Belated Curriculum Post!

To be honest, I haven't kept up with my regular blog friends since Little Bird was born. I have a very few I check often, but my long list on my feed? Not so much. But I do remember I always loved reading curriculum posts. You can tell alot about a homeschool by what curriculum they have chosen! Now we are over halfway through our year, and I don't think I ever did write a curriculum post! So, in case y'all are wondering, here's what we use:

Our core curriculum is Adventures in My Father's World. It's technically for 2nd to 3rd graders. I have a seven year old (nearly 8) and a six year old doing it. They are ALL over the place in the various subjects, so I really don't have them in any particular grade level. We all love this curriculum, and highly recommend it. My Father's World covers their music, art, history, Bible, and science.

That being said, we don't use their Language Arts or Math suggestions.

For math, little Bean (7) uses Teaching Textbooks 4, and so far we are pleased. Miss O (6) uses Christian Light Education 1 and so far, again we are pleased. Eventually, I plan to move her to TT as well. It doesn't start until 3rd grade, so for now, we are staying with CLE.

For Language Arts we use: Amish Pathway Readers, grade 3. Miss O reads them aloud, and Little Bean completes the corresponding workbook pages. We love the readers, but the workbooks is...blah. We will continue with the readers next year and leave the workbook aside.

Writing With Ease, level 1. It's ok. We won't be using it again next year.

All About Spelling. Little Bean finished Level 4 this year and Miss O is starting Level 4. So Bean is taking a break while O finishes this level, and then they'll enter Level 5 together (this will really cut down on the individual time I have to spend on spelling).

For handwriting, Bean is using a cursive workbook, but it's really not been helpful. Miss O is using A Reason for Handwriting. It's fine, but we probably will switch next year. She is nearly finished.

We use Heart of Dakota for book recommendations. And we get those at the library. :) HOD has some great book lists!

We also have Heritage History's CD libraries. We have their Young Reader's Collection and one other. The books on these CD's are all public domain, but beautifully formatted for you. These we use to supplement our history studies. Bean reads many of them on his own (daily reading time) and we read them together as well. Right now, he is reading Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans, and together we are moving through Boys and Girls of Colonial Days. I highly recommend HH. It is a valuable supplement to any history program. The books are of a very good quality, and it is very inexpensive. I had a coupon code, and only spent $20 on two collections.

I'm writing a family devotional!

And I'm planning to share it with you all! :) Don't get overly excited, I'm not writing a book or anything, but a ten lesson family devotional on the fruit of the Spirit. Our church has been talking about the fruit of the Spirit recently on Sundays, and one day as we were heading home, I said something to Raymond about how we should study the fruit of the Spirit in our family worship time. He laughed, saying he was thinking the same thing. I love when what we learn in church can be expanded upon at home!

We found a devotion online and started using it, only to quickly find that it didn't meet our needs. It was too watered down, and there wasn't enough scripture explaining what each fruit of the Spirit really is. It was a great jumping off point, but every night I kept thinking that there was so much more we were adding to our study and I started wanting to rewrite it myself. So I am!

Hopefully there are those of you out there who read my blog and would benefit from something like this. I'm not sure how long it will take me, but I hope to finish fairly quickly. This is the first time I've ever attempted to write something like this, and I'm finding that I enjoy it very much and will likely write more in the future! The other aspect is learning to share files. Does anyone have advice on that? I had a dear reader offer to host my power cards (a very popular post on my blog due to pinterest), but I would rather host my own files so I guess I need to figure that out too!

I'm so excited to share this devotional with you all, and I hope some of you are excited as well!