I’m trying something new this year…I put our curriculum together myself! I needed to find something for Turkey and Bunny’s fourth grade year, and Ladybug’s kindergarten year. I wanted some things they could do together, and some grade-appropriate things, and I also wanted to continue the survey of American History that we began last year. I don’t think I’ll be doing this assembly every year…I just couldn’t find what I was looking for this time around, so I decided to try it myself. Never say never, though…if it goes well, maybe I’ll look into doing it again in the future!

Religion

• One Hundred Bible Stories, and, for Turkey and Bunny, the accompanying Activity Book
• The Story Bible
• Hero of Faith Series
• Inside the Reformation
• Daily Life at the Time of Jesus
• Bible Handbook for Students
• Luther’s Small Catechism
• Treasury of Daily Prayer

Math

• Horizons Math 4 for Turkey and Bunny
• School Zone Math Readiness Stickers for Ladybug

Language Arts

For Turkey and Bunny:

• Intermediate Language Lessons
• Writing Strands 3
• Spelling Workout E
• English 4

For Ladybug:

• A Reason for Handwriting K
• Explode the Code Primers
• Fun Tales

Latin (Only Turkey and Bunny will have formal Latin studies, but Ladybug is welcome to listen along and absorb vocabulary!)

• Latin Christiana I–We have to finish this up from last year before we move on to…
• First Form Latin

History/Geography–We’re studying the Civil War to the present day. I tried to make sure every decade from then to now was covered either in a history book or a read-aloud.

• A History of US
• Children’s Encyclopedia of American History
• Encyclopedia of the Presidents and Their Times
• National Geographic World Atlas for Young Explorers
• Lincoln: A Photobiography
• Chicago History for Kids
• Great WWII Projects You Can Build Yourself

Science

• Apologia Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy and Physiology, plus the Notebooking Journal (for Turkey and Bunny), and the Junior Notebooking Journal (for Ladybug), and the Lab Kit
• First Human Body Encyclopedia
• See Inside Your Body
• Flip-Flap Body Book
• The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body
• Smart Lab Squishy Human Body
• Concordia Publishing House’s Learning About Sex series
• The Magic School Bus: The Complete Series DVDs
• Apologia Exploring Creation with Botany, plus the Notebooking Journal (for Turkey and Bunny), and the Junior Notebooking Journal (for Ladybug), and the Lab Kit–We won’t be using this until probably the last third of the school year, once we’ve finished our anatomy study, and we’ll also be using this at the beginning of the 2013-14 school year!

Electives

• Kumon My First Book of Cutting and My First Book of Pasting (for Ladybug)
• The Classical Kids Collection volumes one and two
• Story of the Orchestra
• A Child’s Introduction to Ballet
• A Child’s Book of Art

Read-Alouds–I’m not sure we’ll get to all of these, but whatever we don’t read out loud will be turned into book basket selections.

• Turn Homeward, Hannalee
• The Great Turkey Walk
• Henry Ford: Young Man With Ideas
• Bully For You, Teddy Roosevelt!
• Bread and Roses, Too
• War Horse
• Letters From Rifka
• All of a Kind Family
• A Letter to Mrs. Roosevelt
• Miracle on Maple Hill
• In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson
• Team Moon
• Cracker!: The Best Dog in Vietnam
• The Wall Trilogy–This is the one wild card in my curriculum. I stumbled across this series, which focuses on the Berlin Wall from it’s conception through its fall. I’m hoping the series works out…I couldn’t find anything else that I wanted to use that covered this period of time.

Bonus Read-Alouds (a few special titles I specifically wanted to share with Ladybug in her Kindergarten year, in addition to our regular read-alouds.)

• Ramona the Pest
• The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature
• The Year at Maple Hill Farm
• Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm
• Mouse Cookies and More: A Treasury
• A Robert McCloskey Collection
• Mike Mulligan and More

Hopefully I didn’t leave any books (or whole subjects!) out. I won’t even try to list all of the book basket titles we’ll be using, but some of the series will include You Wouldn’t Want to…, If You…, Childhood of Famous Americans, Who Was…?, and multiple American Girl series (those focusing on historical, albeit fictional, characters Addy, Samantha, Rebecca, Kit, Molly, and Julie). This list also doesn’t include the books we’ll be using for our Thanksgiving and Christmas units…and those lists are plenty extensive themselves!