Join us for Kindergarten Time! Using Abeka, Saxon, and My Father's World

 I'm probably biting off more than I can chew, but what else is new.

I'm going to attempt to coordinate Abeka Kinder Phonics/Reading with My Father's World Kinder and Saxon Kinder.

I'll plan to post my weekly lesson plans along with pictures and highlights of each week in case you are looking to do the same.

The Saxon part will be easy to incorporate into the mix, but coordinating between My Father's World and Abeka is a bit more challenging as they each follow their own plan for introducing letters and sounds and those plans DON'T line up with each other.

Here's to the start of another crazy awesome year! 

2011-2012 Curriculum for Kingdom Academy

My dabbling into next year's curriculum has come in spurts. Now that these 'spurts' are finally tallied up and various thoughts have been gathered together...I think we have a plan for my 2nd grader and (2) 4th graders. They are growing up so fast!

A fun rainy spring day :)

We are going to continue with My Father's World (MFW). This year, we move into Exploring Countries and Cultures (ECC). This will be year 1 of a 5 year multi-age family cycle. I am really excited about ECC. It looks like so much fun and the kiddos are really hyped up about it!!!

MFW ECC covers Bible, literature, history/geography, science, music appreciation, art, and character development. Check out their link here. 

Abeka has been working well for us, so we are also going to roll with it.

We use Abeka for math, language arts, reading, and spelling. Check out their link here.

Even though My Father's World ECC covers science during the school year, my kiddos love it so much that we are going to continue with "summer science" using Apologia's Exploring Creation with Botany. This year, we are going to forego purchasing the Notebooking Journal though. Last year, we purchased the notebook that went with astronomy and never got to do much in it. The book itself has waay more projects and activities than we can ever get to, so we'll just stick with the book/manual this year.

Did you miss my last post?....field trip ideas for My Father's World Exploring Countries and Cultures....if so, check it out here.

Review of Week 21

I love that my kids love to read!

A is still working on The Courage of Sarah Noble. She sort of got side tracked on a new series called That's Nat!. She absolutely loves them! They are all Christian based about a little school aged girl named Natalie.

J is my speed reader. He reads books faster than I can get my hands on em. He's already gone through his new series, The Sugar Creek Gang, also Christian based. He finished up Farmer Boy a day or two ago and is about half way through Mountain Born already.

Yes, I know several of these books are read-alouds for MFW, but we just never seem to find the time to get to them with everything else we have going on. So, the kids read these in their spare time.

A is getting much better at her math facts. She loves when I hide the flashcards and she finds them one at a time and answers them. 

J and S are learning things I know I never did in the 3rd grade math...like equations... and they are pretty good at them too.

The state studies are going ok. A loves everything about them. She could color for hours. J pretty much does the bare minimum...state flag, state abbreviation, and state capitol. Every now and then he feels like going all out.

The kids enjoyed learning about Robert Fulton. They wondered how he was able to keep the water out of his diving ship while he attached a bomb to another boat. Hmmm...I guess we'll be looking that up this weekend on the internet :) 

Makin' Changes and Makin' Rain

After the long Christmas break, this week back in school went surprisingly better than I had planned. My little brother, S, will be homeschooling with us from here on out now which brings along a few changes. He uses the Abeka DVD program and we do not. I beat my head trying to figure out how we could fit in all of the things my kids were doing plus the things he was doing. There was no way I could do it all and still keep my sanity! (We use Abeka too, but only for math and language. For history, Bible, and science, we use other curriculums. ) My dad has already paid for the entire year of Abeka DVD, plus S's grades are all sent stright to Abeka. (I keep track of my kids' grades myself.) Anyway, I didn't want to mess up S's records for this school year or anything, so I had to come up with some sort of compromise.

I think we've got a plan though. Since my husband does MFW Bible in the evening with my kids, we just get in the Abeka Bible lesson with S through DVD in the mornings. We are taking a break with our Apologia science (this was the hardest part for my kids because they loved learning about the planets) to finish up S's Abeka science with him through the DVD. We also do S's Health, Safety, and Manners Abeka lessons with him and he does MFW History with us. Soon, S's Abeka history lessons will start up and I think we will have to split up at that point and S do his history lessons with the DVD teacher while I do MFW history with J and A. I don't know...we'll think more about that obstacle when we come to it I guess. 

Now for what we did this week....

In history, we learned about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Sadly, we did not get around to picking the fake seeds out of the cotton balls though like we had planned, but some things just fall by the way side I guess. The kids did have some fun this week "making rain" in their science experiment though.


The steam coming from the boiling water represented a cloud.



The ice cubes in the dish represented cold air.



Warm, moist air (the steam/cloud) met up with the cold air (the ice cubes)...

...Thus creating "raindrops" .

And the "raindrops" begin to fall

All in all, it was a good week :)

Our 2010-2011 Curriculum

I have a 1st grade daughter, a 2nd grade son, and a 3rd grade brother who often joins us in our home school adventures each week.

This year, we have chosen to continue using Abeka for Language and Math. We have added in Apologia and My Father's World. We use Apologia for science. I let the kids choose from the list of things they had to offer for their ages and they chose Astronomy. So this year, our focus will be on that. I think it is important to allow your kids some say into what they would like to learn. If they are more interested in a certain topic, I feel they would be more engaged and open to learning about that particular topic.

In My Father's World (MFW), we are using the Adventures curriculum this year. We focus more on the Biblical and Historical aspects MFW has to offer. We are loving it! It brings in the Biblical history our country was founded upon and it allows my husband, J, to be a part of our home school adventures. He usually does the Bible part of the curriculum with them in the evenings after he gets home from work. The kids love it and mom gets a little break ;)