HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM REVIEW! | YEAR END 2020/21 UPDATE & CHAT

hey friends welcome back to my channel if you are new here my name is julie i am a mom to five and we are just finishing up our seventh year of homeschooling as i am filming this we still have about two weeks left of school to go but i'm gonna go ahead today and kind of give you a year-end review for this 2020-2021 um school year i will try to go through this and talk and show you everything fairly quickly i do tend to get long-winded on these this style of video but i'll try to not keep you too long today this school year i had a fifth grader a third grader a second grader and a kindergartner so i'm just gonna kind of give a review on this school year how it went for us the curriculum we used and what we thought of it so let's go ahead and get started i'll start by saying this was a really good school year it was a very different school year less pressures less of a schedule less extracurriculars because of what's going on in the world um at this point so it was a different year but with those less pressures and less extra stuff we were doing we were um we really had a lot of good family time a lot of time to devote to school there were less days that were like oh we're running off and doing this and running off and doing that we've really had good i guess solid uh school days as far as curriculum goes i'll start off by talking about my kindergartners um curriculum so let me find it in my stack here so for reading with her we once again used teacher child to read in 100 easy lessons i just filmed a video it just went up last week where i talked about i really showed this curriculum in depth showed a little review and kind of how we use it so i'm not going to say anything really more about how this curriculum works we love it we did start it a little bit later with zara she just wasn't catching on um at the beginning of the school year she is a young kindergartner she won't be six until this november so we did start end up starting it pretty late in the year and we're only about halfway through it so i think we'll continue to go a bit through the summer uh and then if we have some left to finish as she goes into grade one that is totally okay as well we used handwriting without tears again she did two handwriting without tears books this is the second one in the first book that she did this year she did a lot of uppercase letters and so this book is more the lowercase letters we've been using this curriculum since my oldest was in kindergarten and i love the layout of it i love how there's lots of pictures to color and as you can see uh zara my kindergartner really enjoyed coloring all those pictures as well and she's done really well with her writing i always like to make sure i'm there to make sure she is forming her letters correctly but for the most part now i just watch her and she remembers how to form each of the letters so it's nice it's nice to be there here is our math curriculum for her missing the front cover missing the back cover i think it's even missing the first couple like title pages here um it was a well used well-loved book this is our matthew c curriculum so she did matthew c level primer this year it's really just getting started on really simple stuff so this is how the book starts um and then it goes on and by the end of the year she was getting into um counting by twos she also did counting by fives and counting by tens and then just some simple math i have to show you this page too because this just like this is just zara anytime i would walk away if i wasn't right there telling her to do her next her next question or helping her along she would just draw little girls on her page and i just think okay i think i'm going to keep that page in her little kindergarten portfolio because that that is her right now she just draws little little girls everywhere and anywhere so that was really um her curriculum in kindergarten we really just focus on math reading and writing so she is ready for grade one now for math for my other kids i also have my second graders math book uh he also lost front and back cover and he did matthew c betta this year he did really well with math he finished it um pretty early on he also did a lot of skip counting and then adding as he went further on into the book he did work with money he learned to add some pretty big numbers this year and then he also went on and did some long addition and some long subtraction pages like this matthew c is more of a mastery approach and so they do a lot of work on one topic on one concept i guess and then they really work on it and master it in each lesson and so through the math you see curriculum we will skip pages here and there if i know that they understand the concept and there are still a couple more work pages i'll see that and say okay you know what you're doing we'll skip a couple pages let's go on to the next concept so i am very flexible to do that if need be also with my second graders math curriculum it came with a test booklet as well so at the end of each lesson so there are 30 lessons each lesson has a b c d e f so there's a lot of parts and at the end of each lesson there is a test booklet where i could be giving him tests to do as well we didn't really do them because again if i can see as he's going through um the lesson if i can tell that he knows what he's doing and he's he is understanding and getting most of the questions correct then i didn't really bother doing the test this year we did the like end of year final test um but that's it because i follow along as he goes through and i know whether he is grasping everything or not so i don't think the tests are necessary this math you see curriculum also comes with math blocks i just have this drawstring bag that i keep all of our manipulative blocks in but they just look like this um someone asked me recently what i think of the math blocks and how how durable they are i guess and i messaged back and said well if you want to know how durable these math blocks are i didn't buy them i used these math these exact same math blocks growing up when i did matthew c in elementary and so when i told my mom i was going to do math you see she gave me a bunch of my and my siblings manipulatives um and now my kids have been using them for what seven years and they are still in excellent excellent shape for math for my older two kids who are in fifth grade and third grade they are doing teaching textbooks again i did a video uh very recently talking more in-depth about the teaching textbook sorry there are so many vehicles driving by my road and trucks making noise um more in depth of what we think of teaching textbooks and how it works it is a program they do on the computer and again we are very happy with teaching textbooks it's nice to go through a school year like this school year where i think we loved everything we're gonna do basically the exact same thing again next year um because we were just really happy with the curriculum that we used okay so for our bible curriculum i have shared before um what we use there and what i did this year did i grab my bible book um i did i thought i did give me a second where okay found it um like i said i have a big huge stack of books beside me uh i printed up our own bible curriculum this year and these were printables from the website iblp.org and so we did a character trait study so basically here's how it looks we would learn a new character trait um i would have some reading to do we would have a bible story that talks about um diligence we would have a memory verse and then we would have a hymn to learn and we had a hymn story to go along with that hymn so we did i think eight different character trait studies or maybe it's ten i'm not going to go ahead and count them right now but we we studied a lot of character traits and then at the back of the book um i also just typed out a whole bunch more memory verses that i wanted us to learn through the school year as well and we stopped right here so we did that other page and then halfway through this page so we almost almost completed um our our memory verses i'm gonna make a new bible curriculum um this coming fall and i'll just stick this on the back again as the back cover and we'll finish off those bible verses my my stack of books just about to collapse okay i was really happy with this character trait study i have no complaints we did it we liked it i have always every year that we've been homeschooling i've kind of come up with my own bible curriculum what we'll do for for our bible time and so i do have a plan for next school year it's going to be different i already have mostly everything typed out printed out i'm going to be assembling that very soon and i will share with you guys what our bible curriculum is so that will be coming out um in the near future okay on to our core curriculum so this was our first year using the gather round curriculum which is a unit study approach so i'm just going to show you all of our books for what what units we did this year so we started off the year doing human body we did the asia unit study so i bought the digital unit study i laminated front cover and back cover and just did the binding myself which i was really really happy with uh we did these aren't really in order but we did the space unit study we are just now finishing up our last unit study which is earth science we did an easter unit study which was amazing i would definitely recommend this one if you want to do an easter unit study we also did a christmas unit study and then we also did a europe unit study so those are all the units that we um completed this year like i said it's a unit study it really includes all of your subjects except for math it does include some bible i like to do some separate bible time to do a little bit more but there is also bible it's definitely a christian unit study um but it has your science history geography art grammar spelling writing it is very very thorough and very well-rounded i know one popular question with this curriculum is is it enough i absolutely without hesitation i say that it is enough some people might use this and think oh i want to make sure my child's doing more grammar or more writing or maybe this isn't enough history and so you just kind of have to decide for yourself and for your family if it is enough but for us i definitely think that this curriculum aside from your math is enough and if you want to add more then you can feel free to add more okay this hasn't been my initial plan but i thought i do want to grab the kids book so you can see a little bit more what's in these so i did print up the pre-reader book for my kindergartener like i said for kindergarten we really do math reading and writing and so this was not mandatory for her to complete but i did always print up her books and if she wanted to do them she could and she loves coloring she loves cutting things out and so she did use her pre-reader books a bit so the pre-reader book goes along goes alongside my teacher's manual and it just has coloring pages just very very simple pages on to my next my second grader he used the early reader book this year and so i'm gonna go ahead and just show you when i show you lesson eight so lesson eight we studied austria in my teacher's guide i have about four pages that i read aloud to all the kids as a group and then these are just the work pages i'm showing you so he colored the austria flag we found austria on the map and then he wrote um an interesting fact you might see a black eagle is what he wrote about austria then we did a little activity so this was our science page for this day where we studied hot and cold air then for bible time he had to copy out a bible verse then for social studies we did a page on trade and export and so that was that page and then last of all we studied franz joseph haydn and we listened to some music by him so this particular lesson didn't have any spelling or art but here's a page where we did a little bit of art here's a page where we have some language arts so each lesson looks different geography is not done every day although i guess in this europe unit geography is done every day history is not done every day science isn't done every day each day looks different but it really is covering all of the subjects so charity my third grader is in early elementary level and so similar to simeon's book but just but just that one one level harder here's again austria now my fifth grader elijah he is in the upper elementary book this level included a lot more research here's his page on austria he had to write something about the black eagle and then also write interesting facts for that lesson he had to write his memory verse that we'd been working on all week by memory his page on trade and economy is just a bit more detailed a lot more information there so that's kind of a quick look at what the gather round books um look like on the inside but like i said we are very happy very happy with this gather round curriculum one thing i love about this curriculum there are a lot of things but the one thing i really love uh is that we did how many units this year one one two three four five six seven so we did seven different units this school year there's really no burnout or like feeling like oh i can't wait till we're done this school year i'm so done learning about this topic i want to complete this book because we are switching units every five or six weeks it's like a new start again we get near the end of the unit and maybe we think okay i'm about done learning this topic i'm about done learning about earth science just like that it's time for a new unit rather than learning about earth science all of a sudden we're studying asia it's all new it's a brand new book brand new colorful pages brand new topics like i said next school year is going to look very similar to the school year yes we are doing gather round curriculum we're doing teaching textbooks again my third child simeon is entering third grade so he will be starting teaching textbooks rather than using matthew c my daughter zara who's going into first grade will still be doing math you see so we're really doing a lot of the same stuff i will say one small tweak we're making is that we're going to be doing handwriting without tears for all of the kids for my oldest three especially so that they can work on their cursive so we'll just do that alongside our gather round books but elijah and charity both need to work on their cursive and then simeon has not learned cursive yet and so he's going to learn cursive using the handwriting without tears book um next year oh i did want to show one other thing i just wanted to go through and share with you the read aloud books that we did this year so i have a list where i just wrote down our read aloud books we did justin morgan had a horse catty woodlawn pollyanna little pear the poet's dog the vanderbeakers of 141st street stella by starlight trumpet of the swan and daddy long legs those are the books that i remembered to write down i'm kind of feeling like maybe i missed a book or two that we read aloud and i didn't write down but that works out to two four six eight nine books that's not very many i guess we read about one book a month that doesn't seem like a lot but we do spend a good 20 to 30 minutes every morning um doing our read aloud books and that's one of our favorite parts of the day all right that's it was that long-winded i don't know probably a little bit long-winded in the next couple of weeks i will be coming out with curriculum hauls for all four of my school-aged kids so make sure you subscribe to my channel so that you don't miss out on that new content coming out thanks for watching if you stuck it out all the way through to the end please give me a big thumbs up and i will see you guys soon bye you

Channel: Mama to Five

Views: 1,116

Rating: 4.965517 out of 5

Keywords: homeschool review, curriculum review, homeschool curriculum, large family mom, homeschool mom, mama to five, canada, 2021, gather round curriculum, teaching textbooks, math u see, handwriting without tears, why homeschool, how to homeschool, 5th grade, 3rd grade, 2nd grade, kindergarten, teach your child to read, 100 easy lessons, learn to read, bible curriculum, christian family, homeschool chat, homeschool update, large family routine, homeschool routine, big family

Id: 8uM-4wZBM0A

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021