This year, we are using Heart of Dakota’s Little Hearts For His Glory curriculum.
It is adaptable for children ages 5 – 7. To read more about our choice, CLICK HERE.
Alex is 5 years, 7 months.
He will turn 6 in December 2013.
The units in Little Hearts For His Glory are five day units, but we are (for the most part) doing school 4 days per week. (Right now, because we’ve had summer activities…after Labor Day, because we will have homeschool co-op once per week.) So our units will not be once per week, and our posts will not be on a set day. Whenever we finish a unit & I have time to post, I’ll get it on the blog
We are using History for Little Pilgrims and History Stories for Children, as recommended in LHFHG.
Alex is learning right now that history is HIS story – the story of God’s world!
You may remember that I posted last week that this was the hardest part of our transition from MFW K. I’m happy to say that we stuck it out, and both Alex and I are enjoying the readings now that we’re past the introduction. The beginning parts of history in Little Hearts centers around Bible history. We’ve read about Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Noah, and the Tower of Babel. Alex learned the word ‘government’…not that he’ll remember it, but at least he’s been introduced to this new word.
We are using the Family Time Bible and Devotions For The Children’s Hour.
Memory Work often has corresponding music from Hide ‘Em In Your Heart Volume 1 CD.
Among other stories (mentioned in the history section), we read about the Tower of Babel. We talked about how God confused their languages in order to lead the people to obey him and spread out to other areas. We built our own tower, and we learned to speak a word in several languages.
Our Bible verse is Ephesians 6:1 NIV.
We played a FUN ball game to practice the verse together.
We also listened to the Bible verse song on my Kindle.
Alex asked (again) if he could write his verse on Day 5. This takes a LONG time, but he is so excited to write something that has meaning. He was trying to copy it from a page that had curvy t’s, so his t’s are very unique on this page! We’ll be mailing this page to someone special. If he keeps this up, we may be mailing a verse every 5 school days! Watch your mailboxes, friends & family! :)
We are finishing All About Reading Level 1 – and (in 2014) moving on to level 2 – this year.
We completed lessons 24 and 25 this week. No pictures, sorry!
(Please keep in mind that I have the older version of LHFHG, and if you purchase a new guide, your math will follow a different sequence than what we are doing. I created my own spreadsheet to match the math activities in the older version of LHFHG to the lessons in Singapore Essentials. It’s not perfect, but it will work for us!)
We’re still working on writing numbers in the proper way. It’s a little easy, but I think starting with the basics – including correct number formation – is more important than jumping into higher level skills!
We made ‘cookies’ out of circles drawn on paper, then Alex added raisins to the cookies & counted/wrote the number of raisins in each cookie.
We are using The World God Made along with activities in the LHFHG manual.
We read some neat facts about several animals that God made. Then we had a little fun making our own “arks” to see how many animals could float in the boat. We saved this for a day when our friend Grace was here, and I challenged all 3 kids to build their own boat from a piece of aluminum foil.
Max had a little help from Mama to turn up the sides of his foil, but I did not plan it for him. His was definitely the best of the 3. It held 101 bears…and then we ran out of bears, so it could have held more!
The other two boats didn’t work very well, so we tried some new designs. The ‘canoe’ style boat was nice, but it only held 5 bears. Alex’s ‘sailboat’ (as he called it) held around 40 bears before it started to fill with water.
After we finished, the kids had fun just playing with bears, foil, and a tub full of water.
We are using Happy Handwriting and Rod & Staff ABC series.
We are trying to go in Kumon order with handwriting. They order the letters by how they are formed, so all of the straight line letters will be first. These pages are fun because they have a little poem that tells you how to make the letter. You also use the poem as a letter hunt, circling each letter of the day that you find within the poem.
When I pulled out a handwriting page one day, Alex said, “OH YAY! I LOVE THESE!!!” When I smiled at his excitement, he said, “Well, not really…I didn’t mean that.” (Too late, my son…I saw your excitement!)
Alex enjoys circling his favorite letters.
Rod & Staff “Do It Carefully” book
Alex would prefer that the book be called “Do It Quickly”, but we are working on slowing down and getting it completed NICELY rather than quickly.
We are using mainly Thornton Burgess books for storytime this year,
as recommended in the LHFHG guide.
Our current book is The Adventures of Reddy Fox. Along with reading the story, each day has questions or an activity to help your child build reading comprehension skills.
Both Alex and Max are enjoying these stories. (We may be ruining Max’s fun in a few years, but hopefully he’ll forget a lot before then…)
Uh, this is where I admit that the art project flopped.
I don’t have a picture.
Yes, I screwed it up that much
We played a fun little game about placement words (inside/outside/near/far/etc)…
We are using calendar printables from Mama’s Learning Corner for Alex’s Calendar Notebook. A calendar notebook is not part of LHFHG, but I think calendar time provides good practice for number writing, days of the week, weather, etc.
{Disclosure: This post may contain Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase after clicking through this link, our family will receive a small percentage of your purchase price. Thank you!}
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