Childhood of Famous Americans Book Series -- Alphabetical List

I love it when you can combine more than one subject at a time, and I think it's essential to the successful homeschooling of more than one kid. 

That's what I love about the Childhood of Famous American series of books. It combines Language Arts with history in an engaging way, not like a boring textbook. 

Below is a list of the entire series of books. I hope to print it out and cross them off as we read them as a family. Some are Easy Readers and fast to get through. Some are full books. 

Enjoy!

Junior Great Books Table of Contents and Overlap in Stories

We discovered Junior Great Books when my daughter Callie took a homeschool co-op course around 5th grade. Now I'm in love with them and try to buy up all of them. Some of them we consume and are not in love with, so we pass them on. Some we save and I hope to teach my own Junior Great Books class at the co-op someday :-) Here you can find the Table of Contents for the books we have read:

Series 2, First Semester (1992) (selling in upcoming homeschool used book sale)

The Happy Lion by Louise Fatio

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter

How the Camel Got His Hump by Rudyard Kipling

Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest, and Piglet Has a Bath by A.A. Milne

Arap Sang and the Cranes (African folktale as told by Humphrey Harman)

Blue Moose by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

Our Reading Box

What Our Box Contains

Bob Books

Explode the Code workbooks

Hooked on Phonics

Reading Pathways

Sing Spell Write

Sounds & Symbols Early Phonics Storybook from Calvert School (when we did virtual school)

Books to read aloud together

Alphabet Books

A Was Once an Apple Pie by Edward Lear

Alphabears: An ABC Book by Kathleen Hague

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin and John Archambault

I Spy: An Alphabet in Art by Lucy Micklethwait

On Market Street by Arnold Lobel

Other Resources:

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (my family did not like this one, but many seem to enjoy it)

Highlights Magazine

Also Check Out:

The New Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease

Read-Aloud Revival by Sarah Mackenzie

Honey for a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt

How to Keep a Book Journal (Readers Journal) and Booklists Galore! #readalouds

ANYBODY can keep a book journal. For example, my mom will be 71 years old this May and I just ordered a book journal for her off of Amazon for $20 and had it sent to her house as a surprise. She retired and was going through books like tissues, and then she would share her thoughts when we saw her. I am keeping a log of what I'm sending her to read from my house and also what I'm getting for her from the library, but some of them really spoke to her, and I wanted her to write down her thoughts for me, her daughter and only child, and also for her five grandchildren.

(Update: The book journal felt like a job to my mom, and I can understand why. It had two pages to fill for each book you read, and I wouldn't want a job like that either. I like my free-form spiral notebook better, and it's cheaper. I passed the book journal of my mom's to my daughter, and it also felt like a job to her. It finally found a home with a teen girl at co-op, but I need to check in with her on her feelings about it! Here's a link to it in case you're interested, and, no, I don't get an affiliate fee for sending you there!)

Current Read-Alouds and Independent Reading Winter 2021

Welcome to the Winter 2021 edition of Current Read-Alouds. If you're not familiar with Read-Aloud Revival or Pam Barnhill (morning basket) or Brave Writer, simply click on the links 😉 I also read to the kids from our Afternoon Basket (because we can't all get going early enough to call it a Morning Basket 😂), which currently includes Story of the World Volume 1, The Gift of the Magi (oh, the vocab words!), and Reading 7 for Young Catholics, among a few other things, like this one:

Scroll down to find out who is hearing which book!

#Time4Learning First Grade Demo Language Arts #Homeschooling

If you like what you see, please use my referral code to sign up and come back here to tell me how much your kids love this program! (originally posted April 24, 2016)

Update: 11/22/19 just signed up my high schoolers again because I am in love with the English program!

Pizza Hut BOOK IT Program 2018-2019

Homeschool Enrollment starts May 1, 2018! Here's the link!

We have been doing this for many years and love it! We used to have a drive-through Pizza Hut right up the street from our old house and the kids looked forward to getting their FREE personal pan pizza every month since they would hit their reading goals.

Now that we have moved to the country, we don't have a lot of restaurants around but we DO have Pizza Hut so yay for that! I think we'll get a head start on the 2018-2019 school year this summer by diving into some great books!

Bath and Books Homeschooling Winter Edition #BraveWriterLifestyle #ReadAloudFamily

Sometimes it is so difficult to grab my kids in the middle of playing and have them sit and listen to me read. I love to read to them! Even the teens! Who doesn't love to be read to? I don't insist that they remain still or anything like that, but they can't be watching a YouTube show or playing Minecraft while I'm reading!

So I realized I had a captive audience in my two youngest, aged 8 and 10, when they were in the bathtub. I started grabbing books to read to them in the tub and they loved it! Here are some books we read this winter, and I think this activity fits in with the Brave Writer lifestyle:

Don't worry; my toilet was very clean ... we have been entertaining a lot so we clean the bathrooms often

Little Penguins by Cynthia Rylant (I love this one because there are 5 penguins, just like I have at my house, and they are having fun in the snow!)

Henry and Mudge and the Snowman Plan by Cynthia Rylant (level 2 ready-to-read book)

Mama, Do You Love Me? by by Barbara Joosse

The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats (we have the postage stamps with artwork from this book!)

The Button Box by Margarette S. Reid (this one inspired me to go buy buttons and a box at the local collectibles shop!)

Also, you have to check out this book: The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids. I just got it and carry it around in my purse, devouring a page or two here and there when I can. It will change your homeschool and honestly make you a more peaceful and confident homeschooler!

Reading Snacktime: Esperanza Rising, Hot Chocolate and Little Debbie Fall Cakes #DoItYourWay

We just got back from being in Florida for two weeks. We had to jump back into not only our normal chaotic life, but also we are packing up our entire house to start moving Friday and Saturday. I really felt like we needed to take even half an hour to slow down and chill with our snacks, hot chocolate and a book. Here's how it went.

Joel (16) has had a cough and welcomed the time to lounge around on the couch listening to a book.

Michael (14) is pretty chill anyway (my least squeaky wheel) and is happy to hang out with us. I read this book to him a few years ago and we liked it.

Callie (12) BEGGED for more when I was done after half an hour and had to get back to packing.

Eva (9) got super antsy. I let her off the hook to go move her body or do Khan Academy math.

Sam (8) listened for a while then got antsy then listened some more.

We read something different every time and I hope to get into a more regular schedule once we move. The cool thing about this (inspired by Brave Writer's Poetry Teatime) is that we can cover science, history, math, anything. Life of Fred is a math book we might read during this time. Story of the World for history. Science might range from a picture book about bees to a textbook about astronomy.

I love that it incorporates ALL my kids so they are all learning. Sometimes the older kids are hearing a picture book. Sometimes the younger kids are hearing complicated terms from a textbook. It all shakes out.

You can have tea or water or anything you like to drink. You can have a snack or not. Healthy or not. Themed to the book or not. (there are great ideas for book club parties when the book is done) Do it your own way!

We are together and learning.

Parenting Challenge: Learning to be Consistent in my #Homeschool

Come on over to my other blog, The Kerrie Show, to see how I'm struggling with being consistent in my homeschool methods and madness!

Figuring Out My Daughter's Homeschooling Style

My other kids come to me to do their schoolwork pretty willingly. My daughter I have to practically chase down and beg and plead with to get her to do anything. I made the mistake once of saying she learns better at night and she has run with that and refuses to do any schoolwork in the mornings. So I gave up because I have other kids to fry. I mean, fish to homeschool?

Yesterday I popped her on CTCMath.com and she did so many lessons I was shocked. She would freak out if she got a 90% instead of 100% and go into a drama-filled soliloquy fit for a girl on a Disney show, but she did the work. She has quite a bit of match catching-up to do so this is terrific! I feel hopeful for the summer and for next year!

Then it hit me. She likes to work independently. My older son and I like to work side-by-side and my next son is somewhere in between but this girl likes to do it herself with VERY minimal help from me.

Since she still struggles with reading a bit but did well with a program we tried a year or so ago called Reading Eggs, I am going to order that program for her today. If my kids can play games and have fun and still learn something, I'm happy.

There are all kinds of helpful things on the Internet about how to figure out your kid's learning style. But just observing them without the busy chaos of daily life is so important and is something I had not taken the time to do, I am ashamed to admit. Then we took a trip to Houston to be with my husband while he worked and I had some time away from our normal life to just observe my kids instead of manage them. I'm finding out some pretty cool things and have since dropped some things off my Life Plate so I can focus on homeschooling as much as I should be.

How's your homeschooling journey going?

5th Grade Benchmarks (Scope and Sequence)

So I've typed up in Excel all the Fifth Grade benchmarks from the book by Rebecca Rupp called "Home Learning Year by Year". Benchmarks are things a typical school kid "needs to know." But you be the judge of that. 

Obviously, some stuff is important and leads to other things. There are other things on this list that you might just say, "Sure, but we can hit that hard later on." And you would be fine. If you are teaching one child right now, it will be no problem to hit all these points. If you are like me and teaching 4 kids while wrangling a younger one, you might choose to put some things off while focusing harder on others. Maybe you choose to focus more on life skills. You are not doing it wrong at all!

Other grades can be found here at the blog under the Blog Category of Benchmarks, as well as by grade.

Here are the benchmarks for Fifth Grade. As I'm putting them into Excel and uploading them to Google Docs.  I'll be adding the others as fast as my fingers can type!

I suggest buying the book so you can also benefit from all the wonderful resources the author provides, as well as a longer description of each benchmark.

Daily Homeschool Checklist Sheet Second/Third Grade

So I finally have my brain back. Well, the best it can come back after 5 kids sucked my brain cells up. That's a sacrifice I was willing to make, though. Moving on ...

My point here is that I WANT SO BADLY TO GET ORGANIZED in my homeschooling yet I am somehow a Type A Free Spirit. Yep, I am both organized/structured and also a rebellious hippie. I love my planner so I can see what we have done, even though my state doesn't require me to even keep records.

And I love when we take Forget Homeschooling days. There is a tad bit of guilt but as the years go on and I see that my kids are indeed learning and, most importantly, learning how to be kind individuals, it gets easier to take a day off to go to the zoo (nature/science!) or to Kaleidoscope (art there plus history at the Hallmark Visitor's Center!). I tell people we half homeschool/half unschool.

It's also difficult to get anything done in the midst of remodeling and not being able to find half the books, but that is another post!

So here's the Google docs link of Callie's checklist so you can see how I have set it up. She pretty much asked for this since she knows we are starting a new school year and she wants to keep all her stuff straight. I put it in a page protector so she can use a dry erase marker to cross things off. Maybe we'll do something like by Friday she has 5 checks by some stuff and only 2 checks by the history and science. Or maybe she'll want to cross it off each day and I'll log stuff in the planner.

Then there comes that day that I want to chuck the planner across the room and just play with my kids and read to them and have fun with them. It's all in the balance and moderation. I can be a Free Spirited Fun Homeschooling Mom and a Let's Get Some Stuff Done For Real Today Homeschooling Mom, too!

Teaching a Kid How to Read

So I have a daughter who is 8 years old and is not reading yet. Her older brothers picked it up easily with the help of Hooked on Phonics, old-school style. You know, you learn the names of the letters, then learn their sounds, then string them together. They were both reading by the age of 7.

My 5-year-old daughter is starting to put alphabet magnets on the fridge in order and if you toss out a word at her she will tell you the letter it starts with.

My 8-year-old does not seem to care, and I know she will learn in time. Of course there is outside pressure from SOME people ... but I don't care. I've seen sparks of her being able to do it, but she just doesn't seem motivated right now. And I wonder, "What's the rush?" ... And I know she will pick it up soon enough. One day it will click. If you in the same boat as me and are considering sending your non-reader to school, please stop and ...

I used to be a little freaked out about it, but it's not like I'm lazing around all day ignoring her. Adults all learn at a different pace, so why are we appalled if all 6-year-olds who have graduated Kindergarten can't read? 

By the way, she went off a diving board and rode a bike much earlier than her older brothers and earlier than most of her friends. So there is some sort of connection there between the body and the brain and what/how we learn.

Here's what we use to work on reading, lots of different methods at different times. (Not all at once, silly ... can you imagine me following her around all day trying like 10 different methods to get her to read? OMG!).

ABCMouse.com. I pay a few bucks a month for my 3 youngest to mess around on here. So far they love it, and I love that I can see their progress. It's nice sometimes to pass the teaching on to someone else, and the kids love learning and buying things with their online tickets.

Alpha Phonics. I was given this to review and she doesn't love the paper version. We're going to work on the CD version.

Clifford Phonics. This is an old CD-ROM where you play word games and get things to decorate your parade float.

Education.com. I spend just a tiny amount every month for this online gem. They have colorful worksheets and projects and crafts that kids of any age can do, which is perfect since I'm homeschooling kids ages 3-12.

Explode the Code workbooks.

Hooked on Phonics. Mentioned this above.

LeapFrog toys on the fridge. We have two sets of letter magnets so we like to try to make words on the fridge.

Sight Words. I print colorful sheets of these from Education.com. You're supposed to laminate them and cut them out, but we just do them sheet by sheet.

Writing. I'll have my daughter copy something I've written, like a thank you note for something someone gave her. That way, it's in her writing and maybe she's figuring out how to put words together a little bit.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few methods we have laying around the house. I'd love to hear your ideas!