From my personal blog earlier this year

Hannah is all Set Up for the School Year

WARNING BEFORE YOU READ: I may sound like a sales lady ;-)

Hannah Is All Set Up for the School Year!

Here’s what we’ve got –

Reading – My original BJU love! I love that Reading also includes subjects like Vocabulary, Dictionary Skills, Library Skills, & Map Reading. Reading selections meet my conservative standards and still qualify as good literature (Twain, Dickens, Browning, etc). Questions are asked on four different levels – critical thinking included. Only TWO Required Books to keep up with! The workbook tells plainly at the bottom of the page the lesson page and the corresponding reading text. Though it isn’t written to be used this way, I will teach the skill station days and a few of my favorite stories and let her work through the rest independently. She’s been asking for this Reading program.  Reading is one of her favorite things to do, so she’ll be raiding the library as well.

English – My 2^nd BJU Love. This will be Hannah’s 3^rd year to do BJU English. Each chapter is also organized around a theme – sort of like a mini unit study. That’s Hannah’s favorite part about it. She says she learns so much more than just English. I love the writing. Two weeks of grammar and two weeks of writing J. That means I don’t keep skipping the writing until the end of the year. She’ll be doing a personal narrative, a newspaper editorial, instructions a research report, historical fiction, a compare-contrast essay, a poem, and a cover letter. It sounds worse than it is. It is broken down into bite-size chunks, and Mrs. Overly will be explaining it all to her. I’m hoping we can make at least some of these assignments fit a scrapbook I want to make about all of her grandmothers. I’ll also be checking her work and answering her questions since Mrs. Overly doesn’t do that very well ;-).

Spelling – This will be Hannah’s 2^nd year to do BJU Spelling. Mrs. Liston will be teaching her. She has a passport ready to stamp as she learns to spell over 100 countries  along with many more words. She’ll be learning tidbits about the countries as she goes along. She’ll have a journal entry every week written for me to read, and I’ll write her back each week. Since she loves letter writing, I think this will be a nice personal touch to our school week. Also included is sentence dictation (an important listening and writing skill) and King’s English which describes not only the etymology but often a Biblical principal as well.

Heritage Studies – We’ll be studying the 20^th century. I read long ago that this is often the most neglected yet, most pertinent part of history. We’ll be making a century book. Each page will have the year printed and we’ll cut/paste/print some pictures to go with it. Samuel and Faith will be joining Hannah for this study. Some Grandma interviews will fit in here nicely too since most of them lived quite a few years in this century.  Mrs. Walker will be helping me with teaching this course. We’ve had Mrs. Walker before, and we absolutely love her.

Science – Mrs. Vick will be helping us with Science. Hooray for Mrs. Vick. I think this will be Hannah’s most challenging course. It includes all branches of science. It includes a lot of activities and observations, but it is so very organized that I don’t think it will be overwhelming. I really wanted to combine siblings in this, but it’s just too challenging for that. I’ll be teaching Science 4 to the youngers.

Math – Ok. Yes, we love teaching textbooks. Hannah made it through almost two levels last year, BUT our test scores came and found us lacking even though we supplemented it. This year- we’re using BJU and considering Teaching Textbooks the supplement. May the Lord reward her extra effort J

Handwriting – Sweet, Sweet Mrs. Cox. Hannah really wanted to have at least one course with her. This course doesn’t run all year, so she’ll also have time for typing. In addition to cursive, Hannah will learn Calligraphy through this course.  The course theme is careers, so she’ll be exposed to a few more things than what’s available in rural Kentucky.

Bible – Mrs. Cox teaches Bible too. Hannah will be memorizing several passages of scripture and creating a timeline. A KJV Bible is her textbook. (That should make her smarter ;-).)

What Else – music and art are largely included – but I’ll schedule a little music theory. Art will be a little digital scrapbooking and the calligraphy. Digital Scrapbooking will be a book of our Grandma’s which fits nicely with the last century which we’re studying for history. I’ll probably dig out Drawing Textbook and assign a few of those lessons. She has some online Horse lessons twice a week as well. For homemaking, she’s the main breakfast cook and she’ll also be making the list for breakfast.

I love the beginning of the year with all the freshness and expectation J.

My Slant on BJU Press Handwriting

      BJU Press offers Handwriting Worktexts and Teacher’s Editions for 1^st through 6^th grades. The printing is done with a bit of curve and a slant to make the transition to cursive easier. It is a pretty handwriting as well.

     Cursive writing instruction begins in the second grade.  A few letters are different than I was taught as a child. The lowercase “b” looks more like a printed “b.” I like this way better. The capital “I” and “J” and “Q” look different as well. The “Q” doesn’t look like a “2.”

     Again, I haven’t used BJU Press from the beginning. I have mostly used Handwriting Without Tears although I’ve used A Reason for Handwriting and Happy Handwriting as well. I’ve always thought my older children’s writing lacked a mature look, and I think it’s due, in part, to the lack of a slant in the writing styles I taught. As we work on better slanting with BJU Press books, their writing is becoming more legible and more mature looking. (I still think there are some wonderful tips in the Handwriting Without Tears books if you have a child with OT issues.)

     As a homeschooling parent, handwriting has not been my strong point. My own 1^st grade report was A’s and A+’s with a C- in handwriting. Handwriting gets sloppy because I forget to expect better handwriting. I’m getting better though. That’s your tip for the day: If you want your kids to have better handwriting, make them rewrite their work when it’s sloppy.

     BJU Press also offers practice in reading cursive handwriting. I know from experience reading cursive is a separate skill from handwriting. A few years ago, I had one of my children write some poems in cursive handwriting.  I decided to record him reading his poems. The only problem was, he stumbled through them and finally lamented, “Mom, I can’t read cursive handwriting.”  Perhaps only a few children would actually have this problem, but we don’t want to send any of them out into the world not being able to read a handwritten note from the future darlings. ;-)

     As with many BJU Press subjects, I love the themes that offer extra learning. My sixth grader is learning about all kinds of different careers with her distance learning course. One year focuses on world geography; another the states. Of course, verses and hymns are interspersed throughout.

     Another extra bonus. . . the sixth grade cursive also includes some practice in Calligraphy. What a great way to get an older child motivated to produce beautiful handwriting!

Ten years of Homeschooling - English

I’ve only been homeschooling for 10 years, but I have a pretty long list of English curriculums/resources I’ve used ;-).

Here goes:

Rod & Staff

Evan-Moor Grammar and Punctuation

Sonlight English

Easy Grammar

Learning Language Arts through Literature

Writing Strands

MFW 1^st grade

Editor and Chief

Total Language Plus

Wordsmith

English from the Roots UP

A Beka

Sandy Queen Language Lessons

And BJU Press

A few of these curriculums had pieces I really loved. I thought marking out prepositional phrases was a neat idea in Easy Grammar. I enjoyed the Orange Book in LLATL when we did poetry. I really enjoyed using the poetry selections from Sandi Queen’s Language Lessons and doubling them as speech work for my son who needed it. “Whose woods these are I think I know” is music to your ears when it is your own child reciting it. I loved Total Language Plus’s Amos Fortune Free Man study. It had such a neat correlation to our freedom in Christ. I liked the dictation part of that study, and I enjoyed reading things my kids wrote. I found Editor in Chief to be an excellent and challenging resource for proofreading. So there you know, I am aware of a world out there other than BJU Press.

I am now on my 3^rd year of using BJU Press English. It’s a record!

I’ll put a review of BJU Press English in another post soon.