Homeschool Catalog Look Through

hey hey welcome back to my channel my name is kalyn if you are new welcome along this is full purpose and heart and i'm kind of excited about this video because i haven't done anything like this before but i received my um homeschool sale catalog in the mail and i was like thumbing through it and i was like i wish i could just have a conversation with my friends about homeschool curriculum so i quickly came in here flipped on the camera the lighting's not perfect but if you've been around here for a minute you know that that's just not something that i do so anyway so this video what i'm going to do is i'm just going to go through my catalog with you and share my honest opinions and just kind of talk about curriculum that i've used and what i haven't used or what i want to use my opinion of some of them um we we've used a good amount of a curriculum of curriculum but we certainly haven't used anywhere close to what's available so um i also have like a little just piece of paper here with the grocery list started um that i am going to use and just kind of write down whatever pops out of stuff that i want to use so if you want to come along with me as we thumb through some curriculum then let's go ahead and get started [Music] all right so i'm not exactly sure um the best way to do this but i have it just kind of here on the counter so i'll thumb through it with you guys and i'll tell you what i think so um first and foremost i saw this the horizons preschool thing and i use horizons for math and so i have looked at that before but whatever i haven't used it okay first first first page hello bju press so i've actually had quite a few comments on some of my bju press um whatever like videos that i've done in the past and we have done bju press for english second grade science third grade and history third grade um i loved their english second grade curriculum we did it with the video and this is thechristianbook.com by the way if you don't have um if you're if they're not mailing you stuff then you need to get them to mail you stuff anyway so you can get just the teacher book and the student book for a much cheaper price and um or you can do the online videos i did online videos for second grade english and i i think we're going to do it again i really do enjoy having something to be able to put my student in front of and let them kind of self direct learning as opposed to me being the caretaker of what they're doing so i i really did enjoy having that space for them and i'm gonna try to have that for each of my kiddos next year so um anyway i highly recommend second grade english um third grade science the the student workbook and the textbook was awesome i would recommend those i would not recommend the video portion to that so um i wouldn't do that and then as far as heritage studies okay so i have actually done heritage studies the book for first grade second grade and then third grade we did it with the videos i would recommend first and second grade heritage studies i i really enjoyed how they laid it out we taught it ourselves so i just like went through the book i had the teacher manual as well anyway it was awesome third grade i did not like for a couple of reasons some of them were personal reasons others of them i just didn't like how they presented the information um and so and i've talked about that on previous videos so if you know then you may have this may be familiar to you so anyway that's my take on bju press i i do like them especially those specific subjects so i'm always looking at some of their other subjects to see what they have actually now that i look at this i believe that we've done bju press spelling for both first and third grade um and we only did like a couple weeks worth but spelling's been kind of a rough gig for all of us so okay so that's that then they've got a couple of other resources they have like a k5 um kits but i've never looked at those and so oh yeah cbj press spelling we have done that before they have a reading program i haven't ever done that before this is the picture they even have a picture here of english too that's the exact one that we did and i loved it and i think we're gonna do it again okay um turning a couple pages i'm just kind of going quickly so this is a becca science stuff is what kind of pops out at me they do oh and arithmetic okay so we are currently doing a becca grade four and we are not going to finish this year so i'm just gonna carry it over into grade five um and then we're probably gonna pick up teaching textbooks but i like it my only negative that i would say about it is that it is not it doesn't have any color enough color does it have any color conveniently it's right here yeah please are you kidding me it's a lot of red and yellow it's not very colorful i don't know i guess as you get older then you just have to be okay with not a lot of color right okay but can we talk about science for a hot minute here so i've done a video about um various science things that i've used and what i like and how i use them and this is what this is what i've learned in my little tiny moments of science is that your students are going to re-learn the same science topics over and over and over and over and over again and yeah you build on it as years go on but like it's nothing new so now that my student is going into fourth fifth grade um okay so can i tangent here for just a second because i can hear myself saying referring to my kids as my students and i've had a person comment on it once before that they're like why do you call your kids your students and i think it's just a habit so i'm just going to say it here in case you've never seen any of my videos before that i was a teacher before i did homeschool and i just it's just habitual that i call my kids my students and mostly because it's just easier for to for me to make sure that i'm um i don't know not necessarily referring to them specifically or i don't know maybe it's a little bit of um an anonymity being anonymous a little bit about them but um anyway so that's why i call them my students or your students um instead of saying like your son or daughter or your kids anyway okay so that's my five cents about that now so i'm looking at the becca science and my first thought is like oh like i need some science because we are always like hobbling along in this science world and so i'm just looking like at grade one grade two grade three anyway it's like essentially the same things we're learning about animals we learn about insects we learn about plants we learn about our bodies we learn about science we learn about or like space rather we learn about weather which is also part of seasons like and then our healthy bodies developing good habits good habits good habits safety animals okay it's just all the same stuff can we just say it what it is so whatever it is that you choose to use whether it's the good and the beautiful or a becca or bju or like whatever it is you're gonna be just fine right so recently so you're gonna need to go back and watch that science video recently we've been doing draw right now and we did it for christopher columbus you can see them he's still down here because it was fun and now i'm gonna move into um we're gonna do one week of the weather as we transition into the human body so anyway that's my two cents about that okay so this is a becca's history and i did look into it briefly um i just i don't know like my america my world seemed really elementary that i didn't okay so i have a background in history teaching that's what i taught when i was in high school when i taught high school and middle school for a year so i feel like i'm really critical about history because my love of history is not in the facts and the dates and the who did what did when but my fascination with history are the stories of history like the the growth of our time and how we've gone from where we were to where we are and what was it like for people who who changed with the times you know they they had to confront what was comfortable with something that's new and uncomfortable they had to live through war they had to live through um recessions they had to live through famines and and all of those stories that people have to share like i want to know those stories and and i am i am interested a little bit in in more of the people that that shaped our country george washington and president lincoln or president roosevelt or whomever it is i'm interested in who they were as people and how their lives were shaped which led them to their positions of power whether it's in the united states or elsewhere so anyway so when i look at these things they really do appear um that they they tell a history of of our world america um heritage studies the united states i love geography studies so um but unfortunately as far as rebecca goes i'm i'm pretty uneducated in them i don't really know it very well okay but i have done this this is a becca's k5 program and i've done their um letters and sounds and number skills i've done both of those and i like them quite a lot they have a whole curriculum for grade k5 so this is for your five-year-old who is not preschool but maybe not quite reading or not quite kindergarten or maybe they are kindergarten but they're not like basic kindergarten right they're like upper level kindergarten going into first grade so i think that the latter is probably more accurate but it is helpful because this is k4 so it's a little bit more than like three to four-year-old which is like the preschool ages my two younger children are um they're ahead of the game because they are fall birthdays so my child should technically be starting kindergarten this coming year i got i can't even remember she would be starting first grade and she's going into second grade so that's how it is and then my youngest would be starting preschool but he's actually going into kindergarten so um anyway that's my two cents about that but a becca actually does have a lot and they they clump all of their um units together like all of their subjects into grades so that makes it for a really quick my problem is is that i've never purchased an entire curriculum set from one company just like across the board because i think that i just like i like approaching subjects in a different way i'm gonna just say it that way like i don't know so anyway um this is a science a c s i i believe i remember its association of christian schools international i believe that i remember listen um one of my youtube inspiration people mentors um and she talked about acsi or was it ati oh no it was an ati that's another thing but anyway um do you want to know what draws me to a curriculum it's the cover yes so that cute little baby polar bear and then it says science grade one and they have life physical earth human body again it's the same stuff right so it looks like they're learning about plants space or that's earth sciences space physical science is going to be like motion probably and then the human body oh please everyone's doing the same thing so just get one that has a cute cover because that's all oh ace so i was just talking about my youtube mentor who doesn't know that i exist but i watched her like everything until she stopped filming youtube so anyway she did ace with her kids for a season and i have never even looked into it because i was distracted by something else but just my general perception of it is they look like they've never done an update they look very dated which isn't bad because it doesn't change but knowing me they're all i was gonna say they're all very affordable but they're about the same price i don't know i just really like a lot of color a lot of graphics all that kind of stuff okay moving on this is singapore math or sex and math i have heard great things about them but i've never done them because we always do um horizons this is a really fun video i'm sure because you see like the top of my head during most of the video so i'm really trying to not make that happen oh i've done these books before they're cumin kumon i don't know how you say them uh we did those for times table uh time like clocks and then i think i got like another one and we did we did like three pages of it and then we promptly stopped because that's all it is is just repetition of that one concept over and over and and i just i can't do that nor can my kids so it's not just me okay matthew c another i i have two youtube mentors that i watched all the time and my second one she did matthew c i did not get into it because i couldn't when we very first started i couldn't afford all the manipulatives and i didn't have a place to store them if i were to do it again today would i go back to it that's a good question i don't know because i've done my first two kids with horizons math and it worked so well um i may just like continue it with my third until it doesn't work anymore instead of moving him into matthew c but i believe that there's a video that goes along with it and so they watch the video on like monday and then the rest of the week they do their lessons but okay so i'm remembering now the difference between matthew c and why i went with horizons was because matthew c is um is the the style that they teach it is expertise do you like that word i pretty much meant that made it up but it's where you're going to like become an expert at this one concept before you move to the next one so and whereas um horizons is the circle one the rotation the cyclical one wow i'm really good at these these uh words right anyway so i think that that's why i chose what i did because i like the idea of like introducing a topic and not being very good at it and then going back to what you know and then reviewing what you know and then picking up what you learned back here and then go like kind of moving along this way so that you're constantly revisiting what you once knew instead of her write or math you see where it's like you you become proficient in this concept and then you build on it build on it build on it build on it and that just seemed overwhelming to me if you want to know the truth that's how that's where it came from so that's why i chose what i did so here's horizons i love it it comes in two books i love their math program i have done their language arts and i do not love them so we have dropped language arts and we're still flailing around trying to figure that out but um and i haven't done anything else of theirs but i did buy this um i bought this when i very first started homeschooling this was the first kit that i purchased and i would never recommend anyone to do that again it was a there was a lot of stuff in here that i didn't use primarily those reading books we never really read them and then there's like a poster in there that i was like there's 10 000 posters that are cuter than this anyway so save yourself the 151 bucks and just buy the two books you don't need the student manuals yeah this comes with the student manuals too no you don't need to do that so it's on sale for 151 the retail price is 189. so anyway just get the student book one and student book two for whatever grade you're in now we are in grade four but we did not do horizons grade four and i i will say i kind of regret it i don't know i loved it so much but we didn't do it i got really intimidated when we started fractions and then i pulled back and so now we're i don't know now i don't know where we are is what it what the truth of that is but i think i'll figure it out and we'll we may like pick up horizons grade four book two and then do book grade five book one i know i literally just said we're doing teaching textbooks but i don't know okay so here's life packs i never got into life pack that's also with alpha and omega um which is the company that makes the horizons curriculum and then there's just a bunch of books oh here's u.s history and world history so i'm always looking for history and i'm going to tell you my favorite thing to do for history right now this is not this is unplanned but here you go these this is my favorite favorite thing to do with history right now is to make an entire unit on a history pocket and these are made by evan moore and if you can see they've got well it's not straight but anyway they've got all different kinds of um themes and i don't know if i have them all i want to say that i do but they have they have books for grades one through three and then books for grade four five and six and i have um i have ancient rome too because we did the roman history this last time but anyway essentially you just like build your whole unit off of these i did a whole video on these and i would highly recommend that this is what i love to do for history and because it's really it's about those stories that i was talking about and less about the the dates and the names and the who did what when's which is typically what his story history gets caught up in and for me i'm like i want to know about why they traveled west and like why did the jones family decide to travel west and what did they pack and what did they experience and when they got there what did they do and who did they socialize with and how did they socialize like that even just talking about it is really really fascinating to me and can i talk about another thing this video really is like just whatever kaelin wants to talk about so in 2020 my family and i were able to travel um on the eastern states quite a bit and we and i'm a western child i was born and raised in california and then i went to college in the mountain west states so my experience on the east coast is literally just vacations and the stint i spent working in disney world in florida anyway so when i took my young children and my family out east um i my eyes were significantly opened to the difference in history lessons that public school gives and in my conversations as an adult now with people who grew up and went to public school on the east coast it's just so amazing to me to see the difference because in the western schools we learn heavily about the westward movement the louisiana purchase moving west the big wild west the gold rush like what life was like was on the on the plains and i grew up in california so the california missions was a really big deal and we anyway so that was my growing up history and when i went back east with my family and i went to jamestown and we went to yorktown and we went to williamsburg and we went to the battlefields i was just stunned at the education that i learned just in those few months that we were there whereas over versus an entire lifetime in my public education right well then fast forward to my adult years and talking with people now who grew up on the east coast they say the same story but of an opposite set right that they learned all about like settlement and the colonies and colonial life and the war like the revolutionary war and the just the movement that happened within the colonies during that season and they don't know anything about the wild west and it was just last weekend i was down in zions with my husband and we were hiking around and zion's is in southern utah it's the national park in southern utah and we shared the bus the the little tram bus that you take up to the narrows with um the people we were sitting around were from new york and they were there on vacation it was just a group of guys anyway we were just kind of briefly talking about it and they were just like their eyes they had never been to the west and he was just making a joke about like a saloon versus he was calling it a salon and and i was like this is this is literally my whole public school growing up life versus his public school growing up life and how completely different they were he didn't know hardly anything about the wild west and i knew very little about colonial america so that huge long story is an umbrella to share the benefit and the love and the excitement that i have that i get to teach my kids this perception perspective rather of history as a whole country and we will in the future travel eat back east again so that we can see those places and experience those stories and these these history pockets are a really awesome way to kind of do an introduction for those and give a nice overview of some of those big topics that when i was a kid were breezed over so fast that we didn't ever really talk about it so anyway i got that went from this right because evan moore is not going to be in here oh that's a lie look at there's an evan moore geography book okay so anyway i don't know if these will be in there but that's going to be my number one like resource of hopping into and i wish that they did science pockets dear evan moore can you please start making science pockets for us because i love them they do literature pockets okay that's a side note all right um so i have done this evan moore geography book this daily geography one down here looks like this i've also done this one right here this is better get this one the daily geography grade whatever you want they're very very simple so your student doesn't have to do one per day although you could essentially like if i were a teacher in public school it would be my bell work right um or seat work or whatever they do in the first thing i didn't like this beginning geography one as much so that would be my vote for that the the skill sharpeners geography i love skill sharpeners but i don't i don't love that one so take that as it's worth right i don't i don't know if i would get that one so but right now for geography well we haven't done it in a long time but when we started our school year i got this giant okay hold on because i'm gonna move you really quick so i got this giant there's a water bottle um map right here it's kind of not very cute but anyway i got that giant map from cherry creek lane i believe i know i'm gonna try to put my camera down without making you sick they were called cherry creek lane it's a giant map and so then we started coloring the states as we learned them but then i couldn't figure out like i didn't like taking it off the wall and on the wall off and on so then we stopped coloring it but um and then we had puzzles and we had flash cards and we had game boards and books and like all kinds of fun stuff so learning american geography is actually really fun and and i need to pick it up again but there's always something so anyway let me look here in this book again they have some electives i don't recognize oh i recognize these okay i actually mentioned this so this is the draw right now that i was talking about and um they have what five books or something like that and you can get all of them in a kit they have eight volumes you can get all of them for 64. if you buy them whenever the sale date is on this thing i don't know anyway but um retail is 100 bucks but you can buy them all for cheaper but anyway i love them i love them so they have anyway just look them up they have all kinds of stuff and like this is the one that we did christopher columbus out of that's these ones right here and then i added this like flap book thing that we did um and i like they have words if you've never seen them before they have words in here that you can have your kid just write you can have them like copy it or you can dictate it to them but what i do is i tell the story we might couple it with a youtube video or two um or maybe if i have some other resource i don't know anyway we learn a little bit about what they're talking about and then for my oldest i have him write his own paragraph and then my middle student she's in first grade now so i have her write what this says she just kind of copies it and then my youngest just writes his name mostly but anyway so this one has christopher columbus autumn harvest and the weather so i'm thinking about picking up the weather section here at the end my oldest loves to draw and anything that we can make into an art project he eats it right up so i definitely recommend the draw right now series and i've actually purchased most of my books second hand so um if you have like a curriculum type event look on facebook maybe somebody's hosting one for you they're usually really nice to get so so that's that there's a bunch of science stuff in here for um evan moore most of which i have but like i said before i feel like science you're pretty much gonna hit the same subjects every single for everybody and if you want something more specific like let's say you wanna learn just about birds or you wanna learn just about marine biology then you're gonna have to look for those specific subjects as as opposed to a general science curriculum so for example i know that the good and the beautiful has like marine biology i know that they gather round school curriculum whatever they're called she has the birds or like north american animals is one that she does anyway so they're much more specific so if that's what you want to do for your kids then um then look into that okay so i'm at i'm in the section that's language now like foreign language and so far in our school we have not really done any foreign language i started a science thing at the beginning of last year and never really got anywhere with it i think we learned the colors and we learned like basic hello goodbye um maybe some food i think i might have gotten into a little a few foods in spanish but we didn't really go very far with it and then i was looking into having just an actual curriculum and then decided that i didn't want to spend the money on it when i have a hard enough time trying to get in all of the subjects that we already have so i haven't done really anything with language right now so as like a second a second language so welcome to america i guess right because by now i feel like other areas of the country are of the world have multiple languages down okay um these are just some bible helps is where i'm at now in the book and i do have these this indescribable one right here actually it's right here let me reach i have the indescribable this is a really great book but i haven't figured out how to utilize it very well um so i think that you could just like read the little devotional and then connect it to something sciencey my problem with science right now which i think i'm going to get away from next year i haven't decided but my problem with science right now is that i am required to submit a portfolio at the end of every quarter that has tangible like things that we've created or something that we've done and sometimes in my science life like as we explore stuff it's very experience based as opposed to product based and i've very much morphed my school life to being a product based school into an experience based school and i can thank 2020 for that a thousand times um so anyway i don't know for sure how that's gonna like come down but i really do like this these books and he now uh the author is louis i don't know how we say his name anyway but now he's expanded it so it looks like he's got four or three of them now so he's got how great is our god the wonder of creation and then this one indescribable it's an awesome book so that's a really great way to start your school morning um just to kind of spend some time in science and and god especially since we live in a world who is so interested in moving away from god and doesn't want to recognize god in anything this is a very simple less than five minute way that you can invite god into your home with your kids and show him show them that he is in everything and everything shows that he exists right okay um i'm a believer and if you're new and you haven't watched any of my videos before you need to know i'm a believer okay history where the well-trained mind oh i've heard okay so this is the story of the world this is another really popular history curriculum that people love to go through i have friends that love it um it comes with a student manual with like a ton of different activities i never got into it i didn't even i think i've thumbed through the textbook one time at a fair or something and i was like i can't i can't do this because it's a lot of reading now some families really thrive on read-alouds and that's just not me so um i could not see myself sitting down and reading the text to my students we i need to experience it more which is why i love these evan moore um whatever those called history pockets so anyway so that's my my take on the story of the world i haven't done it enough to be able to share about it so all right um okay here's some more evan moore stuff that i've done oh here's another one okay so this is explode the the code we have done explode the code my they're very very affordable but they're affordable because the paper is very thin and there's literally not one stitch of color anywhere if you know you know i love color wow i'm really close to you guys let me pull myself back i'm leaning on my knees anyway however that being said um the concepts are really nice and they're very simple for kids to go through as independent practice work i do this with my son and sometimes i feel like it's kind of busy work that he just speeds through the page without really learning what he should be learning so if i'm not sitting next to him which the vast majority of the time when he was doing this i was not um then there you go then that was my two cents about that but um i do buy them and we like them sometimes so um this is another evan moore these like fundamental series i've done a few of the reviews on my book on my page and we never really got into them i'll be honest um because they were all like compartmentalized or they're like divided up by subject and i just don't teach that way i like them a very you know like round circle what is that word oh anyway you know what i'm talking about so i just never really got into them but i have them i could probably pull one out if i looked hard enough so um all right this video is getting super long i'll probably have to put it into two parts okay i do have these two these are called fix it grammar we did the first one the nose tree and we never finished it so i'm gonna actually have my son pick it up probably next year or maybe during the summer we'll do this because it really was fun as we were telling the story and then he was writing it um so i'm hoping that maybe we can get back to that although mine didn't look anything like this so maybe they have a new version that they've just come out with that now oh look new edition it says it right there new edition so yeah i really liked fixit grammar i would highly recommend it that was a lot of fun um and it looks like they have five five levels so that's kind of a fun one um okay is this i've done this one what is this building writing series it looks really familiar but i don't i can't pinpoint what it is oh handwriting without tears did i do this i feel like i did this but i don't remember but this page looks really familiar there are that little book the kindergarten kit tell me did you watch that video did i talk about it in one of my videos how long have you been watching me okay spelling you see we have spelling you see there is a love-hate relationship in the world of homeschooling with spelling you see you either love it or you hate it and when i first looked at it i was always like what a waste like why would i buy a book that has just three white boxes lined one right after another like what a waste of money but that being said i my son is doing uh spelling bee and i really am enjoying it i like it but you do need to make sure that you're telling your kids to do the steps right so like in spelling in the b one you have to get like a colored pencil whatever color green and circle all of the vowel blends or all of the silenties or like whatever it is that you're circling and my if i wasn't like sitting over my son's shoulder then he wouldn't do it and he just like scribbles in the other side of the page the words to the rhyme without really like paying attention to it and i really wanted it to be part handwriting part spelling um and it wasn't that so i do think that we will move up in a level and do the next level as they come because i really did like it we also did a reason for handwriting i did that with my son when he was brand new to school um when we were brand new homeschoolers and i really did like that one too this is essentially it's just copywork of the scriptures and um but then we stopped with that i do do i do spell and write too i've done this one before this is an evan moore spell and write i think i'm actually doing that with my kindergartner right now if i could remember everything that i have in our books or in our drawers which often times we don't get to okay here we are this is more science stuff i'm just gonna look at it really quick i feel like it's not until you get into like secondary level education that you're really going to start forming like learning science so like then you learn biology and chemistry and physics right but before that it's all just like fun so i don't know they have a bunch of science kits so there's that um and that's the end so there you go this is a very long video but hopefully you got a few nuggets thanks for spending some time with me i should have had like a delicious beverage or something that i could enjoy while we sat and chatted but anyway that is our and again this is christian book that's the homeschool sale walkthrough hopefully it wasn't a waste of your time bye friends [Music]

Channel: Full Purpose And Heart

Views: 585

Keywords: homeschool, preschool, curriculum, full purpose and heart, teaching

Id: FiDf0Bplx_c

Length: 38min 46sec (2326 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022