I can’t tell you how much it warms my heart to recall our very first “formal” year of homeschooling. I will share what we used, and then share my current thoughts!
Bible
We do our Bible time either during breakfast or directly afterwards cuddled up on the couch. Many times, the kiddos are sprawled out on the floor playing MagnaTiles while I read, which is just fine by me. We’re always saying, “You can move your hands, but not your mouths!” We have no schedule, persay, when it comes to how many devotionals we want to get through in a year. Rather, we move through each resource slowly and once we’re finished, we move on to something different. There’s no specific “finish line” for the year; instead, it’s simply a constant daily practice with whatever resource we’re loving at the moment. Here are a few of the ones we used during first grade. Note that during this time, I also had a 3 year old and a 1 year old, so our time remained short.
The Complete Illustrated Children’s Bible
The Kingdom of God Storybook Bible (Use discount code:JADADANNIELLE to save! Don’t forget the two “n’s”)
Little Pilgrim’s Big Journey, Books 1, 2 and 3 (Use the same code as above)
History/Geography
I wanted to introduce history and geography in a gentle, explorative way. While I consider myself heavily influenced by Charlotte Mason’s philosophy, I did not follow her advice on studying your home country first. We started abroad, because I honestly wanted my daughter to have a missional, global perspective first, and then tailor it down to a local perspective, if that makes sense. We decided to go with Around the World in Picture Books, Part 1. (photo above) This is a literature-based curriculum focused on Asia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. In Asia we covered China, Japan, Thailand, and India. In Africa we studied Morocco, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ghana. This became the “spine” of our homeschool, meaning we focused on it 3-4 times a week, and stayed in a country as long as the kids were interested. If they wanted to keep checking out more books on a certain country, we did that! So directly after our Bible time in the morning, the kiddos would go clean their rooms and get ready. We call this “Blessing Hour.” After Blessing Hour, we would meet at the homeschool and do our Around the World studies. After that, we would alternate either math OR language arts- so, one day would be Math, and the next day would be Language Arts. I’ll explain this more in my weekly schedule further down in this blog.
Nature Study/Science
Nature Study is now my absolute favorite subject to teach, and I believe this curriculum has a lot to do with that. The Charlotte Mason philosophy speaks of focusing on Nature Study as Science in the early years, because it teaches the most primary and formative aspects of science- detailed observation. There’s nothing that comes more naturally to a child than to crouch down and observe an ant crawling, or to smell and then pick apart a flower. It’s all science! For 1st grade, I wanted a rich, deep-dive into nature study. I wanted something that my 3 year old could jump in on if she liked, and I wanted something focused on beautiful picture books and time out in nature. Hence, The Organic Studies.
The Organic Studies is an A-Z nature curriculum that studies a topic per week. For example, A is for Amphibians, B is for Birds, C is for Caterpillars, D is for Dens and Homes, and so on. Each week, Lavender was immersed into hands-on activities, colorful picture books and time outdoors.
Additionally, The Word Studies is an accompanying A-Z Bible Study that is tailored to align exactly with the Organic Studies lessons. For example, when we studied “B is for Birds” in The Organic Studies, we also studied Matthew 6:26 in the Word Studies, which reads: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor store away in barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life?” We also learned how mommy and daddy birds build nests to prepare a place for their babies; and how, likewise, Jesus has gone to prepare a place for us! Another lesson taught on song birds, and in the Word Studies, taught how we should be continually singing praises to the Lord! How lovely, right? I am proud to say that I got the pleasure of assisting Jenese in creating The Word Studies, and it is such a delightful, rich study. Your students come away seeing creation as a direct reflection of their Creator, and that’s exactly the way it should be.
I will say, however, that because of the ages of my crew, having two toddlers in tow made it quite difficult to focus on Nature Study AND Around the World in addition to math and language arts. This was also our first year making Nature Study and History/Geography such a heavy priority. We made it to letter “L” maybe, before stopping to simply focus on Around the World. That being said, this is still one of my absolute favorite resources we have for nature study, and we will continue to use it for years to come. It actually worked out though, as I realize we do better doing a heavy focus on nature study in warmer months, and a heavier focus on history/geography in the cooler months. There’s nothing like studying Creation when you can actually get out and play in it, right? I highly, highly recommend both the Organic Studies and the Word Studies for elementary ages and also middle school. You would simply tailor the lessons as needed, making the older grades write a bit more or dive deeper into the topic at hand. It’s created to be a family-style curriculum, and I can 100% vouch that it would be wonderful for so so many ages. I learned something new every week as an adult! Use the discount code “JADAHITE” to save some money if you decide to try out anything on their site.
Math
In Kindergarten, we used The Good and The Beautiful Simply Math K, and while we enjoyed it, we recognized that Lavender had not yet mastered her addition and subtraction facts. We needed a mastery program rather than a spiral approach, and so we landed on Math U See. It really helped Lavender so much with honing in on the mastery of place value, addition and subtraction facts. She enjoyed the lessons with Mr. Demme (every week, there’s an online lesson with a homeschool dad and math teacher named Mr.Demme), but grew really tired of the daily black-and-white worksheets. We completed the school year, but she gave an emphatic “no” on using Math-U-See for the following year. If you need to master math facts, Math-U-See is definitely helpful; but I can’t lie, the daily worksheets are dry as a bone and the monotony of it made for quite a boring year of math. We decided we like a blend of mastery and spiral approach, and that was reflected in our 2nd grade math choice (a different blog post).
Language Arts
We utilized very little formal language arts curricula for 1st grade. In kindergarten, Lavender learned to read using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. This is a very unpopular opinion, but I really enjoyed teaching her to read in her kindergarten year so that we could just focus on reading for fun and writing practice for 1st grade. Every child is different, but both my girls showed signs of readiness around this age. Perhaps my son will be different! At the beginning of the Teach Your Child to Read book, Lavender didn’t even know all of her letter sounds. By the end of it, she could read at a 2nd grade reading level. At that point, we simply read books together at her pace. First, she started at Level 1 readers, then Level 2, then she just took off reading whatever we had on our shelves. Some early chapter books that she really enjoyed were My Father’s Dragon, The Mercy Watson series as well as the Sophie Mouse series.
For her writing practice, we focused on notebooking. We used notebooking for nature study and history/geography. Notebooking truly takes care of spelling, grammar, reading comprehension and sentence structure. I detail the process of notebooking here. Other than notebooking, the only formal curriculum we used was Explode the Code, 2 and 2.5. These workbooks are simple, can mostly be done independently and help so much with phonics and spelling.
I’d like to add that we tried The Good and the Beautiful Language Arts, Level 1, to no avail. It just simply didn’t work for our family. We (maybe?) completed 30 lessons before stopping. This was also before I really honed in on Charlotte Mason’s philosophy; since then, we’ve really minimized the use of textbooks in our homeschool. It’s just a personal choice!
Extras
In addition to our normal homeschool day, we also had Lavender (and Lyon) in ballet. We also were a part of our local Wild and Free group, and went on occasional hikes with them. Lavender also learned some weaving, and we took a 12-session watercolor class together!
Overall, we had an incredible 1st grade year, and I can truly say I watched Lavender blossom (pun intended!) in so many ways. She grew in her walk with Christ, her level of responsbility and her leadership skills. And I grew so much as a homeschool mom, learning the type of teacher and truly honing in on my philosophy of education. Homeschooling is tough work, but there’s truly nothing else I’d rather be doing!
I hope this recap inspired you, and also showed you that it’s okay to piece things together that you love! It’s also okay to put something down when the timing isn’t right, and pick it back up later. The flexibility we have as homeschoolers is one of the greatest gifts!
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