Tuesday, August 24, 2010

What we're using for second grade

We're sticking with modified Ambleside Online as the core, I guess you'd say, this year.

Here's our reading schedule, if anyone is curious. We're using Story of the World instead of AO's history readings for the most part, so I've arranged things around that.

Math:
Math Mammoth 2A/B, or however far we manage to get. We have a TON of math workbooks I picked up for cheap at a garage sale a few years ago, and that's what we've used in the past, but I felt that MM was worth it for a more coherent approach. We'll probably still use them for supplementation. We're currently doing about 2 pages a day, but about 1/3-1/2 of the problems per page. He is obviously doing ok with the math itself, but the writing and repetition were turning him off.
Beestar.org weekly exercises as long as they remain fun.

Reading:
Continuing with Progressive Phonics. I feel like LemurBoy has made a big jump in readiness over the summer, despite not working on reading much - he reads much more fluently now, and is doing more proto-reading (pretending to read books to his sister and things like that).

I think I want to print out a compilation of the intermediate books, with less repetition per concept, because I feel like the amount of repetition is making for very slow progress. He needs practice, but... maybe not quite that much?

Read-alouds:
Roughly following Ambleside Online's schedule, plus other random (or not-so-random) books. We hope to get back to our former town for at least one of the book club meetings, which he enjoyed last year!

Handwriting:
We're trying Italics: Beautiful Handwriting for Children, by Penny Gardner. Again, I have workbooks from that garage sale, but I'm not sure I like the ball and stick method most of them teach, and didn't feel LemurBoy was doing well with it. This seemed an affordable and reasonably attractive option. He tolerates it.

History/Social Studies:
Story of the World, Volume 2. He loved volume 1, and we read the latter third of it as bedtime stories over the summer.
Supplemented with readings from Ambleside Online and books from various booklists (Sonlight, Tanglewood Education)
Maybe some more local stuff.

Science:
We'll probably continue with random books and documentaries for this year. LemurBoy wants to read two pages a day of a prehistoric animals book, which will take us the whole year if we're actually consistent about it, which we haven't been so far.

We still need to find something for him to do for exercise beyond helping with work around the place. We're also hoping to get him involved in Cub Scouts again, plus 4-H Cloverbuds.