Ending Thoughts on our Curriculum - Part 2

So, now that we had our schedule and Science figured out we continued our school year.  We were now technically "behind" the public school schedule, meaning we had not completed as many weeks in our school year as they had theirs.  But no worries.  I was just happy that we had something that worked.

We used Sonlight for our Core subjects - Bible, History, Geography, and Reading.  As was the case for our Kindergarten year, Sonlight's literature selections were awesome.  Our main History "texts" were A Child's History of the World, The Usborne Book of World History, and The Usborne Time Traveler.  As most of you know, I am an Usborne representative, and so I'm very fond of Usborne books.  These two did not disappoint.  The pictures, captions, and text were simple to read, easy to understand, and really kept R engaged.  She loved seeing inside the buildings, what they ate, how their cities looked, how they worked.  A Child's History of the World was a little tougher in the beginning to grasp, but as we are nearing the end of the Roman Empire (we will complete the World History Unit in 2nd grade), the chapters are quick, simple to read and understand and enjoyable.  I've especially liked how the book explains the empire changes and how they occured.  It can be very disjointed to study the Assyrians, then all of a sudden, we're studying the Greeks and their empire.  How did it happen?  When did the change happen?  Who were the key players?  This book really flushes it out nicely, and perfectly on-level for a first grader.

The Read-Alouds and Readers were also amazing.  R was introduced to Beverly Cleary in Henry Huggins and has since devoured two or three Ramona books in her free time.  The books chosen have really pushed her to move outside the 'fake' chapter books (you know the ones, 2-3 pages, with lots of pictures in one chapter) to real chapter books.  Henry Huggins was a Read-Aloud - a book I read to her.  But she enjoyed it, and many others, so much, she wanted to dig in herself.  She's now proficiently reading long chapter books, and I give all the credit to Sonlight.  Introducing kids to great books only encourages them to explore them themselves.
Some of our favorites this year were:
Charlotte's Web  (which we conveniently read around the time we needed to butcher our pigs...)
Henry Huggins
Mountain Born
Mr. Popper's Penguins
Understood Betsy
R really enjoyed a lot of the readers, though they were much too easy for her by the end of the year.  Her favorites were the Frog and Toad books (she thought they were silly friends, like her and her best friend).

A Reason for Handwriting was very good, in my opinion.  It was too easy, but I did want to make sure we built a solid foundation for handwriting before moving on to sentences and dictation work.  It isn't too much copy work, which is what I was looking for.  She knows how to form her letters, we were looking for neatness and correctness, which I felt like didn't need pages and pages of practice.  Our lessons were letter formation on the front side, a color page (something of God's creation that started with that letter) on the back.  It will be more difficult next year, and I'm hoping that the foundation we built this year will help.

Shurley English - Level 1, was awesome.  R hated the sentence work at the beginning of each lesson (diagramming 3 sentences per lesson), but enjoyed the lessons and activities in the workbook.  She especially enjoyed the journal entries.  We took that idea and created "Letter Books" for both her Grandpa and Nana that they pass back and forth.  R will write a letter, draw a picture, write a story, etc and give the book back and Grandpa and Nana will also write something.  It's been a lot of fun for all involved and I highly recommend something like that for writing practice.  Writing letters to someone is a great way to get a child to practice lessons.  R had to write her first paragraphs this year, writing about 2 things (topic given) she liked.  For 2 of her practice lessons, I had her write the paragraphs on 2 things she liked to do with Grandpa/Nana.  It was good practice and also a lesson in gratitude for all the fun things they get to do together.
We did skip the first 6 chapters of lessons.  It was a lot of practice categorizing pictures into different groups and then into smaller groups.  R didn't need more practice with those things, so after the first 2 lessons, we just took a break and picked it up where we would have anyways, had we done all the lessons.

Saxon Math.  Oh, Saxon.  How I love thee.  How R doesn't like fact practice.  She actually doesn't mind the worksheets, and we both prefer the fact that there is no text book for her, just a teacher's manual for me and we work out the concepts together.  But R hates memorizing her facts.  After months of fighting her on it, I finally started timing her, giving her an incentive to finish under a certain period of time.  And you know what?  She did it.  She barely missed it the first time, but the second time, she finished a whole minute early.  So, I'm calling it Facts Master (remember those???) and we're going to work on it until she can get it done super fast!  I told her if she can finish all 40 problems in under 5 minutes, we'll go to Sonic for a slush.  She won't do it this year as we're almost done with math, but we'll continue next year and see how it goes!
In other Saxon stuff, I really like the way it introduces a concept, but doesn't drill it for days.  There are a few problems every day to reinforce the concept and then a couple weeks later we revisit it and build on it.  It makes the learning seem 'new' every day, rather than mundane.  Some people do not like that particular point of Saxon, feeling like a concept never gets flushed out.  I see it working in R and I think it also makes the kids feel more empowered like they are mastering something more independently than being drilled and drilled and drilled over the same thing all the time.  It can feel a little 'random' at times, but I trusted the system and I'm happy with the results so far.

So that's my review of curriculum this year.  I hope this helps someone who is considering any of these to make a choice.  Overall, I'm thrilled with how our year turned out, speed bumps and all.