I looooove homeschool curriculum posts. Mostly because I’m a total nerd who loves researching, shopping for, and hoarding all the curriculum! Today, I’m sharing our first grade homeschool curriculum choices for Clark. (You can see our Preschool and Kindergarten choices from the last couple of years, too!)
We officially kicked off our new school year last Wednesday, and we were so excited to continue our tradition of a “hot air balloon ride” and a scavenger hunt. The hot air balloon rides started 2 years ago when we began using A Year of Playing Skillfully, and it is such a fun and memorable way to kick off each year. I literally hope to be making my kids take first day of school pictures in their “hot air balloons” when they’re teenagers (you know, while they sigh loudly and roll their eyes)!
Okay, back to our first grade homeschool curriculum. This year, the choices were SUPER easy. We will continue using several things that we used last year, with a few new additions and changes.
So what are we using for our 2020-2021 First Grade Homeschool Curriculum?
Reading | All About Reading
Clark and I BOTH love All About Reading! Last year, we absolutely loved incorporating Ziggy in both Pre-Reading and Level 1, and just felt like it was such a gentle, fun introduction to formal reading. Clark completed Pre-Reading in December, and we moved into Level 1. It has gone SO WELL and I now have an emerging reader in my house!!
You guys, I cannot speak highly enough about All About Reading. The lessons are short (only 20 minutes long), they are super easy to follow as the teacher, and you can easily adapt them to fit your learner’s style (we made up some super simple games with the review cards). It has been so cool to watch Clark learn to read, and to see his confidence soar as he masters new skills.
Since AAR’s levels don’t correspond to grade levels, we will just keep working our way through Level 1. I imagine that sometime in the middle of the year we’ll finish Level 1 and move into Level 2. From what I hear from other AAR parents, each level tends to take about a year, although obviously some kids move faster and some kids move slower.
That’s the most beautiful thing about homeschooling…go at your child’s pace!
(P.s. I am an All About Reading affiliate, because I love it THAT much. So, if you purchase through my link, I’ll get a small commission and you’ll get a solid reading program!)
Math | Singapore Dimensions
Math deserves an entire post all by itself. Our math journey last year was kind of a mess. First of all, I really enjoy math. Not quite as much as I love all-things language arts, but I do love math. I feel like that’s important to note, because there are plenty of people out there who loathe math, and therefore struggle to pick a curriculum they’re comfortable with.
That’s not me.
I once spent an entire year teaching Algebra I to high school freshmen. And I enjoyed it! So it’s not that I dislike math, nor do I struggle with it.
We started out last year using Math Lessons for a Living Education, which I know works for a lot of families and a lot of families love. It did not work for us. By December, the writing was on the wall that I needed to find something else. So I researched and researched and finally landed on Math-U-See. I was drawn in by the hands-on manipulatives, and I really liked Mr. Demme in the videos.
And really, Clark did so much better, caught onto the topics much faster, and demonstrated actual mastery for the first time all year. However, I didn’t enjoy teaching it as much and he started to seem bored by the repetitive (and colorless) nature of the practice pages. There are things I really like about MUS, but by May I realized that it also just didn’t work for us. And what I’ve learned is that the curriculum needs to work for both the student AND the teacher. Otherwise, it’ll suck the joy right out of your homeschool.
Enter Singapore Math.
So, after more research, I landed on Singapore’s newest curriculum, Dimensions Math. Last year, I’d completely discarded it as an option, I think because it seemed too much like the “new math” I’d heard people complain about. However, upon further investigation, I discovered that it actually fit many of the things I was looking for in a math curriculum: solid, research-based math approach, short lessons, mastery with spiral review built in, and hands-on activities and games (oh, and it turns out that colorful pages are important to us, too).
Singapore’s original curriculum has a long history as a solid choice, and many, many homeschool mamas recommended it as I sought out suggestions from those more experienced than myself. I bought the Kindergarten level at the start of the summer, and we’ve worked through it over the last couple of months to make sure there are no gaps in his understanding (since we switched curriculum twice).
So far, we’re loving it! It’s solid, it’s thorough, and it’s fun. The teacher’s guide gives clear directions, and Clark really enjoys the lessons…so much so that we completed all of Chapter 1 on the first day (it was big time review for him and he just kept asking for more)!
So, we are going to finish up the Kindergarten level in the next few weeks, and then we’ll move into the first grade book.
Handwriting | A Reason for Handwriting
Last year, I’d heard so many great things about Handwriting Without Tears, so it felt like a solid choice for us. The problem was, we were terribly inconsistent and more often than not, it just didn’t get done. It seems really silly in hindsight, but it has several components and it just felt kind of cumbersome to get it all out each day. I really don’t want to spend more than 10 minutes total on handwriting.
So I ended up buying a blank handwriting notebook midway through the year and just writing words and sentences for Clark to practice doing copy work. That ended up working well, but in order to minimize my planning time this school year, I wanted a copy work-type curriculum that’s already done for me.
Enter A Reason for Handwriting.
We started it a couple of weeks ago just for fun, and we really enjoy it! It’s totally open-and-go, it has the typical penmanship lines (that was one thing I disliked about HWOT), and each lesson is very short.
All around WIN!
Social Studies | Teaching Character through Literature by Beautiful Feet Books
Instead of jumping right into a full-fledged social studies or history curriculum this year, we are going to meander our way through Teaching Character through Literature by Beautiful Feet Books. We chose Beautiful Feet because we truly believe in the power of teaching through living books (it’s a pillar of a Charlotte Mason education). We want to nurture our kids’ moral imaginations and teach virtue through great stories, so I was sold on Beautiful Feet Books the first time I landed on their website.
And you guys, the Teacher’s Guide is SO BEAUTIFUL. I read through the book lists and discussion guides, and I am so excited to dig into to this curriculum! We’re planning to include it as part of our Morning Basket time, so it won’t be a separate “subject” each day, but something we read, discuss, and enjoy together each week in a really casual way. It’ll be a perfect addition to our first grade homeschool curriculum!
Fine Arts & Nature Studies | Gentle + Classical Press
We actually started this curriculum back in November, and haven’t yet finished it yet (thanks Coronavirus) so we’ll just continue right on along. I LOVE that both components of the program are so rooted in Charlotte Mason’s principles, and the author of the curriculum did such an amazing job of explaining how to work toward the Formidable Attainment’s for a Child of Six.
(Quick side note: We had the original version of the Nature curriculum, but Erin released a completely revamped version LAST WEEK. I downloaded and printed the teacher’s guide, and it is INCREDIBLE! Go get yours here!)
This year, we are going to simplify how we incorporate it into each day, actually doing a lot of our reading during Morning Basket. It is a robust curriculum that has so many beautiful and amazing parts (read why we love it so much here), but this year we decided to focus less on the memorization components and mostly on the weekly Wonder Tales, the artist and art studies, and the composer and music studies. And of course the full Nature program!
We will still be reading poetry each week during our Poetry Tea Time, and we’ll also have a set time for Bible and theology each day (just reading straight through the Bible and reading the book, The Ology). However, we won’t necessarily do these in order or along with the curriculum.
Whew! So those are our first grade homeschool curriculum choices.
It sounds like a WHOLE LOT of school each day, but the reality is that altogether, we aren’t spending more than 2.5 hours per day on the sit-down portions. The days we go into nature for our walks and observations, we obviously spend more time on school. But I plan to have us done around 11 each morning, so the rest of the day will be for both free play and what Charlotte Mason called “afternoon occupations.”
And one of the beautiful things about homeschool is that learning happens in many more places than just around the table, because “education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life” (Charlotte Mason).
Our 2020-2021 homeschool year is going to be awesome!
Y’all, I am SO EXCITED about this year! Last year was disappointing to me. Clark says he had a great year, but I think it was just really hard on me. I had a baby in September and then the Coronavirus pandemic hit in the spring, so it ended up being a terribly stressful, exhausting school year. I’m really excited to start fresh and I’m looking forward to all we’ll learn and discover this year!
If you have any questions at all about our first grade homeschool curriculum choices (or anything else), please drop me a comment below or shoot me an email! I’d love to hear from you!
Have an amazing school year!
