Catholic Homeschooling Mother of Divine Grace K 2

welcome to my domestic monastery where we work pray play and sleep and sometimes learn to and that's we're gonna talk about today so I've been during nap times just enjoying viewing other people's homeschooling YouTube channels and I realized there really isn't that much out there about the mother of divine grace curriculum so our family I have a going into second grader kindergartner and then we have a baby and we've been using other divine grace for a few years since my oldest was in kindergarten and we really like it it's classical homeschooling and so you have all your bases covered it's a program that's accredited which means that down the line if we want to officially enroll which we don't currently do just because we don't need to with our state requirements we can get an actual like accredited diploma and everything which is awesome and my husband and I both have academic backgrounds so we really like the fact that it's a classical curriculum then it emphasizes truth goodness and beauty and all that good stuff so I wanted to share with you some of what the actual curriculum looks like for mother divine grace because I know that's what I like to see in these home schooling video this is what people's curriculum actually looks like so I'm going to share with you a little bit of everything that we're gonna use over the course of the year but just for a little background to know typically I'm a normal day what I aim to get done is reading / spelling for the older one she's passed like reading lessons um writing so handwriting arithmetic and religion and those are the four things I try to get done every day anything else is extra so I kind of know what I want to what do you want to cover for the other subjects but it's not something we necessarily do every day the other thing we do try to do every day is my oldest is taking vital and lessons so I try to get her to practice every day Monday through Friday okay so let's dig right in um if you haven't seen before the mother divine grace curriculum it's gonna be a little bit of a glare because it's a lovely sunny day here a little very very hot um their curriculum looks something like this this is the kindergarten one I need to get a second grade one but it was out of stock when I went to go buy all my materials so I don't have a second great one right now um so people always wonder like is it worth it to buy these curriculum because so I I'll give this disclaimer I don't strictly follow mother divine grace I do make some substitutions but I really like seeing their scope and the kind of things that they cover to make sure that I in my substitutions get everything covered but for reading and handwriting especially we make substitutions because what they recommend it just wasn't working with the learning styles and my specific children um so what makes these curriculum worth it even if you're not following exactly everything about their divine grace is telling to do you can see like they have they tell you what to do each day and so you can just like literally follow what they say to do each day poetry so I'll just have to tell you about poetry um so you can follow exactly what they do each day or you can look at this just as a suggestion which is more what I do when I first started doing this I think I tried to exactly follow what they were doing each day and I feel just a little bit more comfortable with doing homeschooling in general and knowing how to reach our goals for the year um so but the what really makes this curriculum worth your money and you can you can get this you can find these lists online but I really do like having one that I can just check off and I didn't have one last year cuz I bought an old curriculum and I really missed it so at the back they have these booklets my coffee stain can you see that just real life here um but the book lists are so worth it they just have so many really great book suggestions and so if for nothing else it's worth it just to get those book lists and book suggestions so the syllabus and this was the kindergarten syllabus that I used with my oldest when she was in kindergarten and some of the materials as I'll share with you have been changed since then but it's still the same general ideas so we're just gonna stick with that okay starting with math so I have a second grader and a kindergartner that I'm teaching this year so up through I think it's through third grade they recommend doing a Becca math um in mother drying grace you can do Saxon but I think that it's not like strongly recommend until fourth grade I don't know yet whether or not we'll do Saxon but um we are gonna do a Becca so I have a second grader but she's really bright when it comes to math and so we're actually on the third the third arithmetic for Rebecca and the things I like about a Becca weed one year actually when she was in kindergarten I couldn't get an ax Becca workbook in time and so I was able to buy her a modern curriculum press one and I liked the curriculum I thought it was great but it was black and white um whereas the Becca is all color on the inside which she really likes I really like especially um like learning coins for example she started coins and her when she was in kindergarten doing the first grade curriculum and there's a lot of noise back here because Saturday and so people are just hanging out back there and my baby's not super happy that I'm not holding her 21st I'm I'm sure you know how it goes anyways um in the kindergarten one when they were learning to do when they were learning to do coins they didn't have colors for the coin so she couldn't tell like by the shape sometimes whether it was a penny or a nickel or a quarter or whatever and so it is just really confusing but a Becca does color which is really cool so um said in last without this is my baby and she's gonna join us I think because she just didn't like not having somebody holding her so yeah should we tell them more about the school were doing thank you okay so you said you have Becca and this is something that I did when I was a little kid and I really liked and I found them at a homeschooling conference recently so we got them these are holy cards get it holy like in it so anyway they put a piece of paper inside fold it over and then fill it out as fast as they can and then you can see they can check the answers afterwards um so I bought one for addition subtraction multiplication and division she's used the addition and subtraction ones and the multiplication ones we haven't gotten to division yet but it it works great and it's fun and sometimes it's just nice to break up what she's doing um so she's not just sitting there doing her work book every day cuz I Drive her crazy I also found these when I was at a homeschool conference and so we're gonna read these days here and if we like them we might get some more um mr. Cooper's books so their picture books about math I'll show you on the inside of one it's like here their circumference is talking about radius and mr. Coombe friends and that sort of thing just really a neat concept so we're doing that yeah yes here and so what they define grace for care garden just recognize these little these little golden workbooks these are actually the ones from when my oldest was in kindergarten and so I have to get some new ones but there's really simple little workbooks and so that'll be easy because if you really just teaching them you to counsel Honduras sometimes they start doing a little beginning adding but there's just there's not a ton of content in kindergarten math come here just like first grade on it I do also have this is fun to plot just to illustrate something the this is an oz borne book the first illustrated math dictionary and so it's kind of a fun book what some really pretty colors inside that sort of thing okay reading this is what mother divine grace recommends to teach how to read I've heard of some people who have a lot of success with teacher child to reading 100 easy lessons but we haven't been one of those families and so we ended up switch - all about reading yay Oh all about reading my sensory um it's really great for kids who might have any kind of difficulty in learning how to read we've had some speech delays and stuff like that in our family which sometimes leads to some reading difficulties as well and so it's just it's worked awesome whoo my oldest actually is now reading it she's going into second grade I'd say she could probably read at the 4th 5th grade level and like she reads a little house books she's reading the Pender works right now so it really really works and stick with it right right um let's show them the next thing my little assistant is just with Danny now um ok so like I said we this one doesn't work for us teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons it might work for your kids but it doesn't work for mine so we had switched all about reading and when we were giving in all about reading I didn't do that very first level that has Ziggy the zebra puppet and I kind of wish me to get Ziggy because I've heard Dickie just motivates kids really well but instead I went online and found the pinkest puppet I could possibly find my oldest child and this is weird out she's a monster and it was really sweet actually my big girl named her Gabi because it was the year that we lost our little Gabriel and so again he was named after her baby brother in heaven which was very sweet anyway so Gabi like grabs the cards from her when she was practicing and that sort of thing and now the littlest one has inherited Gabi and she's super excited that she heard of Gabi so Gabi helps us with our reading but by all means if you if you are able to get Ziggy Ziggy the zebra is really adorable so I recommend that you okay so if you don't know anything about all about reading the way it works is the founder Marie Gribble she had a kid with really severe dyslexia and nothing was working to help him learn how to read I think it was a boy and so she developed this Graham and so it's based on I'm gonna I'm gonna say this wrong I think it's the orton-gillingham method which is supposed to work really well for kids with dyslexia so like I mentioned we've had some speech delays in our family and so sometimes you know like kids with speech delays don't necessarily get like full-blown dyslexia but sometimes they can get a touch of it and so it just it's helpful to have a program that's kind of designed for kids then might need a little extra boost and like I said my oldest is now she's seven years old and she's probably reading it like a fourth fifth grade level so it really really does work um and she's also just a really persistent kid she's really fun to teach so um the way it works is they have this is a little box it should get and inside the box you put your flashcards and just organize these last night because somehow I seriously think somebody just shuffled them it was absolutely crazy so there's like you can see there are little tabs for your review your mastered and what you have in future lessons and they have the same little tabs were the words all the phonogram cards are in yellow I'm just gonna pull one out for you it's like in K it starts a lot easier those like she just learned um my kindergarten just started the other day this is the first set of phonogram cards so it'll have the letter on the front and the back for the teacher to know how it's supposed to be pronounced they also do give have like this free app that you can use and so my kindergartner really likes this right now because I'll pull up the app on our little Kindle Fire and she can tap the letter and it tells her the sound and I like that too because sometimes the phonograms sound is different than what I would instinctively think it was so it's good um and then there's also work cards that go with it so that's the flashcards like I said there's just a little knack with the sounds the other big thing with all about reading is they have these um these letter tiles so here are letter tiles um I like my girls have really liked the letter tiles but I will say that it's tricky now having my one year old is kind of at the stage where she's pulling up on everything and everything wanting to grab everything and so for them it's really it's really hard for my kindergartner because she pulls something like this out and the baby's just like I want and I mean they're like little tiny magnets on the back so just makes me really nervous so we keep this in our like kindergarten room which is really just kind of like a big closet that's not being used as a closet and the doors are taken off and so just show you that a different time anyways so we keep it there just to kind of keep the magnets out of her reach but there is an app for the letter tiles and I'm in the process of trying to figure out how to download it on our Kindle Fire and it might just have to I might just have to UM get an iPad this year I've been trying to avoid doing that but they're just there are lots of really good homeschooling apps that they only have an iPad so it might just be worth getting one we're not like we're not anti screening our family and we're not like huge screen either I think we're somewhere in between word you know we watch TV we watch stuff on our Kindle Fire and on Netflix and stuff like that but we also do like to have hands-on stuff as much as possible so it's a little bit of all anyways but the letter tiles are another way to manipulate it and then there are these adorable each level has these little readers and what I really love about it is they use the words that you're learning in whatever that lesson is so the kid can read like a lot of beginning readers it's like okay there are words that the kid can't possibly read in them but these words are so simple that whatever the beginning lesson is they can sound out all the words that story and they get to have the satisfaction of being like I read this whole story and when they get through all the stories in a book they're like I read this whole book which is a pretty good sized book so it's just really empowering and exciting we've also used Bob books at the same time with these and those are it's the same sort of thing where they're just such basic books that you can actually sound out everything in them and the kid gets to be like actually read it so level one comes with three readers anything level two comes with two readers along with that they also have an activity book so if you buy if you buy this program like the first time then you're not gonna have to rebuy like various manipulatives and stuff like that and the teacher bug but you do have to rebuy the activity book and we bought like a new little yellow box cuz I also have a girl my oldest isn't all about spelling now and they use a lot of the same stuff so she needed her own box but anyways here's the workbook let's talk to reading and just lots of really funs the word flippers which are kind of a pain to assemble but my daughter's really love um that's just like fun little activities so it's just another level of like multi-sensory or whatever and then of course comes with a teacher's manual you just really I mean just lays out to you exactly what you need to do each day so just wonderful um so we all really really love all about reading and already seen success with it like awesome success with my oldest daughter who reading did not come super easy for and this just helped her have the tools she needed and like I said now she's grade levels ahead of course she needs to do so it's awesome um she's now in all about spelling so they recommend that once you've completed I think once you've completed all about reading level one if then you want to move to all about spelling you can or you can continue doing all about reading if you feel like you need to keep doing it so we have all about reading level two we started it last year we got partway through it and partway through it was just very clear that she was a very fluent reader at that point and we're like we can just switch to spelling I because it was just like it would have been like painful for her to continue to do these things that were way below her age level so anyways so we started all about spelling level one last year we didn't finish it because we started it towards the end of the year um so we're gonna finish this it's it's not very long it's like I can't remember how many lessons it is it's not very many lessons um there's only twenty-four lessons in it so I want to say that we're like halfway through it so we'll just do the the first the last twelve lessons at the beginning of the school year and then we'll move into level two so it's all about spelling is just like all about reading they have flashcards they have the magnets if the little letter tiles app or the sound app and there aren't readers but um and they aren't really really like activity stuff in the same way it's more like you practice writing out the letters or the words so um we actually have like a spelling no boy I just got our super pinky notebook that was fun okay so that's mouth reading writing so mother divine grace recommends writing our Catholic faith which is lovely but we my oldest went to pre-kindergarten for a couple of morning's a week at our local Catholic school and they used handwriting without tears I looked into it and I really loved it so we've actually stuck with it since then she's been using it the last couple years and my chemist was not using it no my youngest she's my child she's using it so music and writing without tears so this is my little child's book for it and we also have just a few of these different little things we have this and we have like the magnet pieces too what I really like about I've got this little thing so it's kind of like a Magna doodle and so I know if my oldest my oldest is really kind of a perfectionist she wants to do things right the first time and so I would have her practice writing the letter on here cuz I'm not a perfectionist and then she could show it to me and I'd be like okay I can see that you know how to do it so let's erase it and now try it in your book they have a little smiley face in the corner which mimics the little dot in the corner of the letters when they're learning how to write letters in the workbook so it's just a really great little tool it's not very expensive I forget what it was maybe like twenty dollars but it was worth every penny so I definitely recommend getting this little thing and I think I don't know the mega-magnet pieces I think came with it that's kind of cool too I didn't pull that down because the magnet pieces is something we do more in preschool mine in kindergarten and then my oldest is gonna start off the year with kick start cursive so um yeah that'd be great and then I also have for her she she and I both are into art a lot and I've been doing hand lettering and calligraphy and trying to learn that a little bit so I do have this calligraphy for kids which I had heard highly recommend it so when she's just having it over she's like I don't really want to do this then we can switch to that so umm she's done there's a printing one for second grade she already started it last year and I feel like her printing is pretty good so I mean we'll continue to practice it but I'm not gonna keep making her do endless worksheets on it I think she's ready for cursive so um the next I'm actually gonna save religion for last because we do things a little bit differently for religion I'll explain about that in a minute um so this year it's really exciting because mother divine grace used to have just like random books that they would suggest for early grades for geography and history and science and stuff like that which was great and I mean I do read a lot of picture books with the girls to cover those subjects but it I really like having like a book that's like this is the stuff you have to make sure that you cover instead of having to buy a million different little things with it so now they have these little books so they just started selling I think for the first grade last year and this year they have Cameron and second grade I don't know if it goes up to third grade but anyway so this is the science one for second grade in science so inside they just have like really basic concepts that they should know at this grade level and then it's like here this is for second grade they have something on clouds but then they also have like nature journaling and then they also have experiments that they can do it will say this um we do have this for first grade last year and some of our experiments didn't really work great so you might need to do a little troubleshooting that might have just been user error though I'm gonna blame it on us nothing to find grades kindergarten science is the same sort of thing just learning about it always starts off learning about the seasons and then goes into science experiments and then ends with like a nature journal and they have suggestions for a different project sets you can get online but sort of things so that's like our basic but um our girls really like doing nature journaling they like art they like going outside and I can't take the credit for that their dad is more of like a nature guy and the only reason why we go on hikes and stuff like that is totally because of their dad he's just like very knowledgeable about nature ish type things so I have some resources that are more for for nature study type things I got this last year at a homeschool conference and we didn't finish it but I think we're gonna work on it somewhere this year it's really thick book so it's not surprising that we didn't finish it um but yeah Claire Walker Leslie has a bunch of like nature journaling books and this is just the one for kids you can see there's just pages of things out in color and suggestions for sketching your own nature journal I get them like a little journal thing every year this is actually mine it's actually I'm using it as my planner too but this was like nice thick papers that we store my older ones that she can watercolor and that sort of thing usually get a cheaper one for my younger daughter my middle daughter because she just kind of goes crazy with it and she needs more quantity and less quality for hers so I also found these books and he didn't buy them yet these are two from the library but I'm pretty sure I'm gonna buy them because they're really neat um meet your new enemy in farm Anatomy she's really beautiful um I like my daughters and I are all just very like visually inclined when it comes to learning these sorts of things and we really like pretty art so for example this is about teen sex the page five insects so the one difficulty with these is they do use some cursive handwriting in here and my second grader can't consistently read cursive yet so she needs a little help with that but they also have some printing and I think our plan for it is she's gonna like pick pictures she did this the other day she picked at the monarch one the other day and copied this into her nature journal so she just drew her own version of it it was really pretty and she's really good at art so I think she likes that a lot I'm still kind of looking at firm Anatomy and I want to check out the food and anomie because I know they sell a box set and so I'm trying to figure out if it's just worth it to get the box set we also do have this just as a kind of reference it's another Usborne book I do like osborne books i don't sell them i don't have time for that but i kind of wish I did because they're really cool books so this is the illustrated elementary science dictionary and now they're just pretty little reference books and then I do have this - I bought this last year and we didn't use it because I think I forgot about it I don't think she anything no but we like birds like bird-watching and so their dad does at least I mean I like it too it just not as knowledgeable as those guys are but my sweet if I'm with my husband or with my oldest daughter they'll be like that's that kind of bird I'm like oh I didn't know that thank you um so I say he's always our science guy so that's that and then social studies mother divine grace once again has little workbooks and a doll for the little ones and I really really like that a lot so I'm really impressed with the second-grade math skills there's a lot in here so second grade you're kind of looking at like um the geography of your country so I mean there's a section on world geography North America US region state abbreviations US cities and landmarks your state and main the states so just um even compared to first grade just a lot more work bookish type things but also just pages they're kind of information so it's kind of like a little mini a little mini textbook but a little more fun than a textbook and they still do recommend like different picture books for history and that sort of thing so they're kind of blending the best of both worlds the kindergarten one is really really basic integrand social studies it's more just like a little picture book and it's I like it because you know we're gonna read other picture books about history and that sort of thing but this just kind of gives us just like the very bare minimum basic to make sure I have all my bases covered um I also got this little United States coloring book for my second grader and then the other thing is I mean we do really like just reading books um my girls really like the audible it's not audible but you can just get the audio CDs too Little House on the Prairie once read by cherry Jones to create and then there's also like this little picture book series too for the littler ones what we did for first grade at history which I loved and will definitely do again next year for first grade history and even just do every year is I have all girls and so we listen to like all the American Girl books which are all inaudible or most of them around audible there's a few of the new ones that aren't and so we listen to those and gave them a good scope of like American history and so now when we talk about something and they'll be like oh when did that have I'll be like oh you know that was like around the time that Felicity was alive and it just gives them like something to pin it on or I'll be like that's when addy was alive or yeah that's like what was going on when Molly was alive and they deal with some really really tough issues those books because most of the girls are living through wars or escaping from slavery or something Germanic like that but they do it in such a way that it's manageable I think for a little kid so I did find this one last year two story of America and this is just kind of like a cool picture one that like look there it covers this each area and it has the cute little American Girl dolls so if you've got I can't imagine boys really like you miss process but if you have girls I think that it's a really fun way to supplement everything else you're doing and to give them a good scope of history okay so that's math reading science social studies and like I said I don't do all these subjects every day um I do the basic ones the reading writing arithmetic religion and then anything else just kind of extra I just want to throw this out here we don't do this consistently at all but my husband is he's a professor at a seminary he teaches theology and teaches ancient languages specifically Latin and so we have to have just a tiny bit of Latin thrown in just for fun so I highly recommend song school labs and they have this is Simeon the monkey and he's really funny so they have like a video that comes with it and then they have an audio CD which we just have playing in the car and the kids just learn basic Latin they also have an option for ecclesiastical or classic pronunciation which was important to my husband because he teaches ecclesiastical pronunciation you wanted them to learn that too so it's just kind of a cute thing for them just to know like some random Latin words they also have song school Greek which we have but haven't used yet and song school Spanish which I would really like to get because I think it's important to learn Spanish because it's becoming such a prevalent language in our country and I want my girls to be able to know that they also have some and their soon-to-be aunt has a lot of span it has a lot of spanish-speaking relatives and I think it'd just be cool for them to be able to learn something that's connected to a family member so um the other two things I'm going to look at before religion are art and music so mother divine grace for art has um they used to do was it called his mommy's a Renoir but then they changed the name to it again but they were like little work or little cards and it was cool my daughter's liked them but for me it was kind of harder to keep track of now they have their own art books and these are just absolutely gorgeous so it'll show you the paintings and then like there are some discussion questions as you can ask as you're looking at the paintings together so in the early years they really just emphasize its mother divine versus very gentle in the early years and they just emphasized like introducing your children to beautiful things so just looking at beautiful pictures and helping them to start like critically looking for things in the pictures well I guess and my daughter's also oh here's another just another Osborne one that we'll probably just use to supplement it cuz they like this one lift the flap art so sometimes I just pull this one out that just has fun little pictures and flaps and all that good stuff but it's not not strictly part of the curriculum I'll make sure that we get through that one but the other thing I do want to make sure you get through is just doing art because like I said my oldest especially loves love's love's doing art and she's pretty good at it too and um and her the next sister down my kindergartner is definitely getting into it as well we have this little art treasure I think we're gonna go through it's kind of another us-born go up it's really fun um has activities that are based on actual famous pieces of art so that's kind of cool I've been using this one a lot I didn't I didn't learn how to draw when I was growing up I learned as an adult and so I'm still in the process of learning and this book is so beautiful and very simple um so this is just once and I'm gonna just leave out I don't know that the girls names yet but I definitely stat a time it's just how to draw books that sort of thing so in mother divine grace they recommend it's a book that may come in a hit grab but it's like basic like hymns or whatever that she learned so we kind of had that but I don't want that to be too forced I've tried that on the girls don't like it when I'm like we're gonna learn how to sing this hymn I find that like I like looking to the book to get an idea of like okay this is what we should I would like for them to learn these different hymns but feel like it's more natural and organic if they can just learn them in the liturgy and we're really fortunate in that my husband teaches at a seminary we go to Mass there at least once a week for daily Mass and they have beautiful music so I feel like they're getting that exposure there and I'm less worried about it um something mother divine grace recommends that my daughter really really loved is these books like a picture book and then the picture book goes with the musical piece and so there's pictures that cover the different parts of the musical piece and so really beautiful this one's kind of beat up because it's so loved um but the carnival the animals my middle daughter is obsessed with listen to this one a lot and so as it goes through the different movements it it talks about who they're supposed to so it kind of gives an introduction in the beginning but then it goes for the different movements talks about who each animal supposed to represent it's really really neat my daughter's really love it there's also there's a whole stack of them I recommend actually didn't realize that we have pretty much all of them now whole stack of them that they recommend they're just really beautiful lovely books you can get them secondhand you can get them new they come with CDs if you get him new but it's it's worth it because my daughter's really loved that we didn't use this last year I thought we were going to so I pulled it out because we might look at it a little bit this year it's another Osborne book just famous composers very simple um so before I get into religion I do want to mention how I organize these things every day I know some people do work boxes I've tried a lot of different methods but the one method that I found actually works in keeping me organized and them organized is just having a simple little clipboard and then every day I just clip on whatever worksheets I want them to work on that day and then that way you know they can pull it off and see what they need to get done that day and then I know what they need to get done that day easier to get it done I don't do it for everything because some things just don't have something you can pull off but it's something that helps us to stay organized there's still so little that I don't really have huge problems with keeping stuff organized because I up until now I've only been like strictly schooling one because my middle child was in preschool last year was just kind of you know more fun play base stuff um but now even with two it's just it's not it's not that many I'm sure when I'm up to three and I have older kids it'll be harder to keep track of okay so I stay the best for last religion because if you're watching this and you're thinking of using mother divine grace then you're probably Catholic a little bit of background my husband and I both have backgrounds in theology so we both have undergraduate degrees and master's degrees in theology and he also has a PhD in theology so this is a really important area for us not just from the academic standpoint I mean we're gonna want them to learn good concrete theology down the line and that's more of like an academic study but from a faith standpoint I mean we're my domestic monastery our faith is everything to us um and so we want them to really fall in love with their faith and to see it as a love story you know to know that God is pursuing them and their call to pursue God as well to know they have a vocation to know that they're surrounded by the church and the Saints who love them so deeply so I'm really really picky when it comes to catechetical materials teaching the faith I want something that's gonna be really rich really um like really full of the truth and not watering anything down and something that'll just engage their minds and their hearts so I do I have done what mother's divine grace recommends for kindergarten and had success with it but I'm gonna say it was like a little bit of a caveat so this is the the golden children's Bible is what they recommend for kindergarten and they have like kind of a plan of going through and reading the stories in general the golden children's Bible is really beautiful but I think their first arch I think that there is a Catholic version of it that you could check out but this is just kind of like a little little gripe of mine for some reason Jesus has blonde hair and blue in the pictures and I think it's important Jesus was a real person and he was from a certain part of the world and he looked a certain way and interestingly enough in other parts of the book if you know you have people that look like they're actually somewhat middle-eastern but for whatever reason Jesus looks like he's of someone from like Scandinavia and I think okay Jesus did look a certain way and he might have even not looked exactly like me and there's there's value and there's beauty in that because he he came from a people he came and belong to two of people in a certain part of the world and he came for all of us but we can't ignore the fact you know that like he wasn't you didn't come to Sweden like he came to Israel um and so anyway so that's just like my one gripe about it and I think I haven't looked at the cat the one the cat that one might do a better job of it just didn't like so I might even just go through and color in his hair or something like that I think the stories are really well done but I just don't know how I feel about pictures of Jesus I will say there's a lot of awesome Catholic presses lately that have just been coming out with you know Bible stories and stories about the faith that are doing a great job of Jesus looking middle-eastern which i think is you just think it's important to have there so anyways I came across this at some point is it I may have been last year I might even found the second hand I'm not remembering now I'm gonna grate about that said the homeschool convention I haven't used it yet at any rate but um this one is put out by a Magnificat mcNeish espress and they're just in general their little kid books are so good like I said I have a very high standard for this so trust me when I say they're excellent um I think I'm gonna use this one you can occur in this year tell me about the Catholic faith for small children I think we're just gonna kind of read through it because it it covers just like all the very very basic stuff and I know some people don't like kind of the little cranny drawings but I really think these are really sweet sweet drawings like I said you I I really love it because when you look like look at this and fix things went wrong star what cool is that it's so cool um you know except everyone is Jesus this time actually looks like they're from the Middle East which is accurate so that I did you like that a lot um but it goes through history and everything just it looks like a really really awesome book so we will be looking at this over the course of the year now my second grader so typically second grade his first communion right but she is kind of a late fall baby I'm just born in October and so she's on the older end of second grade and I didn't want her to wait until she was like eight and a half to have her first communion so she had her first communion last year so her past first communion mother divine grace recommends the first communion catechism and then like the other Baltimore Catechism I think the Baltimore Catechism is great if you kind of just don't have an idea of what you want them to learn you feel like they need to memorize stuff um because they just need that foundation I feel like a lot of the stuff that they were having us memorize it felt it felt really stilted to me because I have a background in teaching catechesis to little kids so for me it's like I want to I don't feel like I struggle explaining anything like we talked about deep theological things my kids are like fasting I would like the resurrection of the body at the end of time it's like stuff like that so I don't feel like I needed to have that in order to help them learn the concepts of the faith um so we just you just aren't using that and we didn't use that um do a lot of just living out the faith and just a lot of like informal discussion and we have a lot of really beautiful picture books around the house um you know sometimes we'll put real pray Liturgy of the hours with uh my husband I create literally the hours in the Rosary every day and so I mean just like we go to daily Mass at least once a week during the school year and then you know go to Sunday Mass and so like they're just very much is like living out the faith and they see us to talk about the faith and Ashley live it out I feel like that's the biggest thing for like little little kids when they're too little to learn like like theology is just for catechesis to be a Ledge sort of thing but I think having good resources can help make sure you cover all your base - so renewing two things this year for second-grade one is okay like I said I am super super picky about um cata catechol materials really really really picky so if I tell you something is excellent know that it is like amazing I have learned things from this book okay ready the Catechism of the second sacraments with LEGOs oh my goodness every kid I've heard from really likes these this is a really pricey book but it is so worth it it covers all the seven sacraments using Legos it's kind of like graphic novel style which may second-grader a lot of scratch up novels but the content is so so so good they're quoting Saints they're quoting scripture there I mean it's just it's really good they're covering every little like nuance that I would want covered and it's just it's so much richer than any second grade catechesis text book I have ever seen um and it I would say it covers everything you're gonna find in the Baltimore Catechism but it doesn't in a really really engaging way and I feel like Kat um memorization has its place in early education Francois mother drag-race also does recommend poetry I didn't pull it out most of them are from Robert Louis Stevenson and the harp and the laurel wreath and the laurel wreath this I'm gonna have to pull it out but um poetry memorization is a big thing and mother divine grace but other memorization to because it's just that first step of classical education um the grammatical stage so that being said like memorization is its placed we have to memorize things related to faith but I really just want them to fall in love with the faith and something like this helps them just fall in love with it it's beautiful it's very very very rich it's very very very engaging it's funny like it's just it's just really really great like okay here this is many years later during the time of Noah the world turned wicked and God has mercy decided to create a new so this is like the story of the flood because of people being wicked and like glorious it's just so well done the other thing we're going to use is my own book and I'm gonna have to have a whole separate video that's just about um the books that I published cuz I published a bunch of children's books this is and if you follow me on any other social media you've already heard funs about this this is a book I came out with earlier this year like a field guide it's divided into sections and it it covers everything you can see - there's like color I'm not getting it in there there's like colored there's like colored tabs and it covers just everything you could find in a Catholic Church including the church yeah I'm so for example let's say I want to learn about investments today so I'm gonna go to the green section and Oh what's a chance' bowl and then there you go so it's a good reference book but it's also good if you're like I want my kids to know about the names of all these different things we see and there's some is that my husband works at seminary my daughters and I actually like on the sacristy team it's like sacristans at our parish so there's like a lot of things that I was like learning as I was working on this book and I'd be like we're gonna put that in the book that's like a new thing I'd never heard of before um this aquarium that I didn't know what that was before but that's something a lot of people don't know about because it's back in the sacristy so anyways gonna use Catholic field guide and you want to use it too I'll have to stick a link down um below so that you can purchase it if you want please purchase it though because it supports our family if you do and I just I really really really have longed how it turned out it's really pretty okay so that's everything that we're doing that's a lot of stuff and like I said basically what we do every day is a little bit of religion um a little bit of reading a little bit of math and a little bit of handwriting and that's what I aim to get done every day anything past that is extra and we do I mean we do other learning things beyond that but I think when they're a little it's so important for them to play and to just enjoy being little and that's a big reason why we homeschools for them to have that peaceful playful lifestyle so I hope this you enjoyed this video if you do like it and subscribe to my channel and I look forward to talking with you and telling you more about how this all plays out in the course the year

Channel: That Catholic Catechist

Views: 7,984

Keywords: Mother of Divine Grace, Catholic, homeschool

Id: ek6EXwJiOaw

Length: 43min 42sec (2622 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018