Embracing Multi-Level Learning: Curriculum Choices

 One of the special perks of homeschooling is getting to experience the learning adventure together as a family.  We don’t all go off in different directions, learning about separate things.   It is always fascinating to see what each child gleans from our studies!  While some of our activities are level specific, there is much we can do together.

How Multi-Level Learning Works:

For subjects like history, geography, science, and such it is easy to all learn about the same thing.  I compare it to a ride on a bus – the adventure learning bus.  Everyone piles on at the beginning and each child gets off at a different stop.  The youngest usually hops off first and returns to their open-ended play, but not before they’ve absorbed an incredible amount of information.  It’s so important for our preschoolers to learn ABOUT interesting things instead of merely focusing on skills.  This is what sets the stage for a life-long pursuit of learning!

So today, I’m going to share with you our curriculum choices for this year; both what we do for multi-level, family learning and what we use for level specific studies.

Family Learning 

KONOS ~ This is our spine.  I love that it is based around developing godly character.  I love the hands-on, active learning element.  There are many unit studies out there, but few that incorporate full multi-sensory, movement rich learning like KONOS.  Movement is important to me; hence my new ebook. {Psst, it’s finally being released – NEXT week!}

This year we’ll be wrapping up Volume 1 and focusing on Stewardship and Honor. {Want to read my formal KONOS review?}

ART

We are loving A Simple Start in Pastels.  The plan is to spend some time once a week learning new techniques with our pastel’s.  I am not an artist, but the directions are simple enough that we can all sit down and produce a pretty picture!

Living Grammar 

Grammar has always been relegated to the realm of age specific study in my mind, but so far this year is proving to be different.  I found Grammar Songs this summer and we fell in love.  All of the boys are singing about verbs, nouns, pronouns and adjectives!  This doesn’t mean they are all learning the same amount, but they are all learning something and I’m only doing it once!  For my 4th grader, we are talking about it, finding examples in real literature, and doing some of the worksheets that came with the book.

Alongside these songs, we’re also reading the book, Word Fun.  Each chapter ends with a fun game.  Between these two resources, they’ve been BEGGING to do grammar every day!  One of these days, I want to tell you more about these two resources and maybe share my little lesson plans that I’ve put together.

Read-Aloud Time

We love to read here.  It’s been fun to put together a short list of books for this year.  With all of our traveling this fall, much of our read-alouds will be books from our Heritage History Young Readers collection.  Have you heard of Heritage History?  They are amazing books written for children that all date before 1923 on a whole slew of subjects from Bible to Ancient Greece/Rome to American History. I shared about our experience with them a few months ago.  We are thrilled to have an economical and space-saving way to build our library of good books.

From Heritage History we’ll be reading: Heroes of Israel, Fifty Famous People, Fifty Famous Stories, Stories of Robin Hood and the Jakata Tales.

We also plan to read: The Secret Garden, Around the World in 80 Days and Alice in Wonderland.

Nature Walks – the perfect multi-level learning activity available right outside our doorstep!  Here’s my series on Nature Walking!

Chess at 3 – We’re in the process of reviewing this exciting story-based curriculum for learning Chess.  I figure if I can learn chess at 33, than anyone can.  I’ll let you know how it goes next month!

Here’s what we are using for 4th-Grade

Math-u-See Delta – For some reason, I wasn’t thrilled with last years MUS Gamma book.  But I already had purchased the Delta set, so we are going to give this one more year.

Daily Multiplication Drills – 100 problems.  The goal is to first get them done in 5 minutes and then 3 minutes!  We are going to master these!  I used mathscore.com to generate the sheets and then laminated them.  We have two to mix-up the order and use a transparency marker so we can wipe it clean afterwards. {Wow, I just checked Amazon to see if they have those and what a deal…  You can get 12 markers for $9.17.  That’s 53% off retail.  I think I’m gong to stock up!}

Spell to Write and Read – I am so thankful for the strong foundation this program is giving my children – not only with learning how to read, but also developing strong analytical spelling skills!  We are also on a super tight budget, so I love that this one program works for my kindergartner on up and covers phonics, spelling and beginning grammar.  I’m working on a formal review later this week so I can share some of the reasons why we chose this and why I think it is one of the best programs out there!

McCall-Crabb Standard Lessons in Reading –  This is a compilation of short stories followed by reading comprehension questions.  It lets me instantly determine his reading level.  Xander ADORES these assignments.  We are graphing his progress here too and watching his reading comprehension improve.  I’ve found it helpful to identify what he is having trouble comprehending from the text based on what questions he gets wrong.  For instance, Xander is a black and white person.  He doesn’t catch inferences well and that has manifested itself in his reading comprehension too.  These reading tests have provided us with a wonderful opportunity to talk about how to infer something from our reading even if it is not clearly laid out.  He was getting frustrated last year when he couldn’t finish all the problems.  It didn’t seem to matter when I told him he’d be reading at a 7th grade level if he could finish all the problems.  He wanted closure.  So after the three minute time limit was up, I’d hand him a red pencil and give him another 2 minutes to finish.  This dissolved his frustration and still allowed me to keep an accurate barometer of his progress.  We do these 3 times a week.

I highly recommend these McCall-Crabb books as an easy, enjoyable way to work on reading comprehension that will work with any curricular approach.

Grammar – In January, after our semester of multi-level Grammar fun, Xander will jump into a formal grammar program.  I’m very excited about this because I want to delve in and get a refresher on grammar too.  Writing my book, The Ultimate Guide to Brain Breaks, has reminded me of the importance of grammar and how lax I’ve become.   I’m looking into using Easy Grammar.  I used that when I was a girl and know it worked well for us.

AWANA – We will be utilizing this program for Bible memory work this year!

 

Here’s what we are using for 2nd-Grade

Math-u-See Beta – I love Math-U-See for addition and subtraction and am looking forward to delving into Beta with Keegan this year!

Daily Addition/Subtraction Drills – 100 problems in 5 minutes.  I made sheets from the same site, mathscore.com, for addition and subtraction.  Keegan and Xander do these quick drills at the same time.  They love them.  I think it helps that it is for a short, concentrated period of time.  I’m also graphing their progress, so they love seeing if they’ve beat previous highs!  Keegan’s sheets have been laminated as well to reduce paper usage over here.  They love the excuse to pull out the transparency markers.

Spell to Write and Read – Keegan is doing really, really well with this.  He’s a bit impatient and dislikes breaking the word apart as we review why it is spelled the say it is, but this free-spirited speller is really starting to internalize the spelling rules and making huge leaps in progress!

Cursive First – You can see more of an explanation below.  Keegan has mastered the lower case cursive handwriting, but still needs work on his capitol cursive letters.

Manuscript Instruction: Keegan is also obsessed with print from a stylized view as he’s been into writing his own books lately.  I plan to utilize the manuscript instruction contained in our Spell to Write and Read program so that he can bring his print handwriting up to speed for ‘fun-times’ use.

AWANA – We will be utilizing this program for Bible memory work this year!

Here’s what we are using for Kindergarten

How is it that my baby boy is five years old now?  This busy boy is super smart and loves to learn about interesting things.  He rivals his brothers in his recollection of historical events and scientific facts.  His fine-motor skills and attention to detail are on the active boys/late bloomer end of the spectrum.  He has a desire to learn how to read, so we are tiptoeing into that arena a bit.  While he is not taking to the reading as his brothers did, my years of research on this topic remind me that once the neural wiring is in place, he’ll make the leap into reading.  Kids tend to grow at irregular rates, so while I say that now, he could surprise me and have a developmental growth spurt!  If you have a kindergartner {or preschooler}, I’ve collected all kinds of wonderful resources on my Cultivate Learning page as the early years are a particular passion of mine.

That being said, here are tentative plans we are making for this year:

Making Math Meaningful – There’s something about this program that pulls me.  I love the idea of a gentle approach that emphasizes understanding – especially at this age.  So we are jumping into it this year and seeing how it goes.  Treyton loves the special play-time we have together as we work through the reasoning exercises.

Cursive First – Several years ago, we made the switch to Cursive First.  I had been reading about all of the benefits  of starting out with cursive instruction {including this article by Sam Blumenfeld}.  I was sold. Mechanically speaking, it is easier on the hand to make a few fluid motions for cursive letter formation than the ball and stick model of manuscript.  It helps promote a better pencil grip which means the hand won’t fatigue as easily and it helps reduce letter reversals.  But I was picky on how handwriting was taught.  I was thrilled to discover Cursive First which teaches the correct strokes for letter formation utilizing muscle memory instead of having a child merely trace.  I’ve also been thankful for the gross-motor approach to handwriting before transferring those skills to the fine-motor use of a pencil.   Cursive First is also great because the cards help you teach ALL the sounds that each letter makes while also learning penmanship.  With my older two boys, they made the leap to reading basic BOB books simply by learning how to write.

Spell to Write and Read – Depending on his progress with Cursive First, we’ll jump into doing spelling.  The idea behind Spell to Write and Read is that the child focuses on encoding a word (putting letters together to form words) and in the process easily learn to decode them.  Once the rhyme and reason of the English language is unlocked they are able to jump into reading any book and aren’t limited to beginning readers with limited vocabulary or memorizing sight words without an explanation for why they are spelled the way they are spelled.

AWANA – We will be utilizing this program for Bible memory work this year!

Here’s what we are using for the {almost} Two Year Old

Greta, sweet Greta.  After 3 boys, I’m amazed at how easy she is at this age.  {No dare devil stunts while I’m not looking or sharpie on the kitchen floor or lipstick art on the carpet!} That being said, it doesn’t mean it’s easy.  I love our multi-level learning approach because it encourages her to come along-side us in the process.

I try as much as possible to bring her into my lap or sit her down next to a brother as she wants to be a part of everything.  During this process I keep several things handy to help her feel included: paper and colored pencils, Shape sorters, Pattern Blocks + these fabulous free pattern blocks from Confessions of a Homeschooler as well as a couple of montessori inspired activities.

We’re also utilizing room time for around 30 minutes each morning.  She loves it and so do we!

Finally, she loves singing and dancing, so we are using our preschool song cards and singing some nursery rhymes each morning during our Circle Time!

If you are wanting to be a fly-on-the-wall and check out what other families are doing in their homes, check out this months NOT Back-to-School Hop!

 

Related Blog Posts:

10 Ways We Cultivate Learning

Motivation: No One Size Fits All Solution

7 Benefits of Read-Aloud Time

How to Make Passive Learning Active

Engaging the Senses Boosts Brainpower