Ending Thoughts for our Curriculum - Part 1 (Scheduling and Science)

As our year comes to a close, I was thinking it would be a good idea to give a review of our curriculum options that we chose for this year.  We stopped for about a month shortly after the year began to rearrange, reevaluate and figure out what we needed to do because what we had was not working.

We originally started doing each subject every day.  We quickly realized it was a waste of time doing it that way as I spent more time getting out books and resources than actually studying the material.  I even have a handy cabinet right next to me to hold all of our current books so I'm not wasting time getting up and around between subjects, but even then, it was just too much shuffling.  I never felt like we got anything.  So I took the advice of my husband and switched to block scheduling.  For those not familiar (like myself) with block scheduling, you do half of the subjects on one day ("A" days), half on the other("B" Days).  In a five day week, it would look like this:
Week 1: A  B  A  B  A
Week 2: B  A  B  A  B

We have a 4 day week, so ours are just A  B  A  B.  It worked out phenomenally!  We did two lessons from each subject on it's given day, and really felt like we relished in the material, rather than rushed through a lesson and onto the next thing.  We did do our Bible lessons every day (partially because I think it's a great way to start the day, and partially because the Bible lessons are fairly lengthy to try to get 2 done in one day).

So, problem numero uno solved.

Our next problem was science.  Ahhh, Science.  Since this is "my" area, I lovingly spent hours researching and deciding exactly what I wanted to do with R.  Plenty of hands-on experiments to help her make sense of the world she sees every day.  I ended up going with the Sonlight Science program, but I did the Kindergarten level program, instead of 1st grade.  K starts with air, water, and botany, and some biology - all of which are things we deal with on a daily basis and the experiments were just so exciting to me!

But reality hit.  And it hit hard.  R hated Science.  She groaned every time we even mentioned it.  She drug her feet, refused to pay attention and was just being stubborn all the way around.

And I realized that I had chosen a Science program for me, not for her.  At least not at this stage.  Since my daughter has a definite linguistic 'bent,' I had pored over all of our curriculum choices to make sure they would fulfill her need for books and reading.  But I had forgotten to think about that when it came to my favorite subject.  So, during our extended fall break, I decided to do a non-science Science curriculum for the year.  Our good friends were studying the Burgess Bird Book and seemed to be enjoying it so I looked into it.  The Burgess series is written as a fictional story from the perspective of Peter Rabbit or his furry or feathered friends.  The stories are obviously fiction, but the premise of the stories is that Peter (and Co.) are wanting to learn more about the world around them, and Burgess skillfully integrates biology lessons about other animals into the story.

The first in the series is the Burgess Bird Book.  I am incredibly surprised just how much we both learned about the native birds of North America from this fictional book.  R has become an avid bird watcher and loves looking out the windows to see what birds she can find.  The second in the series is the Burgess Animal Book, and we learned about many, many, MANY different animals and animal families from North America.  The last book is the Burgess Seashore Book.  This book is from the perspective of Reddy Fox, Jimmy Skunk, and Danny Meadow Mouse (which we met in detail in the Burgess Animal Book) and their trip to the seashore.  Another homerun as we learned about clams, crabs, worms, starfish, etc.  There were very few fish or animals that lived in deeper water, but there were a lot of neat discoveries.  My favorite thing about these books is that we meet the animals as friends, with first and last names.  So the Cardinals that frequent my yard are "Glory Cardinal and Mrs. Cardinal."  The Canadian Geese are "Honker and Mrs. Honker."  We have made new friends with these books and I'm extremely happy that we were able to do them together.

More review on the rest of our curriculum tomorrow...