I am a straight montessori homeschool. The work mat is a thing for sure! I don't mind getting stuck in with Montessori's own books and using manuals/albums. If I couldn't do it though, this is definitely the next best thing. I am excited to see you use hands on materials.

Wow thank you so much!!!! I just happen to stumble across this video while looking for something else on curriculum. I have been looking for the past month for a child therapist for my 7 yr old. Been difficult. I have read certain things that have been helpful like : 'The Whole Brain Child'...very good for me in my approach to my daughter that has excessive fears and a very active imagination. I will definitely get these books so we can work through these feelings together. (thanks again for the book walk-throughs).

2nd gen homeschool mom here. I liked your balanced viewpoint regarding the different types of content providers. You’re right, there are no real experts. My own experience: I am the oldest of 9, all of us homeschooled from the cradle beginning in the 80’s and also homeschooling all 8 of my children from the cradle, currently infant up through high school. That’s roughly 40 years of home education experience. My mom was an OG, part of a generation that had no one else to ask advise from, no KZbin, no tik tok. It was socially ostracizing and “not cool”, a time when you had to have tough skin and really believe in what you were doing, even if you were guessing about how to implement it. Does my boomer mom think she made mistakes during that time? Absolutely. Do I think I’ve made mistakes thus far? Absolutely. No one is perfect. I firmly believe some grace needs to be given for perceived mistakes in that first generation however. I do hear from some that they won’t homeschool their kids for one reason or another. Lack of supervision does seem to be a common reason. I’d like to point out that at the time in the 80’s to 90’s, the reigning experts insisted that children would naturally gravitate to teach themselves and that a more hands off approach should be taken. If Johnny wanted to play outside all day, let him. He’ll want to read eventually was the theory. This was a theory of John Holt and other earlier homeschool pioneers. I see that type of theory come up by younger homeschooling parents and cringe every time. I think that theory might apply to select children but shouldn’t be applied to the whole, as children will slack in general when things are hard (such as high school). For any adults who feel this was their experience, just know that the “experts” at the time pushed this theory. Keep that in mind when you hang on to the opinions of every “expert” you hear today. Give that first gen homeschooling parents some love, they fought the system that tried so hard to put them down. New homeschoolers have no clue how hard it was back in the day. I appreciate the cool moms online that help newbies. I usually don’t learn anything from them and tend to smile at some of the naïveté, but I’m glad they’re influencing others to come on board. I like to watch teachers for advise on gadgets and organization. Each group has something to offer, but take it all with a grain of salt and just do what you think works for you and benefits your kids the most. Remember you will make mistakes, and if you are second gen forgive your parents for mistakes and pray your kids forgive you for yours. We do it out of love, and all we can do is our best ❤

Where did you get most of your rock gem and geodes? Did you buy them from a certain place?

Hi, we are going to use book shark this year, under the PEP FL scholarship. We are still on the fence, B or C. We will do the whole curriculum, except maybe math, we are still debating Saxon or Beast Academy. We would love to know if you loved it, and anything you may have hated. Our biggiest problem and this is with any curriculum we look at is what we really level wise need. So if you can answer, were you able to go deeper for your 9 year old and make it easier for your 6 year old, as they say you can. Did your 9 year old want to speed thru cause it was to easy? Our little one is different, not disabled, but has an EP plan, he is a genius. Last year in brink and Morton he entered as a K student and exited as a 3rd grader, but we still think he is going into 3rd, because he only was there for 6 weeks, school wants him as a 4th grader next year. He is 5, he definitely reads chapter books, like Magic Tree House and such. So we are thinking start 3rd and go up. We may end up doing 2 grades in one year (especially in math), but he is 5, so handwriting is still at 5 year old, spelling more like 1st grade but yeah he can do way above his age and grade. What do you think, is this a curriculum that is good for deep dives into things and explore more on his own. We look at it and think it will work, just still not sure if we should go B or C or D. Any I put will help.

This video is what I want though with my son.

Thank you for sharing, we are going to try this next year after finishing Beowulf Grammar!

I loved hearing your baby in the background ❤ I had my 4th girl in the middle of April, and I know you were due around that time too. I hope everything is going well for you and your family. Having a new baby and a toddler can be quite challenging. 😅

I hope all went well for you. I went into labour 5 hours after a kingdom hall deep clean! 😂 It definitely works 😂😂

✨🤰🏻 This was the last video I filmed while pregnant, and all this organizing and cleaning put me into labor 😅 ✨ Do you have any projects you're tackling to prepare for the new homeschool year?

Hello. May I ask if you are continuing with Bookshark for science?

This looks awesome! Thank you so much for taking the time to make such a thorough overview. I so hope this will be a great fit for you guys, it would be such a dream to have most of LA covered in one place!

The Last Mapmaker is really good. My daughter and I did it as a read aloud this year

We are going to be using a couple of the novel studies from Hearth and Story next year

We just started this as well! We're wrapping up grade 5, but we're going to do this over the summer and into next year anyway. I LOVE it so far!

Definitely buy ! Thanks

This is such an excellent video. I wish I paid more attention to other homeschooling KZbinrs' backgrounds when I started homeschooling last year for my son's kindergartener year. I notice that homeschoolers with PhDs (but not always) tend to be more academically rigorous in their homeschool approach, and in many cases, but not always, former educators from a public school system lean more on unschooling than former educators who were in academia. Now, I am from neither background, I consider myself an autodidact, so I tried a few academically rigorous curriculums for my son's kindergarten year, and it was not something my son and I are ready for at this stage. If I was a person who was a former educator or academic, maybe I would have a better experience. 🤷‍♀️ Now I find myself in the position that I think starting to learn Ancient History for first grade is really bad advice, even when it has become commonplace in a lot of "first grade" social studies/history curriculums to start out with Ancient History. 😔

Such s good thorough review . Thanks!

Thanks for the review! You did a better flip through than I could have done, and the printing company did a terrific job, especially with the flashcards!

I just bought this a couple of days ago during the sale, I had already looked at the sample pretty closely before buying but now I'm even more excited about it. I hope it works as well as I think its going to. Are you still going to be using Write by Number too?

I will definitely be looking out for your review once you all are finished. I have a rising 4th grader and have this on my list once we hit 5th grade.

💖 This is a big sneak peek into our curriculum picks for 5th Grade! What are you using for language arts this year??

Hi! Just wondering. Does it feel like doing history workbooks on top of literature guide for reading is redundant? I am consodering both but not sure how to combine? Thank you!

I love your videos Kaela ❤❤ I love just hanging out and listening to you chat about what’s on your mind ❤❤

Thank you for this video! I’m still not sure what to do for history, but I now know what I won’t be using 😁

Thank you! Very helpful! My two schoolers are almost 11 and 5. I don’t think I can do science and history together. They get play and meals together 😂. Also they do co op together which just happens for us in the woods and all kids are together for that. We do Art together but that’s about it. I would love some suggestions !

Do these activities ever feel a little baby-ish to your kids? I’m on the fence about AAR

Can I see an example of a weekly spread for your two girls? I will also have two schoolers this upcoming year and I’d like to see how you use this book for it, if you could. TIA

I see you said secular, could this be use by any faith as well? Thanks

Did you ever get around to reading The Hobbit? I'm reading it right now with my 12, 11, and 10 year olds, we love it! It's so nice to 'meet' other JW families who love homeschooling and books, as we don't know any in real life in our area of Canada ❤

I have a 5 and 6 yr old. They both read well and know all the phonic rules for reading. Do you think I could just use the 1st grade level for both kiddos (listening and learning strand LA) I want to mainly use that strand for the subjects the units cover. Hope that makes sense. I plan on having them use the “right” grade level for the skills strand.

Thank you for the flip through and explanation of how you use notebooks in your homeschool. I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate them and I think your way seems doable for a first time homeschooler like myself.

You are so pretty! You remind me of America Ferrera.

I have a filing cabinet with 3 drawers for 3 kids. I plan on starting this year and our system will be super similar to your bins, just in the filing cabinet instead. We are preschool, first, and second grade this year.

❤️

This is the most helpful video I have ever seen! It can be really difficult to learn other’s style for organizing and planning bc it’s so personal. The way you explained this scratched the itch in my brain 😂

7:08 농담하는 거야?

we have tried notebooking with my middle children, but she didn't like it very well. she is more of a tell me exactly what i need to do and i will do it. i am going to try some notebooking with my boy as i think it would work well with him. we are going to be starting with mythology.

Do a light coat of olive oil on the wood and it will take care of most of those scratches.

This was so helpful!!

I really appreciate your video on breaking down Core Knowledge. I've been looking at it for a couple of years, but couldn't wrap my mind around the teacher guides. I'm thinking of switching over to it for quite a few things, but my printer is the worst. Also, the Language Arts materials for 1st and 2nd grades are not available in the website bookstore at all, which is odd.

Have you looked at "Have I got a Story for You!" Art history program? I found it when looking at the timberdoodle kit for ideas and it looks pretty interesting. It is not cheap but after researching looks like a good value.

Miller Pad and Paper has lots of notebooks too.

Thank you for your video! We are using Dash for our 4-soon-to-be-5-year-old daughter since the beginning of the year as the only curriculum to teach her how to read, and we are now in set 2. She's able to progress and reads blends well so far, but I do feel Dash is lacking instructions and differentiation of the sounds of certain blends, such as long oo and short oo (I don't know the proper term for them! 😅). So, I feel like I need a book or not necessarily a full curriculum that can instruct me on sounding different blend sounds. Do you think just having the All About Reading manual is good enough to add while continuing Dash? Or do I need the student activity book also? Thank you!

This looks great! About how long does each lesson take? We would be needing to complete each "week" in three days.

Some great tips! I'm wondering if your newest little one is here? Congratulations, if so! If you don't mind, could you tell me the typing game shown around the 21 minute mark? 🙂

Thank you for the video breakdown! We are new to homeschooling and i am trying to find curriculum that will work with my soon to be 4th grader, this seems great for her since she is a natural story teller and loves making up new stories and writing. I am curious with the stages, do u ever go back to previous stages for review?

Did you end up doing any of the LitHouse novel studies? I see from another comment that you're still using LitHouse with History. I’d really love to see video explaining if you still think there’s a place for LitHouse in your LA, now that you’ve fallen in love with write by numbers. And if so, why you use both and how you integrate them and why you don’t just use Write by Numbers assignments for the writing part of your literature studies and history. If you don't use LitHouse anymore, what do you use for lit comprehension, teaching literary techniques, and analysis? I'm also wondering if you think Write by Numbers uses a TWR approach, or no, but it just works so you don't mind. Maybe that’s too much to ask lol!

Guesstimating ahead of time to divide the grade-level notebook into a few subjects was exactly my mistake last year too. It just didn't work because I couldn't predict, especially with little kids who sometimes mess up a page and need to skip it, how many pages we'd use for each subject ahead of time.