Our books of the week have a late 1700's focus

Julia is still learning about the late 1700's in Social Studies, so we borrowed these books from the library. They are from the American Girl history series. Felicity is a young girl living in 1774, and the books tell her story of life in that time.

We only borrowed the first three in the series (I believe there are 6) and the "Welcome to Felicity's World" book that gives lots of facts and photos about that time period, because we only get a small window of time to borrow the books, but we do plan on borrowing the last books in the series because we love them!  

The American Girl history series books are great for adding more life to your lessons, and we highly recommend them!

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Our homeschool curriculum choices for first grade

I've talked about it before, but now that everything is finalized I want to share it with you.  We are following the Charlotte Mason Method, and mixing in a little Classical Education.  Those words probably mean nothing or very little to you if you are not a homeschooling family, and possibly even if you are!  Basically, it is just a guide on how we homeschool.

I spent months researching curriculums, reading books, reviews, talking to other moms.  My favorite resources to figure it all out have been Simply Charlotte Mason website, the book The Well Trained Mind, as well as the forums on the Well Trained Mind website, and an amazing group on Cafemom called Homeschooling Moms.  Finally this is what we decided on:

Math - Saxon 1
Spelling - All About Spelling, level 1
Handwriting - Handwriting without tears, my printing book
History - Story of the World, Ancient Times
Science - Outdoor Secrets, and we will be doing our own body curriculum after we complete OS
Poetry - Favorite Poems Old & New, and A Child's Garden of Verses
Personal Development - A Child's Book of Character Building, Book 1
Art - Drawing with Children
Music - World's greatest composers series, starting with Bach
Nature Study - using Hours in the Out-of-doors as a guide, as well as the Handbook of Nature Study
Reading - reading books relating to our Science and History
Literature - following the literature list on www.simplycharlottemason.com
Grammar (will not start until second semester) - English for the Thoughtful Child

Wow, so that seems like a lot.  But the nice thing is that with the method's I am using, most lessons only take 15-20 minute, and of course we do not do every subject every day.  We started Handwriting over the summer, and are about halfway through that book, so we are trying to decide if we should move on to the next HWOT book, or start doing copywork like the CM method suggests.

Another great thing about the method we are using, is that it uses "living books" instead of a lot of text books for subjects like science, history, etc.  So that means, my library has been an amazing resource!  It has saved me so much money, and so far, they have had every book we will need for the first month or two, or a very good substitution.

Wish us luck!