

Grade 6 Curriculum

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Last year I started out with a recommended package for curriculum. It was put together by out local homeschooling store and it is quite good. I made changes to it last year after a lot of research. This year with a year under our belts and a better understanding I will be even more particular about what I buy.

Grade 6 Curriculum

Bible:

Last year we had a workbook that simply was boring for him. Fill in the blanks is not his learning style. This year we are going more the living books, Charlotte Mason style. I have two Christian Heroes , Then and Now Books. One was in the Recommended Package. I liked the looks of that one and they had one for C.S. Lewis that I had to buy it as well. Since Philip read and loved all the Narnia Series last year he will love this.

I also bought Mother Teresa’s biography. It is going to be some heavy reading but he is up to it. It will certainly bring up some questions and thoughts for him.

He will also continue to attend Catechism. We will also be reading a Children’s Missal for the weekly readings and commentary.

English:

We are going to continue with Student Writing Intensive. It made a huge difference in his writing last year and we didn’t finish the course. Writing is not his strong suit so the changes we saw with the bit of the course he did do was amazing. The best direct use was when he took notes for an essay. He copied whole sentence and the essay was sounding to much like the source. I had him go back to the notes and apply the three word exercise to each sentence and then rewrite based only on those words.

We also have two books for the reading part of English. These will by no means be the only thing he reads but they are the ones where he will have to complete some sort of project on.

Math:

We use IXL. It is really designed for practice but I have a heavy science and math background. He works through it until he hits something he can’t figure out then he asks and we go over it. Math is also one of his best subjects.

Science:

We have three area to cover. The first is extreme environment for life. I plan on using this one to examine the possibility of life on other worlds. What is the minimum they would require. This will mostly be online resources including some of the podcast from Astronomy 141 by Prof. Richard Pogge. Philip has listened to some of these before. My expectations for the knowledge gained has to be lower than what the course would require but he still gets loads out of them.

The second is the diversity of life from single cell and up. We also have to cover the kingdoms. This will likely be largely rolled in with the first and mostly online resources.

The third is electricity and electronics. We have cover a lot of this area before. One of the recommended items is a Snap Circuits Kit. These are wonderful and I highly recommended them but we have had one for years and he has already done all the experiments. We will start there to reinforce and make sure we have all terms worked out. I also have an Arduino micro-controller board that we are planning on using over the summer. I just need to make sure that I keep track of our summer projects for portfolio purposes.

Social Studies:

The majority of Grade 6 is comparing countries in a number of ways, from culture, laws, government, demographics, rights, economy, quality of life and society. We are going to be doing three countries. The first is our own (Canada) of course. The second will be China. That one was picked by Philip. He has long had a fascination with China. The third, picked by me, is Pakistan. I plan on having him read Malala’s story. She has a book coming out in October that should be very informative. The Canadian stuff we will probably look up online and discuss. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is available online and is only 2 pages long. The Chinese will probably be mostly online as well although I am looking for a book for him to read, preferably a living book.

Foreign Language:

I will be enrolling him in the Rosetta Stone Mandarin course provided by our Distance Learning provider. It worked well last year so we will continue with level 2. I also found that the local Chinese Association has language lessons. I am planning to give those a try over the summer. I want to see how well he is doing in a more real world application.

Art:

This is always the one that is most up in the air. We covered the requirements last year with Irish Dance and a little bit of drawing. I would like to add more drawing to the schedule and some music. My wife has the musical talent in our family. It looks like she will do something with the kids in the morning before going to work.

Homeschooling, Main

Starting to Homeschool

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We have decided to homeschool our oldest who is about to go into grade 5. The reason for doing this are numerous. The main reason is that he interacts better in smaller groups. This is something that I can provide through homeschooling. The second is that we have more control over the content and the speed of the curriculum. We can speed it up and not worry about leaving people behind. We can customize the content to be more of what he is interested in. We can go into it deeper if we like and if he doesn’t understand it will be easier to remedy. It comes down to personalized vs mass produced. What would you prefer a mass produced McDonald’s sundae or one made with homemade everything personalized the way you like it.

First I should explain the variations that we have here in BC. First there is registering for homeschooling. That means no funding, no supervision, no criteria. Meaning that I could teach him anything I wanted including outright falsehoods and the government would do nothing. Needless to say that is NOT the path we are taking. The second and the path we are taking is called distributed learning through Heritage Online Christian School. The details differ from school to school. With them we get a teacher assigned to use to provide guidance and mark a portfolio that we provide. We would get report cards with letter grades based on that material. We are required to meet Provincial Learning Outcomes which means the school gets funding from the government. They then pass on a portion of that funding to us to use for material.

The second thing is that there are co-ops where we as parents get together and hire someone to teach a particular course to a small number of kids. I intend to pick at least one of these so that he has a group setting to work on his social skills in. There are also group activities/field trips planned throughout the year that would provide the same.

So for curriculum they have a package that we can purchase through a local homeschooling store. So rather than reinventing the wheel I started with that. There were a couple of areas where I am choosing to substitute material.

The first is with Foreign Language, which we are required to provide at this level. Normally given that we are in Canada this would be French but my son has long had a fascination with China, thus he wants to learn Chinese. At this level he doesn’t need much. Its more of an introduction. So we are going to be using an online version of Rosetta Stone that is offered through Heritage. I am also going to have Grandma who is Bilingual teach him the few phrases he needs for French.

Second is science. I didn’t like the book that they had in their package. Now I may of not given it a fair chance but it was also expensive. I am Catholic and believe all that entails but when it come to science I want to dig deep into why and how. The book had a very shallow explanation and the deeper was all ‘Its God’ I have already had to reconcile the existence of God and the big bang to my kids. I know that he would question some of the statements in the book and thus I feel that it would hurt his faith not help it. As a result we are going to be using the textbook (Probe 5) used by the public system plus my own knowledge.

The third is more of an addition. We are considering adding Student Writing Intensive from Excellence in Writing. Writing is the course that worries me the most. Its not my strongest subject although I have improved from my school days. Its also not his best subject. The other option is to find a local group that is teaching it. A friend of mine from church has the course and is willing to let me have a look at it before I go and buy it.

Below I put my very tentative schedule. I expect this will change the first week in but I needed a place to start. Plus a schedule gives me that sense of security.

Homeschool Schedule

We have decided to homeschool our oldest who is about to go into grade 5. The reason for doing this are numerous. The main reason is that he interacts better in smaller groups. This is something that I can provide through homeschooling. The second is that we have more control over the content and the speed of the curriculum. We can speed it up and not worry about leaving people behind. We can customize the content to be more of what he is interested in. We can go into it deeper if we like and if he doesn’t understand it will be easier to remedy. It comes down to personalized vs mass produced. What would you prefer a mass produced McDonald’s sundae or one made with homemade everything personalized the way you like it.

First I should explain the variations that we have here in BC. First there is registering for homeschooling. That means no funding, no supervision, no criteria. Meaning that I could teach him anything I wanted including outright falsehoods and the government would do nothing. Needless to say that is NOT the path we are taking. The second and the path we are taking is called distributed learning through Heritage Online Christian School. The details differ from school to school. With them we get a teacher assigned to use to provide guidance and mark a portfolio that we provide. We would get report cards with letter grades based on that material. We are required to meet Provincial Learning Outcomes which means the school gets funding from the government. They then pass on a portion of that funding to us to use for material.

The second thing is that there are co-ops where we as parents get together and hire someone to teach a particular course to a small number of kids. I intend to pick at least one of these so that he has a group setting to work on his social skills in. There are also group activities/field trips planned throughout the year that would provide the same.

So for curriculum they have a package that we can purchase through a local homeschooling store. So rather than reinventing the wheel I started with that. There were a couple of areas where I am choosing to substitute material.

The first is with Foreign Language, which we are required to provide at this level. Normally given that we are in Canada this would be French but my son has long had a fascination with China, thus he wants to learn Chinese. At this level he doesn’t need much. Its more of an introduction. So we are going to be using an online version of Rosetta Stone that is offered through Heritage. I am also going to have Grandma who is Bilingual teach him the few phrases he needs for French.

Second is science. I didn’t like the book that they had in their package. Now I may of not given it a fair chance but it was also expensive. I am Catholic and believe all that entails but when it come to science I want to dig deep into why and how. The book had a very shallow explanation and the deeper was all ‘Its God’ I have already had to reconcile the existence of God and the big bang to my kids. I know that he would question some of the statements in the book and thus I feel that it would hurt his faith not help it. As a result we are going to be using the textbook (Probe 5) used by the public system plus my own knowledge.

The third is more of an addition. We are considering adding Student Writing Intensive from Excellence in Writing. Writing is the course that worries me the most. Its not my strongest subject although I have improved from my school days. Its also not his best subject. The other option is to find a local group that is teaching it. A friend of mine from church has the course and is willing to let me have a look at it before I go and buy it.