Above: We celebrated Ginny’s 1 year ‘gotcha’ day (adoption anniversary) with friends during this unit.
Ginny has only had one year of school with me, so even though she is in 4th grade, I want her to get a solid foundation of history. As such, this year we are doing a combined World History core and next year we will do a combined American History core. Sonlight calls what we are doing this year, B+C and it is the first pass of World History I and II. She will miss out on a few readers that the other kids had, but I might assign those for extra reading for the summer.
Ginny gets to jump straight into reading out of a full bible instead of another year of a children’s bible. She is doing good at learning how to find the passages and memorizing the assigned verses for each week. She also follows along with Hannah’s readings when we do family devotions.
In history/social studies, our main spine for the year is The Usborne Book of World History and we add in Usborne Time Traveler as a supplement. We use Window on the World for social studies as well as Geography Songs for geography. When we got to studying Egypt, we read Tut’s Mummy: Lost and Found.
We started Read Alouds with Red Sails to Capri. It was a stretch for Ginny but we enjoyed it. Then we read The School Story and Homer Price. We also have The Aesop for Children and 104 Poems of Whimsy and Wisdom for our extra reading selections each week.
Ginny is on grade level for reading but behind on grammar so we are fast tracking through LA2. I just let it roll over as we finish. We probably get 5 days done in 3. She has spelling lists, Explode the Code 5 and Explode the Code 6 for grammar, reading from The Beginner’s Bible, Frog and Toad are Friends, Greg’s Microscope, Hill of Fire, and Owl at Home, Wordly Wise A for vocabulary, and a weekly creative assignment.
For science, we went ahead and started Science B to keep pace with the core. B had been updated with a new experiment book, Discover and Do: 2nd Grade, which we are enjoying. She also read The Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth and we are now working through DKfindout! Earth. We have a book called See How It’s Made that shows how different items are produced and we read about one item a week.
Ginny is working through Horizons 3 for math. We are still filling in some gaps and she needs to practice her multiplication so we have Prodigy for some supplemental work a couple times a week.
Extras for Ginny include weekly piano lessons and daily practice, karate on Mondays and Wednesdays, Royal Rangers on Wednesdays, being drug along for all our church activities like packing and distributing blessing bags, attending all our Connections activities like pumpkin carving and a hay barn festival. We had a Diltz trip to Arkansas for Thanksgiving, some geocache hunting and Christmas in Bandera/Kerrville.