Student Spotlight: Grace

   I'll start with Grace. Her birthday party was yesterday, and there's still a lingering Queen Grace feel in the house today. Even Veritas Press thinks so! Grace participated in their summer reading contest, and Veritas Press drew her name for a $10 gift certificate.

   Grace is a second grader this year. Her seventh birthday was 2.5 weeks past the cut-off for the state of Arizona, but she began kindergarten (at home) in Carson City, Nevada, which has a later cut-off. She's a social butterfly that can hold her own in practically any age group: second grade it is!

   Grace's goals for the year are getting into the 4th grade math book, getting better at Latin and spelling, and reading a zillion books. Her favorite color is pink, her favorite subject is math, and her favorite book changes on a regular basis. She chose How to Train Your Dragon book 1 on Not Back to School Day, then Secret Garden a week later, and today she would say book 2 of the How to Train Your Dragon series, which she just received for her birthday.

   My goals for Grace's second grade year are keeping up with her! She doesn't feel challenged if her studies aren't consistently pushing the boundaries of her skills, and those boundaries jump by leaps and bounds.

   Here's the curricula she'll be using for the '12-'13 school year.

• Grammar: First Language Lessons 3
• Spelling: Rod and Staff's Spelling by Sound and Structure 3
• Writing: homemade cursive penmanship for another month, then a delicious vintage text, With Pencil and Pen (You can download it free on Google Books.)
• Literature: lots and lots of really good books, and a few fluffy ones for the fun of it
• Latin: Latin for Children A
• Math: finish Rod and Staff 3 book she began in first grade, and begin the 4 book
• Science: homemade human body study, using Kingfisher's First Encyclopedia of the Human Body, Scholastic's Make and Learn Projects: Human Body, Inside My Body Lapbook from A Journey Through Learning, and a few ideas from Otter's Elementary Science. That will be followed by BJU Press Science 4, and if that isn't enough, we'll get into a homemade rocks and minerals study.
• History: homemade again, starting at the Revolutionary War and moving forward from there, using books like American Pioneers and Patriots, A Child's Story of America (Both from CLP), Sea to Shining Sea (Amy Cohn), Story of the World volumes 3 and 4 (Peace Hill Press), Usborne's The Last 500 Years, and plenty of extra reading books tossed in
• Geography: Rod and Staff 4: Homelands Around the World
• Art: Discovering Great Artists (Maryann Kohl)
• Poetry: Pizza, Pigs and Poetry (Jack Prelutsky)

   Grammar, spelling, writing, literature, Latin and math will be done daily. Science is on Tuesday and Thursday, and history is on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Geography, art and poetry will be spread across the weekly evenly, so that only one of them is done each day. Grace and Honor are usually combined for science, history, geography, art and poetry. By that I mean they have the exact same lessons and projects, but their performance is measured by their own individual needs and readiness. 



End of the year curricula notes, added June 2013

    First Language Lessons 3 didn't make it. She really just didn't care for it, but she probably would have finished it just fine if I'd pushed it. We jumped sideways to Grammarland for awhile, then she went into Rod and Staff's English 3, which suited her much better than First Language Lessons. 
    With Pencil and Pen was a hit. She adored it. She did a fair amount of studied dictation too.
    Latin.... this was not a good year for Latin. We barely did enough to keep the memory work lodged in their heads.
    She enjoyed the human body study as long as there were paper crafts involved. We added David Macaulay's The Way WE Work, and dropped the Kingfisher.  Rocks... not so much.
    History went well. Then we switched back to our trusty Veritas Press and it went even better. 
    That art book barely left the shelf, and we tired of the geography book before we finished it. Pizza, Pigs, and Poetry was a hit!