OneLuckeyWife

 We have finished All About Reading Level 4 ! I am so glad that we started using this program from All About Learning Press. It is hands-down the best if you want to teach anyone to read. This last level goes over the rare teams, unexpected phonic sounds, and words that are borrowed from other languages. The break down of each lesson is amazing not only for the teacher but the student as well. The games incorporated make it really intriguing for the student. I absolutely love the little readers that come with each level. The lessons are perfectly spaced out so that it isn't too much at one time. I love the way the teacher's manual is done. As a dyslexic teaching another dyslexic I couldn't be happier with the teaching method. A lot of the things taught in all 4 levels of All About Reading I learned for the first time. I had never learned them in public school but am so glad I am able to teach them to my own kids. While most American adults read at a 7-8 grade level my seven...

I love, love, love All About Learning Press! So with that of course we have kept with All About Spelling after finishing level 1. Just like before I have organized it by getting the teacher manual's spine cut and the pages spiral bound. It is so much easier to go through the book that way. The student pack comes with the cards (phonogram, sound, key and word), syllable tags, syllable rules, word banks, jail for words that break the rules when spelling, the progress chart with stickers for it and the certificate. You will need the tiles but if you have used either All About Reading or Spelling before than the tiles are the same. We got the app (for tablet only) instead so that there is no chance of losing the tiles. In level 1 there were tokens to help with making sure your child sounds out each sound in a word and then writes it. Level 2 does not come with any tokens but you can really use anything as a token. Our daughter likes to use Hot Wheels if she is missing sounds in a word...

This is the second to last level of reading! All About Reading  has been an amazing curriculum for it. Everything is laid out so nicely. The thing I love best about this curriculum is that even as a dyslexic parent I have been able to effectively teach our daughter to read all on my own! If you have read our previous reviews you know I organize this curriculum very particularly. the teacher manual gets spiral bound by Staples. The student book get the pages torn out and sheet protected. The cut outs get laminated and put into a zip lock with an index card to know what level and lesson they go with. The phonogram cards and word cards get laminated as well. This level has two books with many stories in them for your child to read when they pop up in the curriculum. My daughter loves the stories and likes to read the title for the next story before she learns the new lesson that will be in them.  I love that there is plenty of work so that the child can practice the new concept b...

We really enjoyed using Story of the World last year and I found it super informative even for me. So of course we are using volume 2 this year. For volume 2, I bought the item separately because we did not use the audio book last year. The main reason I do not use it is because some of the things in the textbook are gruesome and our daughter is sensitive. So instead I read the sections before had and summarize or omit the gory bits. I did get the activity book  and the test booklet . Volume 2 of Story of the World goes over the time period from the fall of Rome to rise of the renaissance. The activity book I feel is a must have for this curriculum. It has a bunch of information in the teacher manual section and the student pages are so much fun for kids. The teacher manual is hands down my favorite part of this curriculum. It lets you know other books you can get that talk about the same things that you are reading in that chapter. Review questions to ask on the most important in...

I know that a lot of homeschoolers choose not to give test or do any sort of testing. Some states will require that you get test done or go to a place to have a test administered. In Texas, this does not apply to us. However I do give tests, quizzes and we do reviews. I do not tell our daughter when we are doing any of these except the review. I will mutter to myself while looking at my planner and say that week is a review week so she sometimes overhears this. Does this make her nervous? No. Solely because I do not make a big deal about it. I know a lot of kids get test anxiety and I do not want our daughter to think that they are a daunting thing. Last year We used Test Prep  and I really liked it. It touches and 2 of the most important classes in school: English and math. The English portions cover reading, comprehension, vocabulary, writing and grammar.  A lot of the reading will be reading passages and then answering the questions that go with them. The will need the skil...

This year's history class is over the middle ages and the renaissance time periods. We got Famous Figures to go along with it since it was so nice to use for 1st grade. In the front of this book there are little paragraphs that go over who each person is and what they did that makes them so memorable. I did not really use these last year. In fact we only ended up using half of the pages. For each person you get a teacher cut out and a student cut out. Our daughter at first had fun coloring the people but by the middle of it she was bored and did not want to color them so instead I just had the teacher ones cut out and put together for her to play with.  Sometimes I do have her color them just so she learns some patience. She thinks it takes to long to color them. Or sometimes I will color them with her to show her she can take her time and enjoy coloring even if it take awhile. I wish that the book came with the little pins to to put them together with but I found them at Walmart ...

While our history textbook does have geography it is really only over the geography of the time and there is not a lot of it. So to compensate for this we use Skill Sharpeners Geography . I would not use this as your sole history curriculum but rather to supplement like we do. There are 16 different sections for your child to complete. Each one has passages to read, questions to answer and a hands-on activity to do at the end of the section. As to be expected there is a ton of map work for your kids to work on and there are a couple non map sections like suburbs vs city and ocean habitat. The kind of work that will be asked of your child are filling in the blanks (with and without a word bank), multiple choice and writing the answer. I will say that I wish some of the lines were longer because some answers will take a lot more space to write than what is provided for them. So for this we write the answers on a separate piece of paper and then I staple it to the workbook pages. This wor...

I really like using books in our homeschool so I was very pleased to see Word Fun in our 2nd grade kit. This book goes over the different types of words. Nouns, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, conjunction, interjection and preposition are all included. The drawing is really nice and colorful. Our daughter finds the art style to be very funny which keeps her interest in what I am reading and explaining to her. Each new type of word is explained and has the symbol for it. Then you get to read a few passages about if you were that type of word. I really like how they did this book not only does it give you the basic definition of the word but then the passages go more in-depth like saying that a proper noun has a capital letter. It introduces the different kinds of nouns not just giving a blanket idea of nouns. Hands down our favorite thing about this book is that at the end of each section about the kind of word there is a game to play! We often play the game multiple times while we a...

This is such a cute all about me book. I love that Me: A Compendium has a hardcover book as well so the cover will not get bent. The beginning page has a dedication section. This is so cute! After your child finishes this book they can dedicate it to someone and give it to them as a gift. How adorable! There is a lot of drawing, coloring and writing in this art book. It has pages for things your child likes the most, does not like, favorites, etc. Foods, feelings, weather, where they live, holidays, etc. are all covered in this all about me book. Some pages are a bit more interactive. There is a pages that says how many steps from my room to the front door and another has them see how many jumping jacks they can do before getting tried. This is so cute. There were some harder ones for us like what team you cheer for. Since we are not into sport we picked like when we play on teams or her in gymnastics. I love that they have a about page for when your child was a baby. They have a ...

We have kept Building Block of Science for our science curriculum this year. What I like about this science curriculum is that it comes with a lot of things. You will get the textbook, teacher manual, student activity book, a lab notebook, lab kit and test. Some of the things you have to print out but the only ones that I print are the student book and the test everything else I just keep on my iPad as a PDF. I really like this science curriculum because it is really engaging. The pictures in the textbook are kind of cartoony and really vibrant and bright. Our daughter often thinks that they are super funny which gets her more interested. I also like how Building Blocks is laid out. There are 5 main subjects in science: chemistry, biology, physics, geology and astronomy. Each one in Book 2 has 4 chapters to it.  This books chemistry goes over tools used in history and today, acids and bases, how the acids/bases react, food and taste due to molecules. Biology covers tools used, pro...