Our Curriculum

I have been asked several times about out curriculum that we use. I have made posts about various aspects of our curriculum but thought I would make one generalized post about it.

When looking for a curriculum I wanted one that would offer most all the favorite learning resources I used with my older children. I didn’t want to be bouncing from one vendor to another vendor piecing everything together. I started my search about a year ago, contacting different vendors and requesting their catalogs.

The one that I found that had most all the elements I was looking for was Christian Liberty Press. I like the fact that they offer a few different options for math, MCP math, Saxon math, or Liberty math. We will start with Liberty math in Kindergarten then use MCP math in second grade, then move on into Saxon math in fourth grade.

I love the fact that Christian Liberty Press has a very strong phonics curriculum, though in the past I have used MCP for phonics. You can no longer order just MCP materials as homeschoolers though. From previous experience their History and Geography curriculum is very rich and easy for a child to dig right into. I guess as you can see while I mixed and matched with my older children, I find this curriculum to be the perfect fit for Selena, anyway at this time.

This year we are working with their pre-school curriculum. We have the following materials:

I love the Activity book for the way it introduces new concepts. It does seem to be a little repetitive for Selena, but she still enjoys working in it. The Drill book has plenty of worksheets around handwriting. Right now we are currently using Kumon workbooks for our writing skills. We haven’t done much with the Drill book yet, but it will be a nice tool as Selena gets more into her writing skills. The 5 readers, cover the short vowel sound. Selena didn’t really care for them that well so we moved on with Progressive Phonics, and supplemented with a Kindergarten Enrichment Curriculum from Abeka (I am unsure if this reading set is still offered at Abeka, my friend found it on Ebay and I have yet to find a link where you can purchase it.

Currently I am writing our own math curriculum, which has covered number recognition, grouping, patterns, and simple addition and subtraction. I will be including things like time, measuring and what ever else I think of as we move forward here.

Science right now is another area that I just research on line for simple experiments, or take ideas off of Sid the Science Kid.

Geography/History, I just came up with the idea to start the postcard theme and begin a scrapbook of the United States, then Countries that she will be able to add on to in years to come. Right now we are basically just looking at the States, where they are at on our Atlas, finding them on our US map. They are colored in according to the color of the State Flag. We make a page with the State, the State Flag, and State Seal with a pocket on the back for the postcard. I always try to include some interesting facts. This truly is just a beginning of a curriculum that Selena will build upon throughout the years. We don’t really dwell that deep into it at this point. I just love to see Selena make the observations that she makes as she compares the different States with our State.

This is our curriculum in a nutshell. We mostly just have fun!