New Year, New Books!

New Books are Always exciting!

Rowan loves art so these Draw Write Now books are perfect for him. Ellie has very little artistic skills so these are also great for her; teaching her how to draw new things step by step. I love how they teach the kids about things while practicing writing and art. 

A friend of ours suggested these MCP math books. We ended up getting a few different levels depending on where our kids needs were. So far the kids are loving them! 

One of the most favorite books in our house is the Children's Bible. They love it so much it ends up getting worn out pretty quickly. We need to buy a new one almost every year. With six little hands turning looking through it, turning pages all the time, and reading it on a daily basis it gets pretty worn out. They were so excited to see we had a new one!

Working on Patterns

Reading Biscuit books ~ Her favorite books!

Addition

Using the vowel cards to help her figure out the missing vowel in the words

Easy Peasy Handwriting

Working on puzzles

coloring by shape

Leap Frog Academy

Working hard to figure out a math problem

Counting, cutting, matching, gluing

Coloring

 

Learning Place Value with MathUSee

 Working on her letters with worksheets from the TV Teacher

 She has beautiful cursive handwriting so we ended up getting her this book

 It is great because it not only lets her keep up her cursive skills but it also covers facts about the United States and then gives a little quiz at the end of each section about the state.
For Spelling and English she does Abeka Spelling and Poetry and Growing with Grammar.

Working on writing their letters

 Working on Draw Write Now

 English/Grammar work

 Addition and Subtraction

 Cutting skills and working on 1:1 correspondence.

Number Skills

So you may notice we are doing a lot of things. When we started the school year we were hoping that we would be able to just pick one curriculum and stick with it. However we discovered that our kids have too many learning styles for that and that they were at too many different levels. 

At the start of the school year we were only using  Simply Classical Curriculum level 1. However it was discovered after a little bit that while it was great for one of our kids, two of our kids did not have the handwriting skills to keep up with the other four. And yet those two were at a higher reading level than three of the other kids who did have the handwriting skills. This made for a stressed out mama trying to get them to write smaller when they just were not there yet, and them becoming frustrated because some of the non-handwriting work was too easy. 

We are still doing Simply Classical Curriculum and next year we will be working on level 2, however due to handwriting being everywhere for our kids  we decided to use different books. 

So the things we mostly do with the Simply Classical Curriculum include famous works of art/famous music pieces/reading their suggested science and enrichment books along with their read alouds. We also enjoy the Story Bible and learning Bible verses. We mix up the math a bit with a bit of math from the Simply Classical Curriculum, MathUSee, and also the new math book (MCP) we recently got. We have found by using a mix it keeps them engaged and interested.
In addition to all of that, we have been doing the Monthly Happy Sheets and reading books from the So Happy to Learn program.