Work in progress…
Chick, 8yrs, Australian Year 3
The Australian curriculum has 8 Learning Areas, which homeschoolers are expected to cover, although, as with school, more than one area can be covered at once (e.g. learning ball games from other countries would count as Physical Education and Society and Environment. At this level the moderators seem much more concerned with the basics of maths and English.
English
Spelling: Spell to Write and Read – that takes us about 20 minutes on Monday, then 5-10 minutes on one or two more mornings, and 5 minutes for a test of the week’s 10 words on Friday.
Reading:Chick reads happily, and we no longer do any “schooly” reading. Sometimes she picks her own reading material, and sometimes I assign something that fits in with whatever we are learning. Recent picks on my part have included biographies on Gandhi and Mother Theresa. She is reading through the Roman Mysteries series right now. I assign 20 minutes of reading each day, which is usually less than she does. Reading usually gets done on the way to after-school activities, or at bedtime.
Grammar: We have been using The Grammar Handbook 1 & 2 from Jolly Grammar. We’re winding that up now, and alternating Grammar with our writing programme. Next year grammar will be covered through Latin and Writing.
Writing: Writing Strands: We’ve just started this, and it looks very promising. It’s a self-directed programme, which suits me perfectly. Learning to write properly is one of the key things I want Chick to get from her education. It’s one of the few “real” skills I took from high school – who remembers Science or Biology or Trig?
Maths
Chick spends 20-40 minutes on her 2 page Horizons Math lesson 4 days a week, depending on how focused she is. She gets Maths fairly intuitively, and right now I don’t spend any time “teaching” unless she comes across something new. We love this programme, it’s colourful, varied and comprehensive.
She also does a Maths Drill every day, which takes about 5 minutes. She covered multiplication through the computer game TimezAttack, and we’re now back to addition and subtraction drills.
Laguage Other Than English (LOTE)
We’re currently working on adding this to our learning programme. We are working very slowly on Arabic and Latin.
For Arabic we use Rosetta Stone, although I have made flashcards and worksheets to suplement that. We do 1-3 screeens a week, or about 1 lesson a month. In other words, we’re approaching this very slowly…
I expect to cover Latin for the next 2-3 years at least. Right now we are using SongSchool Latinwhich is aimed at the low end of K-3. It’s fun, with lots of songs, and a good route into the study of Latin, I think, introducing the idea that many English words are derived from Latin, familiarising us with Latin pronunciation, and teaching us some basic vocabulary. I was thinking of Minimus for next year, but am now more or less convinced we’ll go with LivelyLatin.
