Our Curriculum and Plan for 2019-2020 School Year

This is our second year homeschooling. Alexie just turned 4 this summer and she has gone through some pretty big changes in the last 6 months, which will really change what we are doing this year.

Back in March, Alexie was diagnoses with 67 food sensitivities which were triggering her sever eczema. Since eliminating those things from her diet her eczema has cleared up completely. And so has her napping. She quit napping which has really opened up our afternoon for more “activities” as she calls them. So we have a little more time to do some more exploring, outings and activities.

(If you are wondering about Zoé, she doesn’t need as much sleep and she isn’t as chained to her routine as Alexie. She’s more go with the flow and is happy to bop around with us wherever we go. As long as she gets an hour or so nap at some point, she’s happy. She’ll also join us for as much as she wants. She loves reading, so she’ll be sitting on my lap as we read all our books. And she’ll love getting messy with any art supplies we put in front of her.

Math

For math, I decided on Math Lessons for a Living Education as a curriculum. Why? I loved the use of stories in this math book. Level 1 has characters that visit their grandparents on the farm. While there many mathematical questions come up naturally and they solve them together. The situations are very real world, from baking to having to figure out how many egg cartons there are to using life cycles and seasons to teach patterns. I also loved that it’s kind of a middle level. With her love of numbers, I’ve found that many kindergarten programs are to simple. But the Grade one is too advanced. I found this book more like a second year kindergarten level.

Science

Alexie is a little bit of a scientist. We nicknamed her “our little engineer”. With that being said, we aren’t doing any “formal” science units. We’ll be kind of “Unschooling” it this year, letting her steer and determine what we’ll be learning about.

To encourage her love of engineering-type stuff, we’ll be doing lots of free play with our LEGOs, blocks and trains.

But we’ll also doing homeschool program at our local science centre. Once a month we’ll go and participate in mini-lessons with other homeschoolers. I think it’ll be a great way to introduce her to other science topics and to meet and hang out with homeschoolers.

Language Arts

Alexie has a goal of learning to read by the end of the year. Now we’re not talking novels, but a very simple book. She loves books and looking at the pictures. She’s even taking to “reading” stories to Zoé, telling her a story based on the pictures. She’s got most of her letters down, so now we’ve got to work on the letter sounds and stringing them together.

With that in mind, I found All About Reading. I loved that it had some interactive elements and games. It’s also a program that builds reading confidence. In the lessons, the child is introduced to words and then those words are used in games and activities. Only once the child is comfortable with the words, do you move on to the reader, where you’ll find all the words you’ve worked on. I’m very excited to see how she does with this program and to see her confidence build as she reads.

We’ll also do an author study in the winter. We found that we had a little dull period in January, after all the holiday excitement. So I’m looking to add some excitement with something fun. So we’ll be studying the works of Barbara Reid. Since her works are available in both French and English, it would be a great fit for us. And then we can also dive into her artistic work in plasticine (or in our case play-doh).

We are also going to be doing lots of read alouds. Later this year (like late spring) I’m hoping to introduce reading novels to Alexie. She already likes series and books that connect, so I’m thinking this will a hit with her. I’ve picked out Charlotte’s Web, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Pippi Longstocking and Winnie the Pooh. I think these texts will be funny and entertaining to Alexie while also fitting in with some of our unit studies.

In honour of her request, we will also try to have monthly tea parties. We will try to incorporate the idea of Poetry Tea Time, but considering I’m not a huge fan of poetry, we are going to be very loose with what we read. But still reading while drinking tea and wearing fancy hats.

Arts

Coming from an artistic family, we really want to include a well rounded arts education for our kids. But we also want to encourage creativity. I’m hoping have at least a weekly block of time when we can explore various mediums and get our hands dirty. My plan is to always have the basics available (crayons, paper, scissors, glue stick, etc) but also have a special material that I can change out every few weeks. I’m thinking of rotating watercolours, pastels, natural/found materials, different paper products (tissue, construction, newspaper), play-doh for our author study, and a few others.

I’m also hoping that a little more exploration of the musical instruments that we have in the house (we have a keyboard, guitar, ukelele, harmonica, kahone drum and hand bells) might prove exciting. Maybe she’ll find something she’s keen on learning. She loves singing right and certainly has her favourite radio hits. If singing along with radio is all we do then, that’s great.

Socialization

We are social people and we love to get out of the house. So we have a few weekly groups that we are going to be joining up. We are going to continue to go to the French preschool program at the school around the corner from us. And we are going to continue to go to our weekly playgroup meetings. And the girls are already signed up for gymnastics classes. But we do have some new things. We are going to be going to our local science centre on their homeschool days. There is also talk with some parents in our area of starting a new homeschool co-op and we are super excited to be a part of that!

That’s our big plan for the year. From September 2019 to August 2020. A little reading and math and a whole lot of exposure to different experiences, materials and activities. We are excited to meet and hang out with more homeschoolers and we can’t wait for our year to start!