It all started with TJEd and Charlotte Mason. I found so many wonderful things in their philosophies that I had a hard time figuring out how to implement it all. I gave trial runs all through the summer with different parts of the philosophies and found out how most work and how some just don't for our family. After a summer full of trial and error, this is what I came up with as our curriculum for the year.
Our subjects for my two whom I am actively teaching this year are Scripture Study, Reading, Writing, Math, Science, History, Spanish, Health, Music, Art, and Physical Training. At first glance this seems like a ton of work for a 1st and a 3rd grader. However let me explain what we are doing with each subject.
I have decided to start with the self as much as possible in each subject. For Scripture Study we will be focusing on personal conduct, which is of course most of what God teaches us about, and so we will also explore why God focuses on personal growth so much. In Reading I will read to the kids The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain as it is written in first-person perspective. (I will go into detail about how I am teaching my boy to read further down.) Writing will be copywork. For my 1st grader he will only be copying letters and single words until his aptitude with fluently writing letters and numbers increases. My 3rd grader will be copying the Articles of Faith from our religion and when she is done with those (as we are already 1/2 way through) she will be doing scripture verses from our morning Scripture Study. Math will focus on fluency with addition, subtraction, multiplication and beginning division. We will also be doing classification via size, shape, color, weight, etc. and time. For Science we will be learning about the Human Body, inside and out. History is going to start with Personal History, then move into Parental History and the Histories of their grandparents etc until we get into Family History. By doing this I hope to give them a greater appreciation for how history affects them, thus making them more interested in it, (Inspire not Require!). For Spanish we will learn one phrase, one color and one number per week. Health will be about how what we eat and what we do physically affects our bodies. Music and Art will be tied in with one or more of the other subjects and Physical Training will be Kenpo, which my husband will teach them.
I am using Charlotte Mason's idea that lessons should be ten minutes to a quarter-hour. So, if we spent the max of fifteen minutes on each lesson we would have lessons for three and three-quarters hours. That in and of its self is a reasonable goal in light of the amount of time spent in the public schools. However, I will also be combining subjects when appropriate.
For example: Science this season is going to be about the human dody and Health is about our lifestyle's affect on the human body, so these can be easily combined. There are also many songs about the human body and healthy habits, so music fits in there as well. Kenpo is an activity which is good for the body, so that fits also. Our religious scripture has what is known as the Word of Wisdom which talks about what things we should and should not eat, that slips in their too! So as you can see, I can quickly condense a lot of these subjects into a shorter amount of time. And that saved time can be spent on pursuing the children's interests and promoting our upstart home based business and teaching the kids work ethic, cleanliness, discipline, love of God, and charity through service. All of which are at least equally important as scholastic learning, if not more so.
As for teaching my 6-year-old boy to read, I am using Charlotte Mason's philosophy. I am not teaching him to read words by sounding them out as I did with my older daughter, because too often that doesn't work. This way of teaching was developed by Friedrich Frobel who is the inventor of Kindergarten. If you couldn't guess by his name or the name of his invention, he is German. Deutsch (German) is a phonetic language. English is not. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of words in English, that if spelled phonetically would look suspiciously like Deutsch. So instead I am teaching the words as a symbol for the sound of the word we say. I look at it as more akin to the Chinese writing or hieroglyphs. This collection of letters in this pattern means this word. It is a fairly simple concept as children have such wonderful visual memories. I take a phrase, either from a nursery rhyme, or children's song, or the scriptures and have the words individually separated and teach them one by one, making sure they simply aren't memorizing some unintentional pattern of how I am showing them. Then as they know each word individually, I put them together in the phrase or sentence and they can read it through without pause. This is an average of 10 words each day. This is so much easier on the children than trying to remember the "I before E except after C or when followed by a G" type of exceptions to phonetic rules that our language is crawling with.
