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END OF YEAR HOMESCHOOL REFLECTIONS | 5th, 6th and Preschool | What Worked (and What Didn't)?
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Jun 19, 2024
Let's wrap up this homeschool year! I'm sharing my final thoughts on our 2023-2024 homeschool curriculum...what did I love? Not love? What changes would I have made and what might YOU want to know if you are going to be using any of this curriculum? Watch and find out! MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO: ⭐ My Father's World Voyage of Discovery ⭐ My Father's World Exploring Countries and Cultures (https://blessedhomeschool.com/mfw) ⭐ BJU Press Heritage Studies 5 (https://www.bjupresshomeschooling.com/site/include.php?id=88) ⭐ BJU Press Basics for a Biblical Worldview ⭐ All About Spelling (https://www.allaboutlearningpress.net/go.php?id=1699) ⭐ Sonlight Science E ⭐ Science Shepherd Physical Science ⭐ CTCMath ⭐ Learning Language Arts Through Literature ⭐ Memoria Press (https://id.memoriapress.com//idevaffiliate.php?id=272) ********************************************* Hey there! I’m Sara, and I’m a teacher-turned-homeschooling mom to 4 kiddos (including a set of twins!). I balance homeschooling while working full-time from home, and am so thankful you are here. I love sharing about homeschooling on my blog, Blessed Homeschool, where you’ll find tips, resources, and curriculum reviews. Whether you are a newbie or a veteran, I hope you will leave inspired and equipped with what you find.
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0:00
Hey you guys, welcome back for another video
0:02
It feels like just yesterday I was filming our first day of the homeschool year
0:07
and now we're already at the end. So today I'm going to give you guys kind of a yearly wrap-up
0:14
I'm going to be giving my overall thoughts on the curriculum we used
0:18
what I liked, what I didn't like, and what I wish I would have known at the beginning of the school year
0:24
So if you don't know me, my name is Sarah. I'm a homeschool mom to four kids and this year they
0:33
were in sixth grade, fifth grade, and I had a pre-care. We used a few different things for our
0:39
curriculum this year and I'm hoping it will be helpful to you to hear my final thoughts on
0:44
everything. This is the good stuff, right? It's really interesting to hear about all of the brand
0:48
new curriculum picks, but hearing about the curriculum after it's been used for an entire
0:53
year is really valuable. I think that being said, as you listen to stuff like this, watch videos like
0:59
this, obviously keep in mind that your kids are different than mine. You're different than me
1:05
Although if you enjoy watching my channel, I'm assuming that maybe we have at least
1:09
some similarities, but this will at least give you an overall idea, a big top-down idea on what
1:15
I thought about some of this curriculum and it might help you make some of those final decisions
1:21
for the upcoming school year. So let's get into the curriculum. I'm going to start with my pre-care
1:26
because I think that this will be the fastest. This year we used My Father's World Voyage of
1:32
Discovery. This is their pre-k curriculum for just before their kindergarten program. I encourage you
1:39
to go watch some of my videos about this if you're interested in it so you can see exactly what it
1:45
was like and some examples of the curriculum and some of the activities that it involves. Overall
1:51
I really enjoyed it and so did my son. It is a 32-week curriculum that really aims to help
1:57
kids start to learn their letters and their letter sounds, their numbers from 1 to 10
2:03
and colors and shapes. And you also read Bible stories from Genesis to Revelation
2:08
You do character development and learn about different people around the community. Because
2:12
it was planned out in the curriculum, I really was intentional about doing the Bible lessons with
2:16
my son and so that was great. And each week there is a part called Helping Together where you teach
2:23
a new chore and practice it for a couple weeks so it becomes a habit and that structure was really
2:28
great. So my son now does things like makes his bed in the morning, helps feed the dog, empty the
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dishwasher, puts away his clean clothes. And because it was a part of his school, I don't know, it made
2:40
him more excited to do it and he loved having little jobs to do. Probably his favorite part
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each week was when we introduced a new letter. We would have a little treasure hunt because he would
2:52
get a new coin with a sticker on it that had the letter on it that we would be learning that week
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and it would go on his little poster that we had up all year. So these are all the different
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stickers that he would collect all year and he loved this. And having this up on the wall really
3:08
helped us remember to practice that letter throughout the week. We liked a couple of the
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books that came with the curriculum. This one, The Big Book of Things, The Spot was a favorite
3:18
And then this right here, Richard's Scaries, What Do People Do All Day? This book was great too. It
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kind of taught about different jobs that help communities run smoothly. The character training
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books were really great and there were a lot of art and craft suggestions included that my son
3:35
really liked too. We liked a lot of this. So I do really recommend this curriculum if you're looking
3:40
for a preschool curriculum to do with your kids. Obviously, like I've said before, I don't think you
3:45
need a curriculum to homeschool preschool. The big things we learned this year were the letters
3:52
numbers, colors, and shapes. So certainly you could pull together resources and teach those
3:57
things to your kids, but if you love structure, if you love having everything in one place
4:04
and lesson plans outlined so you don't have to think about much, you will really like this. I
4:08
will say after a few weeks, we did start skipping some of the educational toys because they got a
4:15
little bit repetitive and boring. So these were things like the alphabet and number puzzles
4:21
There's a kid's puzzle and some lacing toys. We got bored of those pretty quickly. And because my
4:27
preschooler isn't the only child in the house, some days we just didn't have time. So we skipped
4:32
some of the Bible crafts or some of the letter crafts because also he was doing a little bit of
4:37
that in the co-op that we attend. You can be very flexible with this, I think, and tailor it to your
4:42
own child's needs once you get going. It doesn't take much time during the day. And at least for
4:48
my son, it was fun for him and only ignited his love of school and learning. So that was a big
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plus for me. When I asked him what some of his thoughts were about this, one of the things he
5:00
said was that he wishes he could do it all over again. So there's that. Okay, so that's preschool
5:07
Next, we will talk about exploring countries and cultures from my father's world
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which I used with my fifth and sixth graders this year. Confession time. My kids are terrible at geography. And guys, I don't think I'd actually
5:22
realized how little we focused on geography until my kids had to take a pre-test in exploring
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countries and cultures the other day. It's bad. So that was from the beginning of the year, and I'm
5:35
happy to say we have learned a lot of geography this year. I can't say we're all experts, although
5:43
one of my daughters can pretty much tell you where any country is on the map right now. And we haven't
5:49
taken our final test yet. We'll do that in another couple of weeks when we officially finish the
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curriculum. But I'm happy with what my kids learned this year. Yes, this curriculum is pretty much
5:59
all geography. There is a bible component along with art, music, and read-alouds, but it's mainly
6:06
geography. If you are using my father's world and are curious about it, definitely go check out some
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of my videos from the year. I will link the playlist below. But if you are new to my father's
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world and your oldest is in fourth through eighth grade, they are going to recommend that you start
6:23
with this program. My kids were in fifth and sixth grade this year, and I think it went really well
6:27
So the main portions we ended up sticking with were the bible portion, the geography, and the
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read-alouds. Loved the read-alouds. We're still finishing up a couple of them, but they were
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excellent. My kids especially enjoyed kingdom tales and all of the YWAM books like Amy Carmichael
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and Nate Saint. For the bible part, we read through the book of Matthew this year. You basically read
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the daily passage and have your kids narrate it back to you, and then you go through a couple of
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questions with them. We had good short discussions around what we read each day. I will say that we
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also participated in something called bible study fellowship, and it's not that I don't think the
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bible portion of this curriculum is enough, but I think that including another bible study was
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beneficial for my kids. It was something that they could do in the morning as part of their quiet time
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before we came together and did the Matthew readings together. We also really enjoyed this
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book right here, Window on the World. This was a great inclusion with this curriculum, and I'm not
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going to say that we have all this information memorized about all the different groups and
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religions included in here, but it was really great to read and just help my kids learn that there are
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many other types of people groups in this world, many different types of religions, how they relate
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to Christianity, and how we can be praying for them. Geography was also great. There is a lot
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of heavy map work and reading at the beginning of the curriculum to help kids become familiar
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with an atlas and different types of maps, but then it starts using up a bit by about week five
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and you start getting into a pretty good groove. In fact, there were a lot of weeks that we were
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able to complete everything in just about three days out of the week because it wasn't that much
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work, which was really nice that it didn't take up a lot of time during our week, and we could be
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flexible with things. Now, when you study the different countries, you can go as in-depth as
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you want to go. At the beginning of the year, I did better at trying to find some fun decorations and
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extra things to kind of immerse us more in whatever country we studied, but this got really hard to
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keep up with because as the year went on, our co-op started back up, and soccer started, and our
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church ministry, and all the things, and there's only so much that you can do. So you can definitely
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do this. There are some great Facebook groups where you can get some neat ideas of little extras
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that you can add in to enhance your learning for each country. I do highly recommend trying to find
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some little snacks from each country that you visit. I was typically able to find things online
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and my kids really liked trying out all the different snacks from different countries
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and I also recommend trying to have a meal, either making something or going out to a restaurant or
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whatever for each country. That was a really fun part of this too. This book right here, Come to
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the Table, a friend mentioned that this was an addition to the third edition of this curriculum
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and I didn't really like this book, but take it with a grain of salt. It's mainly a recipe book
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We tried maybe three recipes in here and didn't like any of them. So if you don't have this book
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you'll be fine just simply finding recipes online or in a library book, you know, if you want to
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make a meal for each country that you learn about. A really neat idea, a friend just shared this with
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me, and I thought, why didn't I think of this? When she went through the curriculum, she worked
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it out to where her family had meals with other families that she knew who were from the different
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places they were studying, and so her kids got to learn more about the culture from them as they
10:07
shared a meal together, and I thought that was a really great idea if you are able to make it
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happen. All right, this book, I'm going to be honest, we didn't use it much. It came with the
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Exploring Countries and Cultures curriculum. It's supposed to be helpful in researching each
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continent, so helping kids learn how to look up and find information. We did some of the early pages
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in here in the early weeks and then kind of stopped for one because some days we simply
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didn't have time, and this was one of the things that I thought would be okay to cut out
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and also because the goal was to help your kids really learn how to use reference materials, which
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my kids were pretty good at already. We did use the internet to look up a lot of things
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or we used our atlases or maps, but some of it started to feel kind of like busy work. For
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seventh and eighth graders using this curriculum, they assign certain pages to complete
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but for younger kids they just kind of say, work on this continent's pages this week, and they
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leave it up to you to select which pages that you want to do. If I were doing this again, I think
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fifth and sixth grade is a good age for this type of resource, but I would probably be more
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intentional about picking out specific pages that I wanted them to do throughout the year. So it
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could be a great tool for you if you want to work on research skills with your kids
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Just know that there are a lot of pages in here for each continent, and it's okay, I think, if you
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don't do them all. The worksheets that came with this curriculum for the geography lessons were
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helpful. We like those. There is a geography game that you play every week, which is also really
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good. We used a website called Saterra also to practice learning countries on the map where they
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were on the map, and we read a lot of library books. So every other week I would pull books
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from the suggestions in the back of the teacher's manual, and my kids would read those for their
12:00
silent reading time. So that's a big part of learning about each country and culture as well
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This art book came with the curriculum. I didn't use it at all because I had a subscription to
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creating a masterpiece this year, and I actually regret not using it. I think it would have added
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a little bit more to our learning of each country, and sadly we didn't even use creating a
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masterpiece as much as I planned this year. We have loved it in years past and have done some
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really fun art lessons, but next year I am going to try to do the art recommendations that come
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with our next program because it's more integrated that way. So if you have time and are able to
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I would recommend giving the art lessons a try. They look like a lot of fun, honestly, and like
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I said, I kind of regret not doing them this year. And then science. We did about half of the year
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with the science that was recommended, and then we switched to try something new because it just
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wasn't that engaging for us. So two days out of the week you are reading from this usborn book
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and your kids are then supposed to draw something from the pages that they thought was interesting
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and write a couple of sentences about it. So the pages kind of look like this. So the reading was
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fine. I thought it was pretty interesting. They usually rushed through the drawing and writing
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part, and it was just really easy. And then we have this properties of ecosystems book. This
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had a lot of information, and then typically there was a worksheet where my kids had to summarize
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information or write down statistics and things from the reading. I really appreciated the strong
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biblical worldview of this book, and I think it fit well with what we studied in this curriculum
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It was just kind of hard to keep my kids' attention sometimes during the reading because
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like I said, there was a lot of information and the worksheets got kind of boring after a while
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I don't know if that was because of their age or what if they might have done better if they
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were a little bit older. I don't know. A lot of the experiments and activities seemed very basic
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too. So we ended up trying out sunlight science for the second part of the year. I will say that
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the readings, the worksheets, and the experiments with sunlight held my kids' attention a lot more
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but there was a big lack of a biblical worldview in the books that we read for that curriculum
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My kids even picked up on it and were pointing it out, and it bothered them that God was left
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out of the books sunlight chose to include in that curriculum. So I don't know. There has to
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be a happy medium there, right? I'm not going to say that science was terrible, that the science
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was terrible. I think it is enough even though it might not feel like enough when you're doing it
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So you could either use this science, the topics coordinate well with the different geographic areas
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you'll be studying in this curriculum, it just maybe isn't the most interesting science curriculum
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that we've used. Okay, so overall, exploring countries and cultures, I thought this was a
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great curriculum. I really enjoyed the time my kids and I spent on it. I think it was fruitful
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If your kids like history, they might miss history, and I will say that we did add in
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history this year. I think if I would have done some of the things like art and more of the
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research book, adding in history would have been way too much, but it worked out well for us this
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year. What we did was finish up the BJU Press Heritage Studies 5. We started this last year
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but only got about halfway through because it's a five-day-a-week curriculum, and we struggled
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to get in five days of history each week. But we were really enjoying this curriculum. It's
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American history and covers early Americans to the Obama presidency from a biblical worldview
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So we just continued it this year, still only doing two to three days a week maybe with it
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and we just finished it the other week. I loved it. We had some great conversations throughout
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the curriculum. Now it's very traditional. You read and then you'll do some workbook pages
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afterwards, and honestly I barely use the teacher manual. We just open up the book each day and we
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would read through the lesson together and then do the workbook pages together, and then we would
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talk through any questions that my kids had. Now that's going to be totally up to you whether or
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not you want to add in a completely separate history curriculum alongside exploring countries
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and cultures. You certainly don't have to, but history is important to talk about, and I'm glad
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we included it. And there are lots of ways that you can choose to learn and study history. It
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doesn't have to be a full curriculum, so that will be up to you, and you just might want to consider
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it especially if your kids love history and you're going to be using exploring countries and cultures
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this year. Okay, moving on. I talked a little bit about science already. In addition to switching
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to sunlight science mid-year, my oldest son has also been trying out science shepherd, which he
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loves. Definitely check out my review video if you're interested in learning more about science
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shepherd. It's been great. He is using physical science right now, and this is the most I've seen
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him engaged with science in a long time. He loves the short, concise videos. He's able to accurately
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answer the worksheet questions most of the time, so I think he likes having some success there
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and the topics have been interesting to him. He's been doing chemistry, and now he's learning
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physics, which is new to him, and he likes it. Science shepherd has a lot of great options
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so definitely go check them out if you haven't heard of them before. Okay, on to math. If you've
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been watching my channel for a while, you probably know we've been using CTC math for about two years
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now, almost two years, and I really do like it. There are a couple of changes that I've been
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implementing this year that I think have been good, so I will share those with you here. Overall
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I like having an online program for math. Even though I love teaching math, it's super helpful
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to have this off my plate because it helps free up time for me to work with my five-year-old or
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take care of whatever else I have to do. The teacher who teaches the lessons is very conceptual
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but also to the point, and he uses a lot of pictures and diagrams, which is really helpful
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The videos are very short, very easy to understand, which is great because they keep my kids' attention
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and I also love the price point. I don't think you can beat the family membership price
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and the fact that you don't have to pay every time you want a different grade level. Your kids
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can move seamlessly within the year, up or down grades, so that's great if they either work quickly
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or they need to go back and review concepts. One of the things that has been only slightly
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challenging is the fact that when my kids get an answer wrong, it will tell them the correct answer
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but it won't show a worked out solution. I'm not sure if any math curriculum will be completely
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independent, but this has caused them to need my help sometimes to figure out what they did wrong
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Sometimes the video lessons can be re-watched because maybe my kids missed the problem because
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they missed something from the video, but sometimes there are problems that are not explicitly taught
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in the lesson that they have to challenge themselves and apply what they've learned in a new
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way. And I don't think this is a bad thing at all, having to extend their knowledge to new problems
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I think kids should be able to do this, and I think that this maybe makes CTC math a bit more
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challenging sometimes, but just know this. There have been times when my girls have been so confused
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by a problem, and I get on their case, and I'm like, did you not even watch your lesson? Only to
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find out that the problem wasn't really covered in the lesson, and they really did need help to
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figure out how to get to a solution. And so sometimes I've had to sit and figure out how to
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do the problem myself because it's not explained, and I don't have worked out solutions. So some
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people might dislike this, not having those worked out solutions for every question that their kids
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can look at. But that being said, there is a fantastic Facebook group for CTC math parents
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and there are some really helpful people in there who are willing to help out very quickly if you
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don't know how to solve a problem. I have also heard some people say they will use chat GPT to
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show them a worked out solution, but I've not tried that yet. And CTC math has said they are
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working on adding worked out solutions to their problems. However, I absolutely don't know when
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this is officially going to happen, just that I heard it's in the works. The other thing I started
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doing about halfway through the year was adding in more review for my kids. We were doing the
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weekly revision sets, and CTC math does offer reporting on this, but it was very hard for me
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to look at the data in the little bar graph that they have online and then do anything about it to
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help my kids. So the weekly revision sets are supposed to help kids review previously learned
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topics and keep them fresh. So they'll typically have problems on there from the previous grade
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level or the previous semester. So what I started doing was printing these out and having my kids
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complete them by hand. That way, when they got an answer wrong, I could actually have them go back
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and redo it to get it right. And I could also see whether or not it was a big misunderstanding
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something big that they were missing, or just something like a simple calculation error
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So this has been very helpful. After they finish a section, I've also been assigning
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diagnostic tests to them to quiz them over what they just learned. Typically, you can use a
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diagnostic test to see where to place your kids in the program, but I found them to be very helpful
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to use as post-tests. My kids do these tests online, but you can save the results as a PDF
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so when they're done, you can see which questions they got right, what they got wrong. And again
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I will have them print these out and we'll go over them together. I think it's really important to
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have them circle back and work on problems they missed until they can do them correctly and not
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just skip over them and move on. And another thing I love about CTC Math is that they have a huge
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question bank of problems. So if we need to spend extra time on a concept, I can easily make
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worksheets for my kids to practice with. So overall, I'm still really liking CTC Math and right
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now we will continue to use it. Okay, let's talk about Language Arts briefly. I've done a few
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videos on our Language Arts this year. We use Learning Language Arts through Literature. My son
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used the Tan Book and my daughters use the Purple Book. If you are looking for an integrated Language
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Arts program that does not take up a lot of time during your homeschool day, this might be a great
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fit. I found it very easy to use. My kids found it mostly easy to use and it's mostly independent
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although there is a weekly dictation portion that you need to do with your kids and you
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obviously want to be following up with them and checking their work. I wouldn't say Language Arts
22:53
is a strength of my kids. They're not terrible at it, but I found that this was not as hands-off
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as I would have liked. They did need my help many days to kind of walk through the lessons and help
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them understand, but it could be hands-off depending on the kids. I thought the grammar
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portion was strong. I liked how they used literature examples to teach concepts. My kids
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really liked the books that they used for the book studies, but I thought that the spelling and
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writing portions were not strong enough for us. So midway through the year, I began using All About
23:25
Spelling again with my girls. That has been going great. It was definitely what we needed
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They are having success with it and they're liking it, and although I'm glad we tried it
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we aren't going to keep using Learning Language Arts through Literature next year
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We will continue to use All About Spelling and we're going to try out Essentials in Writing for
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all of my older kids. My son is going to try Essentials in Literature and my daughters are
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going to use a BJU Press Literature Curriculum. I've got a few videos on All About Spelling and
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also the new BJU Press Literature Curriculum, so definitely go check those out if you're interested
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in learning more about any of those. All right, we're almost done, you guys. This year
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we also used this curriculum from BJU Press, Basics for a Biblical Worldview. We kind of
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sprinkled this in and did a lesson or two a week depending on the time we had. This curriculum is
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written for sixth grade, I believe, and I think that's fair. I think if you have a middle school
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age kid, this would be a wonderful addition to your curriculum. I have a flip through video
24:29
on this that you should check out. The content in this course is wonderful and so relevant to
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things that your kids may encounter in today's world. We've had so many good discussions reading
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through this book and like I said, we're taking this pretty casually, kind of like the history
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curriculum. I'm not strictly following the teacher's manual, but we are reading through
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the chapters together, discussing, and sometimes we'll do some of the workbook pages if I think
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that they're good. Well, I think they're all pretty good, but some of them have been a little
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difficult for my 10 year olds and some of the workbook pages tend to take us a long time
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so we're being flexible with this and we are going to continue using this next year since
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we're not finished, so we will continue on and see how far we get next year. Finally, this year
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we were part of a homeschool co-op. We have been a part of this co-op for years now. It's a small
25:24
co-op where my kids typically take elective type courses and they've made some great friends over
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the years there, so we're continuing with this. It takes up a good chunk of our Thursdays
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but we love it and right now just can't can't imagine not continuing with it. This year
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my kids did a drama class. This is kind of a yearly class and they do two productions each
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year and we also did a class called JA Biz Town. This was a wonderful class. My kids really loved
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it. It's a curriculum from junior achievement where the kids learn about things like citizen roles
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rights, and responsibilities in a community. They learn money management skills, basic business
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practices, and skills necessary for having a job someday, so all types of things like that
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and then at the end of the semester, we visited a simulated town where they put all these skills
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into practice for an entire day. It was great. I highly recommend checking it out if you have
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something like this near you, and then I did teach Latin at our co-op to a small group of kids
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including my own, and we've been using the Latin series from Memoria Press. We will continue to
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use this and have really loved it. It's a great Latin program. Okay, I think I'm going to wrap up
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this year and review. Like I said, I can't believe it's the end of the year already. It's been a
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really good one, but I'm excited for the summer and even excited for the curriculum that I have
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planned for the fall. If you're curious what we'll be using next year and you haven't watched yet
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make sure to check out the videos that I have on that, and as always, I'm happy to answer any
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questions you guys may have about anything that we have used. I hope this was helpful to you to
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hear my final thoughts on all this curriculum. I hope it helps you make some decisions for your
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homeschool. Hit that thumbs up button if you enjoyed this video, and please consider subscribing
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to my channel if you want to see more videos like this or even just stick around with us as
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we homeschool this fall. Thanks so much for watching. I will see you next time
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