2011-2012 Curriculum

2011-2012 Curriculum

Burke Christian Academy

As with most new homeschoolers, I spent months researching and trying to figure out the perfect curriculum for our homeschool.  I soon discovered that there is a million different types of materials and styles to teach and no one way is the end all be all!   Every mom homeschools differently as every child learns differently and by posting our choices in curriculum I am not saying that this is the best for everyone.  I am an organizer and I work best with a traditional school setting so we have decided to go that route.  Fortunately for me, my kids love it too :)  So here is what we will be using this school year:

Power Princess (Senior Kindergarten) -

the core of our material will be from a fantastic bible based curriculum published by Hearts of Dakota called Little Hearts For His Glory. 

I am very excited to be using this for her as it incorporates a number of different learning styles and Power Princess works better with variety in her day.  This program is also more or less an open the page and go material so there isn't a whole lot of lesson planning involved.  Power Princess has always struggled with alot of worksheet heavy curriculum and this material is more of a hands on approach.  I like that every subject is biblically based on a theme and Power Princess can really get into the Word. We will be using the 1st grade supplements for this currciculum because my girl is smart!

For music and arts, I will be teaching her keyboard skills on our mini keyboard and basic music theory fundamentals.  I didn't purchase any teaching books for this as we will just do whatever comes to us and see how it goes.

For home economics, we will be working thru all of the "Back To School" lunch recipes in our Betty Crocker cook book.

We are also going to master reading.  Power Princess has expressed a great interest in learning to read books like Super Mom does so we will be using Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  I am not sure how well this will work for us as we have already been working thru lessons 1 thru 5 and it hasn't been going that great.  We will try the next 5 and see how it goes.  Little Hearts For His Glory has its own reading program that we might switch to so I will keep you posted.

Rainbow Brite (Junior Kindergarten) -

the core of our material will be from Little Hands to Heaven which is also published by Hearts of Dakota.

We will be using the supplements outlined for 4 yr olds for this material to give us a well rounded program and get Rainbow Brite ready to learn to read at a later date.

As for everyday, we will just have fun with things around the house.  We will be working on colors, and speech as well as anything else we may think of.  Rainbow Brite loves to sort things!

SpiderMan (Preschool) - We will spend our time learning to talk thru play.  It's going to be fun!

 General (For Everyone)

Power Princess and Rainbow Brite will be doing alot of the crafts,  home economics and music material together as well as Bible time.

For discipline and general organization in our home, we will be using a great program for both Rainbow Brite and Power Princess called We Choose Virtues.   This will help with Super Dad's and my sanity.

We hope to post alot of field trips and activities as the school year progresses.  Oh the life of a Super Mom!

If you are looking for a great overall outline on what is the standard for each grade level, we use world book typical course of study as an outline for each grade level on what we would like to accomplish before the end of the year. 

For planning my year, I am using a well planned day.  It has all of the spaces to plan for up to 4 kids for an entire school year as well as household planning which makes this planner extremely useful.  Plus as a Super Mom, the "pretty factor" was a great reason for me to choose this planner :)