Our Curriculum Choices 2013-2014 Part 2

In this second part of Our Curriculum Choices, I'll be reviewing what we are going to use for Science, Social Studies, Handwriting, art/crafts, and calendar time.

Science-
We aren't using a curriculum for science this year. We will be studying science through fun activities and experiments. In my planning, we will be working on science one month then social studies one month for two days a week. Here is the schedule I have for our science learning-
August- Motion/Movement (including force, gravity, friction, ramps)
October- Plants & Seeds
December- We will be taking the whole month of December 'off' from anything other than reading, math, and Bible to focus on Christmas
February- Weather
April- Living/Non-living & Animal Classification

I will be blogging all our activities and experiments we do, so stay tuned!

Social Studies-
Again, with social studies, we aren't using a curriculum. We'll be using resources found at the library and online. So on the months we aren't working on science, here's what we'll be doing in social studies-
September- Maps/Landforms
November- Native Americans/Pilgrims
January- Working Together/ Community Helpers & Workers
March- Jobs/ Working for needs and wants
May- Different Cultures

Handwriting-

I purchased a primary writing journal at Walmart that we will be using for handwriting. Each day (or every other, I haven't decided yet) J will practice writing. She'll start off with writing her name and practicing the correct formation of all the letters. Then once, she moves through all the letters, we'll begin to copy sentences to practice letter spacing as well as word spacing, capitalization, and punctuation. And hopefully, by the end of the school year, she'll be writing sentences on her own. Here's an example of a handwriting page I made for her. She will write her name, each letter, copy each word, and then be able to draw a picture at the top of the page (she loves to draw so I wanted to incorporate this into her handwriting).

Calendar Time-

We will be using the calendar notebook found here by Homeschool Creations-

More than likely, we won't be using a few of the pages like writing the time, temperature, tally marks, etc. until later on in the year. She doesn't know how to do those things yet, but will be covered eventually so I'm not worrying about it right now. I grabbed a copy of page 4 from Mama's Learning Corner's preschool calendar notebook to add to ours for now.

Both are great options for calendar note-booking!

And lastly

Arts/Crafts-

This we are just 'playing by ear'. Lots of painting, creating, and playing. I'm sure I'll find tons of cute, fun crafts all over Pinterest to try with J. I'll be updating this also as we go.

And that wraps up our curriculum choices for J's kindergarten year!! Stay tuned, lots more fun to come!!