Here are our plans for Lottie's Year 1 (age 6). We're about half way through these now, but I thought they might still be helpful to some. I'm in the process now of evaluating this year as I plan the next. For the most part, we've been loving the flow of our year and will continue in the same format. It looks like a lot, but we don't do everything everyday and we keep our lessons short and sweet to build our habit of attention (10-15 minutes on average, some are even shorter!).
Math: Ray's, Life of Fred and Right Start Games. We've been doing a mix of these three and things have been going really well. I basically do a block of Ray's, alternate with a Life of Fred book (we're in Dogs right now, but I don't have a set amount I hope to accomplish in the year) and every Friday, instead of a lesson we play a RS game. I also have a number of other games that we randomly substitute (Time Telling Bingo, Wrap Ups, Inchimals, Icosoku Jr. etc.)
Reading: Simply Charlotte Mason's Delightful Reading, along with Pathway Readers and other various readers (Treadwell, Frog and Toad, Owl at Home etc).
Science: Simply Charlotte Mason's 106 Days of Creation Studies and accompanying books.
Literature: Trumpet of the Swan, All of a Kind Family, Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, Mr Poppers Penguins, Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Stuart Little.
Handwriting: Copywork. She chooses what she'd like to add next from Scripture memory verses, hymns, folk songs etc.
Bible: We're using Vos's The Child's Story Bible along with The Big Picture Bible Timeline for our overview. Most of our curriculum has topics/lessons where we're reading out of our Bibles as well. We also really enjoy Your Story Hour Bible Comes Alive! audios. Monday nights we have a book that we work through in our family Bible time. We're using Wisdom and the Millers and Dangerous Journey for this. Everynight, as part of our family Bible time, we do our Scripture Memory, using Simply Charlotte Mason's Scripture Memory System, which I just cannot recommend enough! We take our verses off of Seeds Family Worship's CDs so that we can also be listening to them to help with our memorization. We just play these throughout our days, and actually speak the verses during Scripture Memory. In the morning we start the day with our devotional time. Each day we either read a devotion from Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing, God's Wisdom for Little Girls (we do the boy one too), or write in our prayer journal or blessings journal.
History: We're doing our own variation of Simply Charlotte Mason's Genesis Through Deuteronomy and Ancient Egypt guide. We're essentially taking the history readings appropriate for the age bracket and using those with helpful ideas from the guide. We're also using SCM's The Stuff They Left Behind...Ancient Egypt along with it. We're mostly doing our Bible separately, and we do use the accompanying Visits to Africa, but I'm not fussed about maps at her age, so we just read the books, look at a map so we can identify the continent and we're going to be using the Africa Geopuzzle for a less formal look at the break down of countries. We also have a couple art projects with Egyptian stencils on papyrus paper, we're keeping a "passport" where we'll add an Egypt page with stickers and we're doing a Pyramid Dig kit.
Canadian History/Folk Songs: For this year we've combined these two subjects, as we're working our way through The Spirit of Canada, only doing their folk songs. Including: The Huron Carol, Follow the Drinking Gourd, The Underground Railroad, Big Joe Mufferaw, Way Up the Ucletaw, Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Nova Scotia Song, The Maple Leaf Forever and Saskatchewan.
Nature Study: Weekly entries into our nature notebooks on a topic discovered on a nature walk. We don't do dry brush technique yet, but have been enjoying our watercolour pencil crayons for this. At the end of the year I'll post some examples from these, as they're beautiful keepsakes! I've been greatly enjoying doing this along with her. It's such a special time. We always play our current composer and relax while painting while the boys nap. She regularly tells me how special these "dates" are to her. I know these will be precious memories for years to come!
Poetry: We're studying A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll and Walter de la Mare this year. One for each term. We read a poem or two over snack time and often more during our Monday tea times. I require one poem, of her choice, to be memorized for each poet. She chose The Good Little Girl by Milne and Brother and Sister by Carroll and absolutely loves reciting them! This is something that the boys are with us for and it amazes me how much they take in! Even Locky, our two year old, has favourites! He loves Jaberwocky by Carroll and often requests it!
Art: Handicrafts Made Simple by Simply Charlotte Mason's Paper and Cardboard, as well as Crochet are what we're doing formally, although we've done lots of other things interspersed, as well as some great times in Gramma's sewing room. We're also using Creating a Masterpiece's Earthenware Turtle and Silk-dying Butterfly. We'll do See the Light's The Crossmaker at Easter.
Picture Study: We're studying Turner, Van Gogh, and Emily Carr this year. We'll be in Victoria in late Spring, so we'll visit the Emily Carr house!
Music Study: Chopin, Mozart and Beethoven, along with a Vancouver Symphony Orchestra performance featuring Mozart.
Personal Development: Simply Charlotte Mason's Laying Down the Rails for Children
Piano: This year has looked really different for us as for three years previous Lottie has attended MYC classes. They have been a great experience, but we made the hard decision this year to pull her out since we felt the pace was quickly surpassing hers and we could see practices becoming a drudgery - not what we wanted! So we've spent this year reviewing and solidifying past concepts since she had started to feel so overwhelmed by the end of last year. We've also been using Music in Me's books where she's working through learning different worship songs, which she LOVES! We periodically all file into the Limberlost (our named room where our piano and many homeschool things are kept) so that she can lead us in worship that night for our family Bible time. We're not sure what our next step is going to be for next year, but this was a much needed slowing down period. Likely we'll start lessons up with her old teacher since she is amazing and Lottie does miss her dearly.
French: Cherrydale Press's Speaking French with Miss Mason and François Volume 1. We intersperse our lessons with familiar picture books in french (The Giving Tree, Goodnight Moon, Peter Rabbit, and a couple Eric Carle books) and french songs (National Anthem, Frère Jacques etc.). We do our french lesson as a family every Friday night. Throughout the week it's thrown into our Memory Work Binder for regular review. I'll do a separate post on this system another time, as it has been so helpful to us!
Holidays: For Christmas we read Bartholomew's Passage for advent, and Jesse Tree where we then made our own Jesse Tree on the wall. For Easter we will revisit Amon's Adventure for our advent reading.
Hymn Study: Simply Charlotte Mason's Singing the Great Hymns, pack 1.
Physical Education: This is pretty much just the kids running wild at this age, but we do a more formal lesson once a week where Da is the teacher. We pick one sport per term so that we can focus on building skills. This year it's hockey, kick ball and soft ball.
How have your plans been going for this year?
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