The Plan

Since I didn't buy much curriculum this year, you may be wondering how exactly I plan to teach my children. Here is my plan:

Reading - Arwen - Teach your Child to Read in 100 Lessons - I used this with both of my older girls. Arwen is proving to be a more difficult student, but we are plugging along. We also have a million easy readers.
Sierra and Kali - books. I instituted "reading time" this year. They have always read time at bedtime, but since they play so well together they don't often read during the day. I have assigned Sierra a book to read because I think she is getting old enough to have assignments. This month she is reading Caddie Woodlawn. Kali can read whatever she wants, but she wanted an assigned book, so I told her to read Kit from the American Girls series. She finished it in a few days and is now reading other books. I am having them narrate what they read, so I can gauge their comprehension. No boring workbooks for us...

Writing - Copywork, dictation, freewriting. Yeah, Charlotte Mason all these ideas are free! Although freewriting is an idea from The Writer's Jungle which is not exactly free. I plan to use more ideas from TWJ, but haven't gotten around to it, yet.

Grammar - First Language Lessons and Rod and Staff English 4 (which I already had from last year). Last year I did grammar with Kali and Sierra separately, but it was kind of a pain and they were learning much of the same things, so this year I am teaching them together. I use both books as a guide. We haven't done any of the written assignments, yet. I gave them each a spiral notebook to use for grammar and I have them write concepts that they learn in the notebook, like the 8 parts of speech and types of sentences, etc.

Spelling - Right now we are going through Rebecca Sitton's "no excuse" list and then we will move on to individualized lists based on words they misspell in their writing. For each word they misspell we will discuss the rules and patterns associated with each word and list other words with the same pattern. I have the book, ABC's and All of Their Tricks, to use as a reference for spelling patterns.

Math - I have all 3 girls using Singapore this year. Arwen is starting 1A, Kali is almost done with 2A, and Sierra just started 4B

History - Story of the World 2 - we only got 10 chapter into this last year, so we will continue it this year.

Science - Oh, how we love the library. I have picked topics based on What your __ Grader Needs to Know. We have worked through almost all of the topics in the K - 3 books and have a few more to cover in the 4th grade book. We have an electricity set from last year and I hope to start Real Science 4 Kids in the spring. I bought Lyrical Life Science Vol1, but I don't think we will end up using it this year. Maybe we will listen to the CD.

Music - Violin Lessons, Piano Lessons Composer studies using books and CD's from the library

Art - co-op art class, Artist studies using books from the library.

Foreign Language - We were using Rosetta Stone that we borrowed for free from a homeschool program in Colorado. When we moved I figured we would use the online library version, but the Rosetta Stone company took it off the libraries' databases - grrr... My plan is to get videos and CD's from the library instead. We also still have the Minimus Latin book, but I don't know if we will get around to using it this year.