Elementary Plans 2019-2020 (5th Grade)

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Miss J is in her final year of elementary school – 5th grade. I can’t believe how quickly this has gotten here! She is such an exciting student – her imagination and interests are fun. She is also a very distractable student so we do struggle with staying on task. She benefits greatly from taking a brain break every 30-45 minutes and getting some wiggles out. She has really benefitted from the mini-trampoline (or exercise rebounder as it is called by the company) in the living room so that she can take those quick breaks. She also takes breaks that involve riding her bike around the neighborhood or practicing her dance or creating with legos. These help her stay strong and get refocused.

Her plans are exciting to me because many of them are just exactly what she wants and is interested in.

Math – CTCMath is what she will be using for 5th grade. The short video based lessons are a good fit, giving her challenge and practice without busy work that other curriculums have. You can read our review of CTCMath that we recently posted.

Language Arts/Literature – Miss J will be using Hewitt Homeschooling for her literature course. We reviewed it a couple of months ago and I really like the way it works for her. It keeps her focused on what she needs to think about and asks her to delve a bit deeper into what might be motives and reasons characters act/think/respond as they do. She is currently working on the book The One and Only Ivan. She will also continue to use the 5th grade level of the Reading Eggs workbook that we are reviewing. The short lessons (5 – 10 minutes) focus on comprehension, spelling, and grammar. She also has access to the online Reading Eggs program for some games and activities.

Science – Bird studies are on the program for this year. I just bought some field guides and handbooks that will be fun. We have a bingo program and we have a scheduled time for weekly birdwatching, which will involve her keeping a field journal. She wants to learn to identify more birds and something more about their anatomy. We have a couple of documentaries that we will be using, as well as some picture books. There are also some interesting bits on birds on SchoolhouseTeachers.com that we will access. (SchoolhouseTeachers has a good sale going on for a couple more days. Don’t miss it!)

History – She will continue with the USA Pack to learn two states a week. She also wants to do a timeline so we will be pulling the timeline out of the Home School In The Woods study on the Middle Ages that Miss E has been working on and add it in for Miss J. These two things will create an interesting combination of history but it is of interest to her so she will learn quite a bit. Again, there are some videos on SchoolhouseTeachers.com that we plan to use to go along with, in addition to a neat resource I did a review of (but didn’t publish on my blog) called History Bombs.

Art – Visual art is going to be done using a combination of Creating A Masterpiece drawing lessons and ARTistic Pursuits for upper elementary. I am actually going to be doing a lot of her teaching with these, but giving her the opportunity to create works of art.

Music – She has a current desire to learn the guitar. At Home Dad will be doing some teaching with her three times a week and expecting daily practice. We’ll see how long this interest lasts. . .

Dance – She will be taking four dance classes a week, so about 3 hours of dance. This will be a great PE time for her as she really enjoys it.

That is it for Miss J’s plans for her final year of elementary school.

Blessings,
Lori, At Home.

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