Let’s go through what we used for our 4th grade school year. I'm going to show you what we loved and what we didn’t.
If you’ve watched our videos before, welcome back! We appreciate you! If you’re new here welcome! I’m Tonya Johnson and I’m the Holiday Homeschooler where we believe every season is a holiday season. We love celebrating life and showing you how you can have a fun and exciting homeschool while keeping a biblical worldview.
Now, I want to clarify something, because my daughter does half grades, so some of these subjects we’ve been done with for almost a year now, but other’s we're just finishing up. Here’s how this happened. We were living in Indiana when we started homeschooling. My daughter’s birthday was 5 days after the cut off date for preschool, so we decided to homeschool just for preschool. She was 4. We fell in love with homeschooling, but she finished the preschool curriculum in six months. We just decided to jump into kindergarten even though she was 4.5. Math she enjoyed and caught on quickly, but reading was a huge struggle. It took us 18 months to get through the kindergarten reading, and even then she wasn’t thriving in reading, she was running through the math lessons, so we just continued on to 1st grade when she was ready. It seemed normal to just work at her pace, which put us into half grades and our subjects just kind of fell into one category or the other.
Well… fast forward to my daughter turning 8, she was half in 2nd and half in 3rd curriculum wise, but 3rd grade when it came to like Sunday school and things at church that required grade levels. We had a ton of homeschoolers in our church, so half grades was very normal and parents just decided which church classes their kids would go to. We decided to move across country to South Carolina which, unlike Indiana, is a state where you have to register your homeschoolers. I thought we would have to do yearly testing, so I decided to enroll her as a second grader (so on the low end of our curriculum) because I didn’t want her testing as a 3rd grader in May if she wasn’t through her 3rd grade curriculum. Church wise, we kept her as a 3rd grader because that’s what she was used to telling people she was in. So now, she’s about to enter youth group which is 6th grade, but she’ll be enrolled as a 5th grader through the state come this fall, so its a little confusing to those of you in our real life who see my posts about 4th grade review and you’re like well she’s in my 5th grade Sunday school class so which is it? If you’re a homeschooler, you get this, if you’re not, there’s our backstory. Anything I post publicly I fall back to the grade level we are registered with the state as because this is how I choose to document our homeschool years, so my socials has to line up with our registration. So yes, she’s both a 4th grader and a 5th grader currently, and this fall will be both a 5th and 6th grader. Welcome to an inside look at homeschool life 😀 .
Now that that’s out of the way. Lets go through our curriculum for 4th grade and see what’s worked for us. And again, some of these we finished 6+ months ago, some we’re finishing up now.
First I want to go through our core subjects; bible, math, science, history/geography, language arts (reading, writing, and spelling). You’ll want to watch the corresponding video to get the full scope of these subjects and what they look like.
1. Bible
2. Math
3. Language Arts (Writing, Spelling, Grammar, and Reading)
Math and Language Arts Centers
4. Science
Electives
Those are our core subjects, now for our electives. Again, make sure to watch the corresponding video to see how these work in real time.
The big thing I would change with electives is having them hold the same weight as our core subjects. We were scheduling them in daily, and if we didn’t get everything done I’d be pretty anxious. Now, these are our bonus subjects. They’re done a couple times a week and we’re not rushing to finish the book each year or have to do every single page in every book.
That’s it for this video. Let me know if you’ve tried any of these curriculum companies and how you like them! See y’all next week!
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