- Second Story Window morning work and homework, daily 5
- Adapted Mind math
- Easy Peasy All-in-one Homeschool Reading-1, Modern History, Science (selections for all four years of study), and Math-2
- Time4Learning (offline resources only) for 2nd grade Language Arts extensions
- Piano Wizard, Reading Rainbow, and Bill Nye the Science Guy
- LDS scripture stories videos
Second Story Window Morning Work and Math/ELA homework: I love both of these resources. They are the best worksheets ever! I was able to print out a workbook for the entire year which covers all the common core for second grade. (I plan to send him back to public school next year, so I keep in mind what he would be doing if he was there this year) I can use this book as a thermometer to make sure my child is on grade level and to see what areas I need to supplement. This resource is fabulous for homeschool because it is beautifully illustrated in black and white and puts 5 times as many activities per page of paper as most workbooks. The problems are clever and engaging too which is almost unheard of in workbooks. We start each day with this book. (In theory, it gives me a chance to do the breakfast dishes:)  |
| My Second Grade Math Book contains: Second Story Window Math/ELA homework and the Easy Peasy Math-2 pdf. My Writing book conatains handpicked writing assignments from Time4Learning Language Arts Extensions and pages for spelling lists |
 |
| Morning Work: Covers spelling, vocabulary, reading fluency and comprehension, sight words, writing, grammer, and math |
Daily 5: I love this concept which I found on the Second Story Window website and I try to do all five each day.
- Read to self (we call this stamina reading and on the first day he read 3 minutes and we are working up to 30-40 minute reading sessions. On day 40 we are at 17 minutes)
- Read to someone else (We do Easy Peasy Homeschool Reading-1 selections)
- Listen to Reading (I try to read two or three books a day to him)
- Work with words (vocabulary, spelling, grammar, etc)
- Write (We are also working on handwriting, forming letters correctly, speed of writing, and forming smaller letters)
 |
| This is the Math/ELA homework, it prints with Math and Language Arts on every other page since it was intended for public school homework, but it works:) |
 |
| Chunk Spelling: I put blank spelling pages in the back of the writing workbook and each week we generate a new spelling list to study. |
spelling list and I use that for inspiration on which chunks to teach and also challenge words, I also found some great lists by googling chunk spelling. I like studying chunks in spelling because I am such a passionate proponent of phonics. Chunk spelling is great for homeschool because it is so easy to tailor the difficulty level.
Adapted Mind: My son and I love this! We came across ads for this curriculum while doing Easy Peasy Math 2. My son had been wanting to do multiplication which isn't part of Easy Peasy, but is a part of the Adapted Mind second grade math. He can also do third grade math when he finishes, which will be long before the school year is over. We immediately fell in love with this highly user friendly program. The cost is $10 a month which is steep for one child, but we are hooked, and the first month is free making it $9 a month. Getting started was so easy and navigating was easy. Previewing the year was easy. I get an e-mail each day showing how my child is doing which helps me know how much he actually did. The only problem is that there are no links to the instruction videos. I can always find them by googling the lesson topic and Kahn videos. I think this is intentional. The program allows you to select any video explanation you would like off of youtube if you don't want to use theirs. I like that flexibility. There are also worksheets for extra practice if you want them. The one thing this program lacks is daily basic addition and subtraction practice. Easy Peasy offers that, so they pair well together.
Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool: I think it really is easy peasy. If I were homeschooling multiple children I would love it even more because it is designed with that in mind! When I first looked at the curriculum I thought "that doesn't look like enough!", but don't be decieved, it is jam packed with EVERYTHING you need and it is very up to date material. It is fun too, which was important to me. The kids learn so much and have a lot of fun doing it. Navigating the site and planning your year is a breeze. I couldn't be happier. I started with Time4Learning and that is horrible to plan your year with. Easy Peasy also update links often. This is a 100% free curriculum worth a bundle! I don't use the language arts for second grade, because I like Second Story Window and Time4Learning better. |
| Easy Peasy Math pages |
 |
| Learning about Henry Ford was our favorite History lesson so far. We made assembly line cars with Legos! |
Easy Peasy Science I use their science curriculum, but I have picked topics from Zoology (insects, animal classification, ecosystems), Earth Science (earth layers, volcanoes, weather, water cycle, rock cycle), Physics (sound, light, flight), and Biology (plants). I looked up my state science curriculum for second grade and pulled out the Easy Peasy Lessons that matched and it worked out almost exactly to 180 days. I wanted to use the Easy Peasy Thinking curriculum, but honestly, our day is pretty full and I don't usually get to it.
Like I said, we use Reading-1. I started with Reading-2 and realized it was really a third grade reading level. I went back to Reading-1 and at the same time we did something similar to their Learn to Read lessons 137-212 (advanced phonics such as sh, ch, oy, ow, oa, or, gh, alk, ight we did two a day) since he wasn't quite ready with the phonics skills. On day 7, Reading-1 was challenging and I helped by reading a lot of the passages, but now at day 40 and done with the phonics unit, his skills have improved so much that it is perfect for him. I LOVE Easy Peasy Reading 1. The literature has a rich style, is interesting, clever, vocabulary building, knowledge enhancing, grammar building, and even seasonally appropriate. I can incorporate any Language Arts Lessons that I want (listening for details, fact vs opinions, identifying main characters, morals in the text, etc) into what we are reading.
Time4Learning: On day 1 of home school I had intended for this to be our complete curriculum. I had done my research and it seemed to be what my son would enjoy the best. It followed our state curriculum very closely which I also liked. I had a DIFFICULT time planning our year despite the lesson planner on the website. It was challenging to scan and get a feel for what he would be learning in a lesson. It wasn't broken into 180 days either and I had know way of knowing where the natural breaks were. I couldn't print because the format would have taken reams of paper to print. Also, I wanted to print out workbooks for the year, but to print all the pages from the curriculum (they were all in color) was cost prohibitive (even in black and white). Also there was a crazy high monthly fee of $20 for using the curriculum. When my son used the website, he also had a terrible time navigating. Then we ran into problems with the videos. They just didn't have play bars. This was a problem because the videos didn't move fast enough and as a parent I couldn't tell what was in each video without sitting and watching the entire thing myself. You couldn't skip to the parts you needed. On week 2 of homeschool, we tried Easy Peasy for one day just to compare and loved it. I didn't have to plan the year at all, it was already divided into 180 days and scanning content was easy. I don't use Easy Peasy Language Arts 2. It is very light which is fine since they do a lot of language arts with other subjects. I prefer to do more language arts and less of the reading assignments with the other subjects though. So I do Second Story Window ELA homework, Daily 5, and Time4Learning language arts extensions for our Language Arts curriculum.
I do like the concept of Time4Learning, but the worksheets and navigation were not user friendly.
I downloaded the Time4Learning Language Arts Extensions guide and printed out every single writing assignment, about 60 of them and made a second grade writing workbook. We use these in combination with Second Story ELA homework and chunk spelling for our Language Arts. We do the other worksheets in photoshop, so we didn't have to sink tons of money into printing costs. The language arts extensions was one part of Time4Learning I could easily scan through in advance, so I liked it best. The Language arts extensions cover science and social studies topics. I have set up my year so that the Time4Learning science and Easy Peasy Science topics overlap. Time4Learning Language Arts extensions has lots of picture book suggestions and when I google them there are usually videos of the books on youtube, this is good addition to our Daily 5 "Listen to Someone Read".
Other resources I like: Bill Nye the Science Guy, Reading Rainbow, and Story Bots when they apply. I am constantly checking.
For music we use Piano Wizard which is about the only kind of music education my kids will tolerate from me.
Art: This year my son is learning Photoshop and drawing. We use photoshop for Language Arts extensions, science and history projects. For drawing we do drawing tutorials on Youtube of whatever sounds fun to draw or whatever we are learning about in Language Arts. He surprises himself by what he is able to do.
LDS Video Library: Book of Mormon Stories, Old Testament Stories, New Testament Stories, and Doctrine and Covenants Stories: My younger kids watch about three stories a day during breakfast to start their school day.
P.E.: Weather permitting we go to the park for at least 30 minutes a day, I'm still trying to figure out how to keep my 3 and 8 year old physically active during the cold days of winter, but the 30 minute a day requirement comes from a specialist my son is seeing for health reasons and is one of the main reasons we chose to homeschool, so we are pretty committed to this. We also do speech and vision therapy every day. So much therapy! Without homeschool we would never get it all done.
Amazing Handwriting Worksheet Maker: My son seemed to be really, really struggling with writing. Each letter was painfully slow and very hard to read. We've been doing a page a day of d'Nealian paragraphs (seem easier to make these letters so we went with it) in the smallest size letters and it seems to be helping a lot. I've timing how fast he can complete a page and his speed is increasing.
No comments:
Post a Comment