I made it through day one. After a lot of stress in making the decision to pull my first grader mid-year and then scrambling to put together a schedule and curriculum. Some things went faster than expected some slower. We just started with Math, spelling, handwriting, reading, phonics and grammar. I have phonics pathways, interactive notebooks language arts, well trained mind for grammar, spell you see. I am struggling how to make them all work together.
For those who use phonics pathways how many pages a day do you do?
Should I be doing grammar daily too?
I am thinking about switching to All about spelling because I really want to focus on Phonics rules. I didn’t like All about reading the lowest level. I tried it with my daughter when she was younger. Should I switch to that too?
First of all, relax! Sounds like you have the basics covered. No, she doesn’t have to do grammar. And if you didn’t like AAR, don’t use it. No advice on AAS or Phonics Pathways. Tried the first one and it didn’t work for us; never used the second one.
Hi! We don’t use any of these in our family, but I find it helpful to do a looping schedule for these types of things, unless you want to do them all every day. For example, last year my 8yo was needing to do more spelling, vocabulary, mythology, and handwriting in addition to her normal language arts and writing. It was too much to do ALL those for “English” every day. So we started looping the 4 topics in.
Looping just means rotating- so we would do language arts and writing every day, but we would rotate through adding a lesson of spelling, vocabulary, mythology, and handwriting.
I would consider focusing on on what you really want your child to learn/grow in (grammar? Reading?) and once you’re into a daily rhythm with those, add in other books. That may only take a week or so to determine and then you can move on! Best wishes to you!
If you mean that you didn’t like Pre-reading, some people who didn’t like that do like the regular AAR 1-4 levels. They just released a color edition too. Check out the online samples to see if you think it would appeal–you can try out some lessons using the TM, matching Activity Book, and matching reader samples: http://www.allaboutlearningpress.com/reading-lesson-samples/
That’s probably the best way to see if it would work for you.
I really don’t think first graders need daily grammar (I didn’t do grammar at all at this age–I just worked on reading and handwriting first. Add on spelling if she already is reading some. If you use AAR, you would start spelling when she’s ready for AAR 2 or higher.
Give both of you time to de-school and find out what works for you! There’s always some bumps here and there–that’s okay! I hope you have a great rest of the year!
Thank you so much for all of your advice. My schedule is a work in progress. After this week I can see how we can move things around. We did a field trip Friday. Great way to end the week. Now getting ready for next week. Right now I am taking it a week at a time until we get into a routine.
