Our First Grade Curriculum

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This has been a year of extreme interest in homeschooling! Several times a week, over the course of the summer, I have been asked, “What is the best curriculum for….?” I will be the first to tell you that there is no one right answer to that question. Each child is different, each family situation is different, and there are hundreds of wonderful curricula. However, I did want to share what we are using in case it benefits someone who is looking for good options.

There are so many great options, but I think it is important to remember that sometimes less is more when it comes to younger children. They need plenty of time to play and explore. They need to use their imaginations and learn from active life experiences. Even with our list of curricula for my first grader, he will only be doing about one to two hours of school each day.

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All About Reading's new color edition review

My son was very reluctant to start learning to read and so we held off until he showed more readiness. Over the summer we started the pre-reading level of All About Reading. It has been a really great fit for us. He was finally ready and willing to learn how to read and doing it over the summer allowed me to really be focused on him while my older children had a break from regular school work. We will finish that level around October and move right into level 1. In addition to All About Reading, he is going to use Reading Eggs for a little fun reinforcement. He adores getting on the computer to do reading eggs, can navigate the program himself, and earning the eggs seems to be highly motivational for him.

Next, he will be using MasterBooks Math For A Living Education. My daughter used the program for several years and we really find it to be a quality program and a great fit for our family. In addition to the math skills sheets, there is a story woven throughout the book which is engaging and also helps students understand how they use math in day to day life. The Level 1 story involves children at a farm which I think my son will really enjoy.

For science, he will be joining my daughter in a study of anatomy and physiology. As a seventh grader, I will expect much more from my daughter but I think they will enjoy the study together. We are using Apologia’s Anatomy and Physiology course as our spine. I think he will enjoy learning about the various parts of the body and it will be a good course for them to work through together. However, if I just had a first grader, I would probably choose a different book in that same series. The zoology ones are a lot of fun with younger children. This is the last one in the series that my daughter needed to complete and he will go through the series over the course of his elementary years.

For history this year our family is going to study ancient history. My son and daughter will be using Story of the World Volume 1. My high school student will also study ancient history but using a high school level course through SchoolhouseTeachers.com. I have found that the short, story style lessons and the fun projects really make Story of the World a great option for young learners.

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For art, he will continue to work on lessons from You Are An Artist Chalk Pastels. He loves doing the lessons with nana and has progressed from her simple preschool lessons to being able to do some of her more advanced lessons. She has so much to choose from and we rotate between choosing lessons that align with what we are studying and just letting him pick lessons based on what looks like fun.

For music, he takes violin lessons from Practice Monkeys. We love this gentle and convenient approach to music lessons and looks forward to them each day. We have also been using a subscription to SQUILT Music over the summer for music appreciation and the children have asked to continue to us that program through the year. Each month there are two new ‘live’ lessons that are done virtually and introduce students to a new composer or musician. In addition, you can access all of the previous lessons as recording at any time.

He will be joining us for Bible study each day and our morning time which will include read alouds, hymn studies, and more. This will give him a good base while still allowing time for free play, field trips, and life learning.

What are your favorite first grade resources?

Resource Library and Affiliate Disclosure

When you sign up for the Schoolin’ Swag free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

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This post may contain affiliate or referral links, including Amazon affiliate links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

Deals and Freebies

Free Makeover Your Morning 5 Day Challenge! This is a great way to help re-focus and get your day off on the right foot.

Harry The Happy Mouse (Free on Kindle)

Illustrated Would You Rather Book (Free on Kindle)

Enrichment Studies has a great free fine arts memory match game this month!

Free Help Your Child’s Memory Book from All About Learning Press!

Our New Homeschool Library

When we moved into our home almost fifteen years ago, the downstairs area was finished space and all of the upstairs was unfinished and used as a storage area. We kept it that way for years, until we started to homeschool. The year we started to homeschool my husband finished one portion of the space to serve as a school room. Over the years, we later finished a space for an extra bedroom and a closet but we still had a room in the middle that was being used as storage.

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Over the course of this summer, we took everything out of that room and my husband and son finished it into a library/music room!! I have always dreamed of having a home library but never thought it would actually happen. We have a rather large collection of books because we frequent yard sales and used book stores. This gives us a place to neatly store our book collection, a place for their instruments and music practice, a place I can go to sit and read quietly, and a place where they can have friends and hang out chatting or playing board games.

My husband and son did all the work from putting up wood slats for the ceiling, sheet rock on the walls, and carpet tiles on the floor. We were blessed to get a large selection of bookshelves back in the beginning of March from a bookstore that was going out of business. Those finished off three of the walls and gave us a place to store many of our books.

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One of my favorite parts was a special touch that my husband put into the room. We are hug fans of C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. So my husband turned one of the doors into the ‘wardrobe’ that leads to Narnia. This makes me smile every time I see it and reminds me both of my husband’s love and that this world is not my home.

We have one step left, we are going to get quotes from some of our favorite books printed onto vinyl and put up on the walls. We plan to use quotes from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, The Hobbit, and The Green Ember series. I know that we are going to include: “It will not be so in the mended wood.” and “My place beside you, my blood for yours. Till the Green Ember rises or the end of the world!” from theGreen Ember. We also know that we will use “Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” and “Oh Children” from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. We are still choosing a couple more from those books and a couple from the Hobbit.

I think our new library might just be my new favorite room! Do you have a favorite room in your house or dreams of a library or special room that you might be able to complete one day?

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Deals and Freebies

Final 2 Days to get the Ultimate Homeschool Bundle for less than $30! Includes a variety of curriculum from pre-k through high school. What courses are you excited about? I’m going to do the Jane Austen course with my daughter!

So many folks looking for homeschool options at a reasonable price during this unusual time. SchoolhouseTeachers.com is having an amazing sale. For less than $200 you get 2 years access to over 400 courses that you can use with as many students as you have in your home! We use this for several courses and I am always happy to answer questions. Just click on this link and use code: SHARK20

If you are looking for a fun way to encourage reading this summer, check out the FREE summer reading materials from Your Morning Basket with Pam Barnhill. The passport and reading bucket list are a great way to encourage reading!

Homeschool Complete is offering a special 10% off discount to my readers! Just use code: SWAG

Get a FREE Literature Kit from LitWits using Code 11READ4FUN. We are currently enjoying the Heidi kit but have also previously loved the My Side of the Mountain kit.

IEW is offering some great free resources right now.

Journey Homeschool Academy High School Biology Review

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

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I get the privilege of sharing lots of reviews with my readers for many great products. However, it is not often that I feel like a review product was a true answer to prayer, but for our family Experience Biology: Upper Level was just that. My husband and I were struggling to find a biology curriculum for my 9th grader that we both liked and I had been praying that God will help me because I didn’t know where else to look. In the same week I was offered the opportunity to review this course by Journey Homeschool Academy.

How Does Journey Homeschool Academy Work?

This curriculum is set up to allow the student to be very independent with the work. Each lesson includes two video lectures, a textbook reading, a quiz, and research questions. The quiz is automatically graded by the computer. Since the research questions are done short answer style they need to be graded by the parent but there is an answer key to help out. Experience Biology: Upper Level has a student notebook that can be printed (or purchased as a hard copy) for the student to take notes as they watch the lectures. These pages have fill in the blank style notes that help the student learn how to take notes and what information is important to remember. Students cannot move onto the next lesson in the course until all of these items are marked complete and the quiz has been successfully passed.

Journey Homeschool Academy Lab Assignments

In addition, each lesson includes a lab assignment. The creators suggest in the parent guide that the students complete at least some of the labs but not necessarily all of the labs to have a complete course. There is a lab notebook that helps the student go through the lab process and a video that explains the assignment for each lab.

Experience Biology Upper Level Review photo

There are also quarterly exams that the students take at the completion of a set number of lessons. On those weeks there are not lectures, labs and quizzes. The students are given a study guide to review and prepare for the exam. These exams help you see how well they are retaining information and unlike the weekly quizzes, the grades are final and cannot be reset.

When you purchase this program you have one year from the start of the program to complete the 35 week course. This allows time for breaks, sickness, and life in general while still completing the course.

My Experience

When we got started with this program, I decided to sit through the first week’s lesson with my son. This was to allow me to learn more about the program and to make sure that he was understanding what he needed to do and how the process worked. We were trying it out during out summer break, so he would work on it at night after he had completed whatever he had on the agenda for the day.

I was pleasantly surprised at how engaging the lectures were, while still being solid and full of good information. The instructor had a very relatable style that made it easy to listen and pay attention. Journey Homeschool Academy has invested considerable time in production, which comes across as clean graphics, images, and sound-which provides a very ‘professional’ product. I only required my 9th grade son to watch, since it is his course, but found that my twelve year old daughter and six year old son would sometimes stop what they were doing to sit and watch as well.

I started by printing out the student notebook pages and lab pages that my son needed each week and having him put them into his three-ring-binder. After trying that for a few weeks, I decided it would be easier on me to go ahead and print everything he would need and let him set up in his binder. This way he can get started each week without needing any assistance from me. I will just need to grade the research questions and make sure he has the lab supplies.

I also appreciated that the labs started by working through what a lab report should look like and how the process works. This allows a student who many not have done any formal labs to get a better grasp of what is expected before diving into the regular labs.

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My Son’s Thoughts

My son felt like he could complete the work independently and liked the video lectures. He is excited about continuing to use the microscope and complete more labs as we continue in the course. He completed the first five lessons (which would be five weeks of the course if you were using it as a year long course) and after taking a short break to finish out our summer will be finishing the course in the fall semester.

Overall, I felt like this was a great high school biology curriculum. I feel like it will help prepare my son for his college level science courses with lectures and lab reports. It covers a great deal of information but in a way that is engaging and not dry. I also really appreciate that he can do it mostly independently so that I can focus on some other areas of our home school. In many ways Experience Biology: Upper Level blends the traditional video based course with up to date distance education assessment tools.

I highly encourage you to click on the graphic below and check out the other reviews to find out more about the different courses from Journey Homeschool Academy and how they were used by the Review Crew members.

MaxScholar Reading Intervention Review

I recently had the opportunity to check out the MaxScholar Orton-Gillingham Software as an online reading intervention program. Both my 12 year old daughter (who does not struggle in reading) and my six year old son (who is still in the early stages of learning to read) spent some time trying out different aspects of the program.

There are a variety of different component to this program that work on reading through vocabulary, music, phonics, words, and more. When the student first begins they take a placement test that helps them be in the right levels of the various programs.

My daughter is a musician, so after her placement test, she immediately wanted to check out MaxMusic. This program used songs from a variety of popular movies and musicians to help with reading skills. There were different activities including reading the lyrics and picking out various parts of speech. My daughter’s favorite was when she was able to use a virtual keyboard to follow along with the music and choose the right notes.

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My six-year-old son enjoyed the MaxMusic but also checked out the MaxPhonics component of the program. He was working on the earliest level, which was all about learning the individual letters and their sounds. Each letter has a lesson which worked on learning to recognize the letter, learning the sound of the letter, and learning how to write the letter. The program incorporated tactile, visual, and auditory learning for each letter. The student would hear and see the letter, then have an opportunity to trace and write the letter with the mouse. Finally, there were activities to help them work on recognizing which objects began with that letter sound.

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The MaxReading section has selections for a variety of reading levels including high school students. There were even selections about a variety of college majors which would be very interesting to a student that was trying to decide what they wanted to study. Inside of the reading program the selections has vocabulary words highlighted and if the student needed help with the word, they could click on the word and be provided with the definition, an example in a sentence, and synonyms. Next, the passages had the student highlight the topic, main idea, and important details. After that step the student worked on using an outline with the reading passage. Following the outline, the student completes a writing exercise. They can choose from three different options for the writing prompt. Finally, the student is asked questions about the reading passage.

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In addition to the MaxVocab that is offered with-in the reading component, students can go directly to MaxVocab to get more vocabulary via the dictionary portion or play games such as hangman to improve the students vocabulary.

Another great component of this program are the MaxBios. you could choose a famous person from a variety of options including Aretha Franklin, Georgia O’Keefe, and even Mother Teresa. The student would then read the short biography, have the option of virtually highlighting important facts, and then be asked to answer questions based on the biography. A great way to include history and even art and music studies into reading. Similar to the MaxBios is MaxPlaces except instead of people it uses reading passages to explore a variety of different places throughout the world.

Overall, I found that this program has a variety of different activities and could be a great asset to a student that enjoys working and learning online. It can support reading skills for everyone from a young student learning to read to a high school student that wants to improve comprehension skills.

I highly encourage you to click on the graphic below and check out the other reviews to see how different families used MaxScholar in their homes with a variety of different ages and reading abilities.

Hymn Study: America the Beautiful

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America the Beautiful seemed like the perfect hymn for July as we celebrate Independence day and thank God for our blessings. This song was written by Katherine Lee Bates, a teacher and college professor. She wrote the hymn in the summer of 1893 after having hiked to the top of Pike’s Peak.

The view and resulting conversations inspired this now beloved hymn of thanks. In her own words Bates said, “One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.”

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O beautiful for spacious skies,
for amber waves of grain;
for purple mountain majesties
above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
and crown thy good with brotherhood
from sea to shining sea.

As we study and learn about this hymn this month, we plan to spend some time talking about all of the blessings that we see around us. From the fields of food growing along our roads, the beautiful river that runs through our town providing beauty, enjoyment, and food, and all of the other beautiful things that God has provided us.

In addition to our regular hymn study activities, I thought it would be a lot of fun to take a virtual tour of Pike’s Peak, the place that inspired this beautiful hymn. Due to the current pandemic situation, you can take a tour of the peak as well as some other virtual activities here:Pike’s Peak Virtual Tour.

If you would like to add some art to your study this month, Nana has this wonderful chalk pastel painting of “the purple mountain majesties and the amber waves of grain”. this painting is absolutely beautiful, but also simple enough for even younger children to participate. As always, her hymn studies are included in the You Are An Artist Clubhouse Membership.

I pray you enjoy time with your children studying this hymn this month. As we celebrate our nation’s independence, I hope we always remember to give thanks to God for all of our blessings.

Hymn Study Resources:

Pike’s Peak Virtual Tour

America the Beautiful (Story and Lyrics)

America the Beautiful (Ray Charles)

America the Beautiful (U.S. Navy Band)

America the Beautiful (Willie Nelson and More with tribute to 9/11)

America the Beautiful (Cedarmont Kids)

Download Your Freebies Below!

Hymn Study Fact Sheet

America the Beautiful copywork

Resource Library and Affiliate Disclosure

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Deals and Freebies

If you have not tried SchoolhouseTeachers.com, you don’t want to miss this sale!

Homeschool Complete is offering a special 10% off discount to my readers! Just use code: SWAG

Evan-Moor is offering their Daily Fundamentals book FREE right now to help out during this time.

Get a FREE Literature Kit from LitWits using Code 11READ4FUN. We are currently enjoying the Heidi kit but have also previously loved the My Side of the Mountain kit.

IEW is offering some great free resources right now.

FREE Baby Yoda Art Lesson from Nana!

Illustrated Would You Rather Book (Free on Kindle)

Homestead Homeschool: Meet Wilhelmina and Other Updates

If you have been following along with our homestead posts, you know that we dabble at homesteading in the midst of a busy life. We enjoy being outside, learning to grow and raise our own food, teaching our children responsibility, and the taste of a garden fresh tomato!! Since my last post about gardening a couple months ago, we have added some new friends to our homestead, had a few successes and some challenges.

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New Animals

A few weeks ago we added three turkey poults to our homestead. These, along with the nine that we are getting next week as a part of a 4-H turkey show, will be raised by my oldest three children and then processed in late October or November.

Next, we added guinea keets last week. My children had been asking for guineas for awhile now and we decided it was finally time to give it a try. Guineas are different from our chickens and ducks because they are much more independent. They also need very little feed and will forage for most of their diet. They should be a benefit to our homestead by helping control the snake and tick population. During the spring they will also produce eggs, which my son hopes to incubate and be able to increase our flock as well as sell some keets.

Finally, just this week we were able to find a good companion goat for my daughter’s show goat. This goat’s original name was Amara but my daughter has named her Wilhelmina Amara. Her show goat’s name is Houdini (because he is an escape artist) and the real Houdini’s wife was named Wilhelmina. We are excited for this addition to the homestead and enjoying watching the two goats play together.

Homestead Homeschool.

Successes and Challenges

One of the biggest challenges we are facing right now are the deer who think our garden makes for a wonderful buffet. We have a fence and first they were just eating what was up against the fence but most recently they are jumping the fence to dine on our garden. I love watching the deer grazing on the grass in the back yard, but we are working on solutions to keep them out of the garden. I have some netting ordered to see if that will help keep them out of the fence. If you have any solutions that have worked for you, I would love to hear about them.

On a happier note, the garden is starting to really yield its harvest and we are enjoying the ‘fruits of our labor’. We are currently harvesting blueberries, yellow squash, and cherry tomatoes. With-in the next week we should also be getting patty pan squash and slicing tomatoes. The potato crop is growing nicely and we have some baby eggplant and peppers that will be ready soon as well.

My children participated in a virtual chicken show this month and did really well. My son did well enough in the first round to move on to the finals and placed fourth in his age group. They very much miss their in-person events but were grateful for the chance to show virtually.

How are things going where you are? I would love to know what you are harvesting from your gardens and any tips about the deer!

Affiliate Disclosure and Resource Library

When you sign up for our free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

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Deals and Freebies

Homeschool Complete is offering a special 10% off discount to my readers! Just use code: SWAG

Evan-Moor is offering their Daily Fundamentals book FREE right now to help out during this time.

Get a FREE Literature Kit from LitWits using Code 11READ4FUN. We are currently enjoying the Heidi kit but have also previously loved the My Side of the Mountain kit.

IEW is offering some great free resources right now.

FREE Baby Yoda Art Lesson from Nana!

Illustrated Would You Rather Book (Free on Kindle)

Exploring The US Life-Saving Service 1878-1915 (Review)

When the opportunity to review Exploring the U.S. Life-Saving Service 1878-1915: 17 Student Workshops with 120 Activities by Rebecca Locklear came up, I immediately thought of my oldest son. I knew he was very interested in history and we had talked and learned about the US Life Saving Service in our study of the Wright Brothers a couple years ago.

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When asked about this review he was very interested in giving it a try and the plan was for him to go through a couple of the units as an independent study. However, when I received the e-book I realized that it was set up more as a teacher’s manual and would be a challenge for him as an independent study. Each section is set up with objectives, materials lists, introductory information, and a variety of activities and answers that relate to that topic. The units varied in difficulty, some of them being suitable for students as young as fourth or fifth grade and others being better suited for high school students.

The activities were varied and included such things as group discussions, matching games, recipes, art projects and more. The section that he was originally most interested in, Prepare to Stay Alive, was not really going to work well as an independent study. So we decided to start with the introduction and work together through some of the other units.

Throughout the different units you are able to learn about almost every aspect of the lives and work of the men in the U.S. Life-Saving Service. You find out about where they lived, the rescues they made, their hunting and fishing for food, the ships they used, and even information about staying alive in dangerous conditions. There were fun activities that discussed appropriate manners and had the children become familiar with how the social rules of the time would have worked. They had to determine whether it would have been appropriate for the men to wear their hats in various situations.

One of the facts that I learned, is that the men only had leave one day a week and that was often the only day they saw their families. While a few stations had family houses built next to them, for most of the men they stayed at the station and only went home on their one day of leave each week.

Our family loves to eat and incorporate food into our educational activities. We were excited to find information about what the men of the U.S. Life-Saving Service would have eaten and recipes that we could try. One of my son’s favorite activities was baking the gingerbread muffins after learning about how they used molasses. As a bonus, they made for a great breakfast that I didn’t have to cook!

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Overall, while Exploring the U.S. Life-Saving Service 1878-1915: 17 Student Workshops with 120 Activities didn’t work quite the way I had envisioned, I think it has a lot of great information and activities. It would be perfect for a co-op or family unit study.

You can find out more about this book, check out the authors other work, and get updates and information by clicking here and signing up for the e-mail newsletter. I highly encourage you to click on the graphic below and check out all of the reviews of Exploring the U.S. Life-Saving Service 1878-1915: 17 Student Workshops with 120 Activities as well as The Mayflower at Cape Cod – Stories, activities, and research that connect 1620 with life today.

Critical Thinking Co (Review)

who is that kid

I started homeschooling when my oldest was in first grade and he will begin his ninth grade year in the fall. I remember teaching him to read and now he is reading the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Time has moved quickly and it is hard to believe that it is already time to be planning for college and his future. As we work towards coming up with a good four year plan and helping him prepare for college, I was excited to get the opportunity to review Who Is This Kid? Colleges Want to Know! from The Critical Thinking Co.™.

critical thinking college

I received the e-book version of this book for this review and was able to print out the sections that my son was working through. We did just a few pages each week as we began to work out way through this journey and the discussions that arose from it. The first section was helping the student work through thinking about themselves and learning how to describe themselves well for colleges and interviews. It was really interesting for me to see what characteristics my son thought describes him and what other family members had to say when they chose.

The next portion of the book helps students explore a variety of college options. It helps them find out more about colleges they might already be interested in as well as looking into other colleges that they may not have considered. The worksheets help them gather information and compare the various schools. This section also walks them through asking questions about the colleges, in person and virtual tours, and other aspects of finding the right college fit.

Part three walks them through college applications, essays, and interviews. Part four gives a calendar of monthly actions that should be taken by juniors and seniors as they work through the college admissions process. Finally, part five is a glossary of terms that students need to know during this process. It includes such terms as humanities, pass-fail, resident advisor and more.

We worked our way through part one and plan to continue to work our way through the book as we go through this process of getting him ready for college. I would recommend the book for any high school student, and ideally start it not later than your junior year in high school. However, if you have a rising senior it could still be beneficial.

Overall, I think this is a great resource for helping students learn more about the college admissions process, helping them learn more about themselves and find the right fit for a college.The less than $15 you pay for this book could easily save more than that in helping them find the right fit before they pay application fees and in increased scholarships because of well written applications and essays. In addition to this title, the Review Crew had the opportunity to review a wide variety of titles for various ages. I highly encourage you to click on the graphic below and check out all of the different The Critical Thinking Co.™ products that the other reviewers tried with their families.

Math Shed and Spelling Shed (Review)

Learning is always more fun when you can turn it into a game. Math Shed and Spelling Shed do just that. These two computer programs turn math facts and spelling into a game. I received these products to review and over the last month my six-year-old son tried out Math Shed and my daughter used Spelling Shed .

When I received my subscription to review, I was able to go in and set up each child as a student. This allowed them each to work and get their own ‘honey pots’ or points if they scored well in the games. However, since each one was doing a different subject and they were working on the same laptop they ended up deciding to save one log-in in the laptop and use the same account to work from. Thus they were able to score more points quickly. Since I was not using the points for anything other than motivation for them, this worked well for us. However, if you wanted to track more data or have students competing against each other, they would each need to use their own log-in.

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My daughter enjoyed the spelling program. When she went into Spelling Shed she could choose the level of the words and the level of difficulty of the game. In the lower levels on the easy setting, it would give you only the letters you needed for the word and you just had to put them in order. When you chose more difficult settings, it would give you lots of letters to choose from and you had to determine which letters were in the word and their order. As a parent I could have gone into the parent dashboard and assigned her certain spelling lists, however, I chose to allow it to just be random practice.

My son did most of the math, though my daughter also tried it out once or twice. There were a variety of different types of math problems to choose from including: number bonds, times tables, add & subtract, powers of 10, and negative numbers. Since my son had just finished up kindergarten level math, we chose to focus on addition and subtraction. When we went into that section, he could choose to focus on addition, subtraction, or both. He could also choose how high the numbers would go for the problems. We stayed with the 0-10 range and worked on those basic facts. From there you could choose the level of difficulty. He typically went with easy which gave him three answers to choose from. Each round of the game lasts for one minute and he had to answer as many questions and possible by clicking on the correct answer choice. This program reviews and reinforces concepts that have already been taught but does not have an instructional component.

ed shed collage

Overall, my children found these games to be engaging and fun. I thought it provided practice with important skills and was a good way to get them engaged and enjoying schoolwork. If you wanted a program to give your child extra practice with math or spelling skills in a fun and engaging way,Math Shed and Spelling Shed might be a great fit. I highly encourage you to click on the graphic below and check out the other reviews to see how different families used these programs in their homes.

Summer Reading List 2020

I’m still working on determining my own personal summer reading list, but I thought I would share with you today some of the books my children are reading this summer in case you still needed some ideas.

summer reading 2020

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This year I decided that both my twelve and fourteen year olds were going to be responsible for reading three ‘classics’ over the summer. I had a fairly broad definition of classics and I let them choose as long as it was one they had not yet read. They, of course, also both have stacks of fun books that they intend to read over the summer. Current favorites include anything about Duck Commander, The Callahan Cousins, Nancy Drew, and anything by Robin Jones Gunn.

Goldtown

My twelve year old daughter has chosen, The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, and Little House in the Big Woods. She wanted to read the Hobbit so that she could watch the movie with us and her older brother. She has started reading it and we have also started watching the movie so she is getting the experience of both at the same time. This is a good book, but a little dense so I don’t’ recommend it prior to middle school. The movie is rated PG-13 because of the violence so I do not recommend it for younger children. We do not watch many movies with that rating in our family, but felt that the overall plot was worthy of watching with the older children.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a family favorite and my daughter has listened to it on audio but had never actually read the book for herself. I personally think you can never get too much of C. S. Lewis so I was happy to have her choose that as her second book.

Finally, I’m not sure how she managed to get to seventh grade without having read the Little House series, but I think she will fall in love with the series when she reads the first one and I expect she will end up reading the rest. We have the collection of them because my son read them all.

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My fourteen year old is still working out all of his selections but he wanted to start with Moby Dick and Fellowship of the Ring the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He read the Hobbit this year and enjoyed it and is looking forward to getting more of the story. He may also read the Father Brown Mysteries. We have been reading the abridged versions as a family and he really enjoyed them.

He is also reading Debt Free Degree by Anthony Oneal. This is the second summer that we have chosen to each read a book and discuss it together. As he is entering ninth grade this year and making plans for college, I hope that this book will give us some great ideas and strategies for helping him achieve his college goals without student debt.

My six year old and two year old will be enjoying a variety of picture books and audio books as we go through the summer. Some of the current favorites are the Goldtown Beginnings Series and Albert Whitman Boxcar Children readers. We have plenty of picture and simple books on hand, but if anyone has a new favorite to recommend I may pick up one or two special ones for the summer.

If you are looking for ways to help you incorporate reading into your summer, you may want to check out the free summer reading programs from Not Consumed or Pam Barnhill. I will also include links to a few posts to help you incorporate reading into your days.

Please share with me in the comments what you are reading this summer! Also, check out the other Review Crew summer reading lists here.

Reading Posts:

Our Summer of Reading!

5 Days of For the Love of Reading

Creating a Book Club Culture (Read Aloud Family)

Read All the Books: Free and Discounted Online Literature Resources

Library and Educational Services LLC (Review)

You can also check out the books section of my Reviews page.

Resource Library and Affiliate Disclosure

Resource Library

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