Recently I visited the homeschool bookfair, to buy supplements, attend interesting speakers, and get reinspired. I’m happy to report I didn’t make any changes to our curricula.
Except for the classical history curriculum that created more work for me than solutions, I was quite happy with our other programs.
I visited each of the booths of the curricula we were happily using, just to chat and share our progress.
Latin
Latin Road to English Grammar was well laid out. My daughter could work at her own pace, with me trying to keep ahead. The curriculum was flexible with our own schedule, and I could ask the author questions as needed. I even started a yahoo group for other parents using it could help each other. Although we weren’t powerfully conquering, we were consistently learning vocabulary, declensions, conjugations, and learning to translate.
Meanwhile my son was using the Bridge to the Latin Road which uses a metaphor of building construction that my son liked. Not only was my son learning, I was learning some new things as well.
Writing/Spelling/Literature Structure
Institute for Excellence in Writing was amazing! My kids and learned how to write with both structure and style. Saving me so time, our energy is used well. There’s also a great yahoo group to go to for help. Anytime I have a question, they have guidance that is encouraging and polite.
IEW also helped us with spelling through their genius approach.
Last year we used Teaching the Classics by Adam Andrews to teach and analyze the structure of literature. This year we were also adding on Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization which comes with an audio CD.
Bible
Bible will continue to be first thing in the morning, character studies and exhortations from Paul are some examples of what we’ll study. They are also involved in Awana Club which is great for Apologetics due to all the Scripture memory.
Science
Dr. Jay Wiles’ General Science course clearly teaches science and incorporates numerous labs with mostly items commonly found around the home, while teaching Apologetics.
Completely undergirding all I had taught about Young Earth Theory at the beginning of our Dialectic studies with Genesis 1-11last year, my daughter learned to clearly articulate the difference between Old Earth v Young Earth theories, why there are fallacies to Old Earth theory, and why Young Earth theories best support the Bible.
My son completed the book a few years later, but as a fifth grader last year he did as he’ll do this year, incorporate science lessons based around our classical history studies.
Old Earth v Young Earth
What are the key words with the Old Earth (OE) theorists?
- Slow change.
- Gentle change.
- Gradual change.
- Millions of years.
- Drastic changes occur extremely slowly over millions of years.
What are the key words of Young Earth (YE) theorists?
- Rapid.
- Catastrophic.
- Drastic changes occur rapidly through catastrophic forces, so that the world was and continues to change quickly due to catastrophic events like hurricanes, flooding, tidal waves, earthquakes, etc.
Classical Dialectic Studies
My kids and I, as well as our extended family, are quite impressed with their dialectic classical integrated studies last year, that were based in logic and grounded with the Bible. We will pursue that which works!
Classical history, literature, art, and other integrated topics will continue to be researched as I go (evaluating each book option to find a few of the best for our studies), discussed with logic, and reinforced through writing (with IEW).
