First Grade Curriculum Review

We’ve finished our first year of homeschooling, and I want to get some thoughts down while it’s fresh about the curriculum used in the different subject areas for first grade.

Math: I started with Singapore but switched to Saxon, mainly because I needed a bit more guidance myself in how to teach the concepts. My daughter had completed public school kindergarten, and in accordance with conventional wisdom I started her about half a year behind with the Singapore Kindergarten 2A and 2B workbooks. The lessons were fairly short, and there was no instruction or drill; just the colorful exercises. They worked pretty well, and they lived up to the Singapore reputation for encouraging mathematical thinking better than other programs. But in first grade math, when we switched to text plus workbook, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I was teaching.

I picked up a lightly used teacher’s guide, workbooks, and meeting book for Saxon math 1 after our first quarter, and we picked up part of the way in. I didn’t buy a complete kit of manipulatives, just linking cubes and a practice clock. (I already had pattern blocks.) What I have to say about Saxon is not much different from other reactions I’ve read. What I liked:

• It gave me the guidance I needed as a teacher;
• It gave plenty of opportunity for drilling math facts;
• The incremental approach makes the concepts very clear and managable.

What I didn’t like:

Tedious. We rarely did every single problem, and the meeting book as well became extremely repetitious and took the fun out of patterning, weather graphing, skip counting, etc. I don’t see myself switching the curriculum again; I think it would be counter-productive, especially when this certainly does the job. I want to work more next year on modifying my use of the materials so that I present the above-mentioned practice in a way that inspires more motivation. My daughter has pretty good aptitude in math, but this curriculum is geared for lots of practice, and doesn’t lend itself to much adaptation.

Reading: I used An Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading. It’s a systematic phonics approach in 231 lessons. We skipped over most of the basic letter sounds because we already had a solid foundation there. I like this text. The lessons are very brief and well-defined, and focus exclusively on reading without combining it with (and making it dependent on) other skills like writing and spelling. It’s also quite simple, without lots of bells and whistles and games and bright colors. My daughter was sounding out simple words at the beginning of the year, but somewhere along the way she really took off. I haven’t tested her reading level but it’s beyond first grade. So the effectiveness of this approach is not a question for me. It works.

Spelling: Spelling Workout has been adequate for practicing spelling. We finished both first and second grade books fairly quickly, doing a lesson a day, but couldn’t go further at this point with this series because the third grade book uses cursive. So I picked up another Harcourt speller at Barnes and Noble, and we did a few pages a day. It worked well too, incorporating some dictionary skill-building as well as spelling, proofreading, and problem-solving skills. At the beginning of the year it was a real effort for my daughter to sit and work through a lesson, but those fine motor skills definitely developed over the year.

Handwriting: I started with a Zaner-Bloser book using the continuous stroke alphabet, finished it fairly quickly, and have used copywork and other handwriting workbooks picked up here and there just to keep up the discipline of practicing neat writing, and working on the problematic letters that she still tends to reverse.

Grammar: I used First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind for teaching parts of speech, poem memorization, days, months, seasons, and a variety of other skills. She learned without even realizing it. Lessons are short, and there’s repetition built in. We skipped some lessons because they were already familiar territory. This book encompasses both first and second grades, so I’ll be using it next year too.

History: By far the favorite text has been Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World Volume I. My daughter liked it so much that I bought her the audiobook so she could listen to the stories we’d covered on her own. The audio version is read by Jim Weiss, who gives it his characteristic flair. Bauer’s aim in this series is to help children latch onto history as a chronological story rather than a list of dates, and judging from my daughter’s response I’d call it a glowing success. It provides a solid foundation to be built upon with a more detailed and in-depth study when she’s older. We supplemented with the accompanying activity book, and with the many stories and materials suggested in its reading lists.

Science: We divided the year into 4 subject areas. We started with animals, taking one species a week, using the Kingfisher’s My First Animal Encyclopedia as a base text and supplementing with library materials. Judging from how often my daughter took this book to bed with her, I’d pronounce this our most successful unit. After this we tackled the solar system using Kingfisher Young Knowledge’s Solar System. Again, we took a planet a week, then filled out the last few weeks with other space phenomena. She had less interest in this subject, but the book has the same strengths as the animal encyclopedia: it’s methodical, nicely illustrated, and provides some good basic factual material for a young learner. From there we moved to DK’s First Human Body Encyclopedia, studying one system a week. I found this book to be interesting, but more difficult to break into hour-long sessions; most systems are spread over several pages. The information and illustrations are good, though, and when I broke into a cold sweat at my daughter’s choice of the reproductive system one week, I needn’t have worried. It’s accurate, but not explicit, and leaves room for you to explain some of the technical details according to the questions asked and your own discretion. We’ve completed the year with a hands-on gardening unit using Laurie Carlson’s Green Thumbs, which is full of activities and experiments related to growing things. It’s weak on information content, but it’s a great activity guide.

Art: I’ve used several activity books. I started with Mona Brookes’ Drawing With Children. Though I love the approach and thought it contained lots of wisdom, it was killing the spontaneous joy my daughter takes in creating. I made an executive decision to go no further with it at this point.  All in all I’ve offered little direction in art, as she’s constantly churning out artistic projects of her own, but recently I purchased a dvd curriculum in drawing to begin offering more guidance. I haven’t used it enough to evaluate it yet.

Music appreciation: I’ve used Stories of the Great Composers. At the beginning of the year my daughter wasn’t much interested in this, and I shelved it. But more recently we’ve taken it out again with good success. It contains short chapters on a dozen or so composers, providing some factual information, an imaginative story, and an activity of some kind for each – a crossword puzzle, word search, or matching activity to solidify what we’ve read. It comes with a cd that gives examples of each composer’s work. Its strength is that it humanizes the composers, and the compositional process, and it has been effective at making classical music accessible and building a solid foundation.