Here’s a great homeschool video by a homeschooled teen…he gives an awesome speech, and I’m sure his parents are proud!

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We found the music flash cards! ? Of course, I could have gone to our local music store but I wanted a good deal and I found some on Ebay for about $3 and very little shipping. For those of you interested, here’s their official site: http://www.johnsonstring.com/ but check out their ebay store if you’re a music learner/teacher…you’ll find some good resources there.

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I know I haven’t updated in a while, but this month has been so busy and we’ve been having a blast. I picked up some curriculum on sale at our learning education store 2 days ago and it’s exciting to know that we can really meet our learning objectives for the year with these few workbooks!  I’m glad I don’t have to pull anything out of the “magic hat”. Honestly, sometimes I just don’t feel like hunting down resources from all over the internet. It’s nice to have a workbook or guide right at my hands for daily use, and of course, I can always modify it as needed.

Let’s see…the Abeka language arts curriculum?? Not exactly what I’d expected when we made the purchase at the homeschool fair. The teacher’s guide is more geared toward a larger classroom setting, as opposed to a private instruction or homeschool setting…and I absolutely can’t stand scripted curriculum which tells me how to teach and what to say. Suggestions are fine, but I think the Abeka program goes a little further than the suggestion mode and sounds very scripted. Example - “write student’s name in cursive and place on the desk…then greet students with the alphabet song found on page (x)…then say “this is how we write the letter ‘i’…who is our friend for the letter ‘i’? The Indian boy! Repeat after me…’i'…” Okay, you get the point.

Too scripted for me.

For language arts, we’ve found ourselves simply reading lots of books and talking about the sounds the letters make- currently focusing on both long and short vowel sounds. Nyomi loves to read the bible to me, so we count that as our Bible learning time also. We do have some bible curriculum, although I’m finding just how unecessary it is… We use Explorers, and we have the New Testament workbook for kindergarten. We find that just talking about bible stories and reading them straight from the bible is the best method.

Math has been one of our most fun subjects. We’re using Math-U-See, a Pretend & Play Cash Register with workbook (for money), plus flashcards for telling time. The Math-U-See is a well-grounded curriculum that is covering her basic foundational knowledge of math concepts. She’s learning place value of ones (or units), tens, and hundreds, counting 0-100, skip counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s, and currently addition. Later she’ll learn some subtraction, multiplying is introduced, and telling time. All of this using the manipulatives is really helping her tremendously and she can’t wait for math time.

For social studies, we’re studying the presidents…just stuff we’re finding off the internet. We also bought a small booklet for kindergartners about the community and rules, presidents, and other social studies facts so we’ll integrate that. Science…hmmmm…after the sunflower project we seem to be at a stand still. Mostly we’ve been looking at pictures of animals and discussing their habitats. I think I’d like for us to start a unit on senses and do some experiments with that…I’ll keep you posted.

I’m STILL looking for a good set of cheap music note flashcards. I thought maybe I could find some for free download on the internet, but to no avail. Perhaps I’ll try ebay. Piano is going well — we’re mostly in review of songs she already has learned. We started a new song this week called “Ode To Joy”, but before we go any further with new songs I want Nyomi to have a better concept of the notes she’s reading and being able to truly recognize them with or without the name of the note placed beside it. Hence, the flashcards are needed for daily review.

French…that’s something my husband is helping her with. I’m going to dub him our official French instructor since that was his native language and he’s fluent. I’ve done a few French games with her, and that’s been fun…but nothing helps as much as hearing the French in every day spoken language. I also bought a little CD and booklet curriculum for young kids to listen and learn French through song and phrases. Nyomi is loving that CD and listens to it in her spare time. Well, that’s an update on our reviews for this month. Next time, I’ll take more pictures of projects she’s embarked on since we plan to do more of those in the upcoming weeks. Until next time…

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