What We're Doing

M and H are both in first grade this year.  This is what we're studying/using:

Reading - Dancing Bears (Bear Necessities A1) - We have tried about a million reading/phonics curricula and nothing worked until this year.  I love DB.  I suspect oldest has dyslexia and this has been the first thing that worked.  It's been amazing.  In less than 6 weeks time (and with some vacation in there!), he went from not being able to sound out the word "at" to being able to read the words "dark" and "feet."

Math - Singapore 1A US - Love Singapore.  I'm a former math teacher and heavily biased towards the Asian-inspired curriculum and I find that it works well for us.  We have a lot of fun doing math, and it's fun to see the kids little minds working so differently to arrive at the same answer.

Science - Magic School Bus Kits - We're using MSB right now as a kind of stop-gap before we start our "real" science.  I loved the look of lots of other science curricula (my favorite was R.E.A.L Science Odyssey), but with my kids not really reading, I wanted to wait a year before we started them.  So far the MSB has been a big hit.  We're exploring science and having fun.  I supplement the MSB activities heavily with books from the library.

History - Story of the World, Volume 1 - LOVE this.  The kids LOVE this.  We're a story-loving family and this just works so well for us.  I love the Activity Book and we hope to do one or two fun activities every week that accompany our reading.  We also listen to the CDs instead of me reading every chapter outloud, which is a nice break from all the reading that I do and gives me a chance to relax and enjoy some of homeschool, too!

Bible/Scriptures - We're reading through Egermeier's Bible Story Book, which I love so, so much.  It has just the right amount of detail for my kids' attention spans and summarizes the stories well.  We also work on a new memory scripture every week.  Right now we're studying the Articles of Faith for our church.


Activity-wise, we're also pretty busy.  M and H are enrolled in year-round swim lessons, and they start piano up again soon.  We do a homeschool co-op once a week, too, where the kids have classes in art and music and get the chance to play games with other kids their own ages.  We're also thinking about doing 4-H this year as a family, and H receives speech therapy twice a week, so we've got a pretty packed schedule!