Juggling A Student and A Toddler
The biggest challenge in homeschooling first grade was that our older son was doing school and our younger son was still too young. The older son could see that the younger still got to play all day; and he didn’t like that he had to do school and couldn’t also play (even when school was only 2 hours of the day).
There were some tough days trying to work through that. I tried to maximize nap time as a learning time (although our younger son didn’t seem to need as much of a nap at this point) or give our younger son “school activities” (activities I kept in a box and only pulled out during this time…play doh, art/coloring, Dollar Tree books, yarn lacing pictures, etc) so they both were doing “school”.
We chose to stick with My Father’s World (God’s Creation A-Z) curriculum for first grade as well. If you choose to use this curriculum, they now have preschool activities/curriculum available for younger siblings. That’s awesome! We did add in the Letters and Sounds workbook by ABeka just to supplement the phonics emphasis. And…based on circumstances, we chose to do school 4 days a week for about 2 hours a day at this grade level.
Why My Father’s World?
One of my favorite things about this curriculum was the Bible reader. Several curriculums have done this, but since we were using this one I can speak to the delight of having our children learn to read using the Bible itself as the main reader. Our boys continued to go back to re-read the stories throughout the year…which began with very simplistic word usage in the Bible reader and then progressed in word usage as their reading vocabulary expanded through the year. Watching a child learn to read is so precious. Listening to them read God’s word is priceless!
Another of my favorites about this curriculum was found in the science activities. (This might be because I taught middle school science. But I have heard others who used these books and were not science teachers also comment on how much they—and their kids—enjoyed these science activities.) The Usborne books for this level use such practical, simple, and fun activities to teach foundational science concepts. Our boys enjoyed coming back to these books repeatedly (beyond first grade) to do the activities.
An additional feature that was very helpful (especially with boys) was that their work was done in a notebook. Since it was spiral bound, all the pages stayed together and in place throughout the year. And, today, they can still look through their “First Grade Notebook” to see all they learned, wrote, and accomplished!
Again, with this grade level, My Father’s World did a fantastic job of drawing in learning opportunities that overlapped and intertwined with the main focus…which is God and His creation.
(Additional note…Because of a friend’s comment about handwriting, I chose the additional phonics work in the ABeka Letters and Sounds to also practice proper formation of letters in the handwriting process. If you choose to teach cursive to your kids, it is very helpful–and saves time when later teaching cursive–to have them learn the proper formation of writing printed letters since the start of the formation of a cursive letter stems from the origin of the printed letter. I hadn’t thought about this and wouldn’t have been so particular with the printed handwriting if my friend hadn’t mentioned it. And teaching cursive later would have included the process of “undoing” a habit to form a correct habit…and would have taken longer.)
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