Wayfarers + ELTL: STILL My Picks for our Charlotte Mason-Inspired Homeschool

Aug 27, 2017

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Curriculum Pick: Math

Grade 5

This year we are trying Beast Academy for River. Have you heard of it? The textbooks are written as comic books, with separate workbooks for practice. The textbooks must be somewhat entertaining, given that my daughter has already read the first one several times over. We haven’t tried the practice books yet; I’ve heard that they’re pretty tricky. From what I’ve read, the curriculum doesn’t start with basic questions and then become progressively harder — it just uses hard questions with a smattering of extra difficult ones. It’s kind of like throwing your kid in the deep end to teach her how to swim. Which is a terrible approach, really. But that’s what we’re doing with math. It’s a bit of a strange choice, I think, given that we’re behind in math, but I almost wonder if River fights math lessons because she’s bored. I’m going to see if this is more engaging — I’ll be sure to update you as we go through the books.

If Beast Academy doesn’t work for us, we’ll go back to a mix of RightStart (River’s choice) and Math Mammoth (my choice). We did this combination last year and I thought the two curriculums worked beautifully together. When I needed to step away from the more teacher-intensive RS, I printed off units from MM and told her to finish them over a week or so. She didn’t love the assignments, but man, oh man, I loved the break it gave me.

Grade 1

For Harbour, we’re going to use RightStart Level A. Honestly I would have held off on anything formal until Grade 2 or even 3, but she keeps asking to do math lessons, so I might as well use what we’ve got.

Pre-School

Forest will continue to learn to count by adding up the number of Made Good bars that he wants to eat. So far he knows “two of them” and “all of them.” I keep my math skills fresh by mentally calculating how much sugar he’s getting when he eats three bars in one sitting. Oh good gravy, that’s not healthy at all.

Jump Ahead: Our Curriculum Pick for 2017/2018

Introduction
Math: Beast Academy and RightStart
Language Arts: Barefoot Ragamuffin and Brave Writer curriculums
History: Wayfarers: Ancient History
Geography: Wayfarers: Ancient History
Science: Science in the Ancient World
Bible: Episcopal Children’s Curriculum
Foreign Languages: Speaking French with Miss Mason and François and Latin for Children
Miscellaneous: Wayfarers: Ancient History

Comments

3 responses to “Wayfarers + ELTL: STILL My Picks for our Charlotte Mason-Inspired Homeschool”

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

September 4, 2017

Thanks for sharing the children’s Bible curriculum! I’m intrigued by it, and am looking through it now. Love how the BCP is incorporated!

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Astrid

January 6, 2018

Can you share a little more about how you use ECC for your kids? I only have two daughters, a first grader and a third grader, and I pick choose CM resources for our homeschool (history and geography from AO, lit from Mater Amabilis, natural history/science from Sabbath Mood) but haven’t been satisfied with Bible. A lot of stuff out there is too Protestant or too Roman Catholic. Do you just split the storytelling and activities up each day? I like the look of it, especially how it incorporates the BCP, but it seems complicated.

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Louise O’Neil

May 16, 2018

I just discovered Barefoot Meanderings, thanks in part to your posts 🙂 and I am re-doing my entire plan for next year, lol! We will be starting with Ancient History with a 5-year-old daughter doing Pathways and as much of Grammar stage as she can focus on, an 11-year-old doing Grammar stage with dyslexia/learning disabiliteis, and a 12-year-old bumping up into Dialectic, yay! (also dyslexia so it will be a challenge and lots of audiobooks). It looks amazing!!! Can’t wait to start!

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