Home Schooling Curriculum

I've noticed on several of the blogs I like to visit, friends will post info about the curriculum that they enjoy using for home schooling.  Sometimes I find this to be helpful in giving me ideas for things to try.  In fact, many of my curriculum choices have come as a result of seeing what worked for someone else.  So, if it's of any use to someone out there, I'll go ahead and tell you what we've been using.

 I'll start with Math, which was the one subject that Penny was struggling the most with in public school.  Math was probably the primary impetus in getting us to start home schooling.  We first started out with Houghton Mifflin books, and have now switched to Prentice Hall.  We are just about to finish up the Prentice Hall Pre-Algebra book and begin the Algebra I book.

The thing that I love about Prentice Hall is that they have an online companion website with tutorials for every lesson.  That way if I'm struggling to explain a lesson to Penny we can watch the online tutor and that usually clears up Mom's foggy memory, since it's only been close to three decades ago when she learned Algebra.

Next, let's take a look at what we do for Science...
The book we are using is  Abeka's Science of the Physical Creation.  I love how Abeka teaches good science and shows how true science does fit perfectly well with a belief in God as the Creator.

For

English...

  I'm using several different things.  The main book that I use for Grammar is also by Abeka. 

I was very unhappy with the lack of instruction Penny was getting in her high school E.S.L. class.  How were these students supposed to just "write an essay" (the main assignment in said E.S.L. class), when they weren't even being taught basic grammatical structure and things like how to write sentences with verb agreement?!  Now that I am teaching Penny basic grammar she's gaining confidence in beginning to write sentences for herself.  One of the other goals I have for her is to learn more English vocab.  I do this by choosing books for her to read.  These books often correlate with the country of the world that we happen to be learning about in Geography.  Then I pick out vocab/spelling words that I think might be new for her and enter them into lists onto the spelling city website.  This website is great, because I just enter the words (and some definitions, if they haven't already been entered, yet) and the website generates all sorts of games, activities, quizzes, etc.  We've recently begun focusing more on learning writing skills.  This has also been a very challenging thing for Penny.  But, since we started using ideas from a program called ...

...Penny has had a lot less fear and trepidation about writing.  It actually gives practical, step-by-step tools on helping students organize their thoughts into sentences, outlines and paragraphs.  With this framework, writing doesn't seem so completely overwhelming.  Another thing that we have been working on is learning idioms.  I just learned about quizlet.com from a fellow home schooling mom who is a part of our home school enrichment group, (Home School Etc.).  I saw it posted on her Pinterest page.  On Quizlet I have found some great sets of idioms that Penny can practice and learn on the computer.  This site, too, has an option to print tests for the idioms that the student has learned.

For Social Studies, we are studying World Geography... this year.  Here is the curriculum we're using, thanks to others' suggestions on their blogs:

The thing I'm really enjoying about this curriculum is that it is teaching Penny to do some basic research to fill in the information about each continent/country that she's learning about, on her own.  She is becoming a much more independent learner since starting this curriculum.  We supplement it by checking out several non fiction books from the library pertaining to the region we're studying for the week.  And, as I mentioned earlier, I also often have a book that is either fiction or nonfiction with a setting from the same geographical region to read alongside it for her English reading.  We especially reading biographical books about missionaries.

Finally, for Bible...

We're slowly working our way through the following books from Alpha Omega Publishing

It's taking us much longer than I expected to get through the material.  But, I'm just amazed at how much Penny is learning in this Overview of the Bible.  She's come a long ways, considering that she grew up in a strongly Buddhist nation, where she never had the opportunity to learn about the bible before.

So, that pretty much sums up what we're using right now.  Come January we'll be starting up some new books for social studies and science.  But, we'll perhaps save that for another blog entry.