1st Grade Homeschool Curriculum Choices Year-End Review

The homeschool curriculum choices blog posts are great, but what I really want to know is what families thought AFTER they used the curriculum they chose!

Next up, 1st grade! Here’s a reminder of the original 1st Grade Curriculum Choices post.

1st Grade Subjects

- - Reading All About Reading Level 2
  - Spelling All About Spelling Level 1
  - Grammar First Language Lessons Level 1 & Growing with Grammar 1
  - Writing Write Shop Primary A & Story Starters
  - Handwriting Logic of English Cursive Handwriting
  - Math Life of Fred, Mathseeds {the math portion of Reading Eggs}, Spielgaben
  - Science Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Science Grade 1, The Curious Kid’s Science Book
  - Extra Daily Literacy Practice
  - Character We Choose Virtues
  - Art Home Art Studio
  - Bible Picture Smart Bible K-3 {with Krash, 4th grade}
  - USA Geography see our plan here {with Krash, 4th grade}
  - Group Subjects ~ Mystery of History, YWAM Heroes of History, World Geography

Ladybug had a fabulous 1st grade year. Overall she loves to learn and does her school time with a good attitude most days. She learns easily and it is a joy to teach her and watch her develop academically!

Below I will give a small review of each subject, if you have more specific questions about anything, just leave me a comment and I will do my best to answer!

Reading All About Reading Level 2

A perfect fit for her! She loved it! By the end of AAR Level 2 she was extremely fluent and reading above grade level. I highly recommend AAR!

We did LOADS of supplemental reading, she is my bookworm. We began and are still reading through the Little House books together. We also read the My Father’s Dragon Series.

We went to the library a lot and I documented many of her favorite books from the year in this post!

Spelling All About Spelling Level 1

We love All About Spelling and level 1 was a great fit for her this year. We spaced out the lessons over the year, although she probably could have done level 1 and 2 this year – I am in no rush. Our basic routine was to do the lesson on the board, using the app when we learned new sounds, then she would write her words in a notebook.

Grammar First Language Lessons Level 1 & Growing with Grammar 1

We aren’t completely done with these books yet and will be finishing over the summer before beginning level 2 of each in the fall. She has more free time in the summer so as we worked with the boys to complete all of their schoolwork, she got a few weeks of lighter work.

These are both great programs and certainly don’t need to be used together, I just really like both. I love the workbook format of GWG and the oral format of FLL.

Writing Write Shop Primary A & Story Starters

Ladybug naturally likes to write {unlike my boys at this age}, which is a joy. We used Write Shop A as our base curriculum but didn’t finish the entire program. It got a bit easy for her and I don’t own level B so once I noticed it was too easy, we just stopped and she wrote for fun. She used our Story Starters to inspire free writing also.

Handwriting Logic of English Cursive Handwriting

Doing cursive with her this year was a good decision, she was ready. Although she didn’t always love learning new letters and practicing old letters, she was totally capable. My goal this year was to introduce her to the lowercase letters and we accomplished that. We even got started on upper case letters.

For each letter she created a drawing, and we ended up with a cute collection!

For 2nd grade I will continue teaching the upper case letters and begin working with her on using cursive naturally when doing some of her assignments.

Math Life of Fred, Mathseeds {the math portion of Reading Eggs}, Spielgaben

Our laid back math plans were perfect for her this year. She was too advanced for a traditional 1st grade math program, but we weren’t wanting to rush her. Life of Fred was perfect and we will be continuing with LOF as a supplement next year also. Mathseeds was a great fit for her also.

She loves our Spielgaben lessons, which I chose throughout the year as we went along. I picked lessons from the manual that I thought she would enjoy and would enhance her math skills. Below you can see direct links to all we did. We will continue to supplement with Spielgaben.

$Math-Play-with-Spielgaben---ideas-fo[1]$ $Math-with-Spielgaben122$ $Hands-on-Math-with-Spielgaben3_thumb$ $Hands on 1st Grade Math with Spielgaben$ $Exploring-fractions-with-Spielgaben8[1]$

She will begin a more traditional math program in the fall, Teaching Textbooks 3.

Science Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Science Grade 1, The Curious Kid’s Science Book

We oved using these books! She did too! The Evan-Moor book was her main science curriculum and she did extra science activities and experiments from the other book. Daddy led all of this and for that I am SO thankful!

Unit Studies

I love doing unit studies with my kids, just wish I took time to do more! We had fun with 3 of our own, and then were blessed to begin reviewing product for Ivy Kids Kits and got to enjoy 3 more units thanks to those kits! She LOVED all of these! Click on graphics to see the posts!

Character We Choose Virtues

We made it through all of the virtues and she really enjoyed this! It was a great fit for her this year!

Art Home Art Studio

I am such an art slacker. I am actually impressed that we completed 2 entire projects from our Home Art Studio Disc. Ladybug is naturally creative and artistic so she did tons of spontaneous artwork on her own, but these are the only two from our actual curriculum!