CtC Take 2!

My second child is now more than half way through Heart of Dakota's Creation to Christ.  I made a few minor changes to how I set everything up for my oldest, as I find my initial set up is never perfect.  But, the first set up is still good!

I did not buy the new Bible study.  I contemplated it for a while, but I think it would be too similar to what my kids are already getting at Awana and church.  I like the depth of Genesis for our family at this point.  So, for the Bible study/Geography binder, nothing really changed.  I did decide which travel log would be best for him and only printed those, but that is the only change I made.

For history, nothing changes as well.  Since the binder is only the HOD notebooking pages and a few page protectors for projects, there is nothing to set up differently.  I am recording myself reading the history books for my son though.  He struggles with reading a little, so I thought this would help him immensely.

Science is the main area I have made changes.  Instead of three sections in the binder for notebooking, five questions, and lab reports, I made pages for the guide covering all of those.  In the main area, the pages are printed in the order that they are completed.  Then in the back, there is an area for animal prints, birds, and plants.  Little books seem to get lots in our house, so keeping these in a binder seems safer. 

Also for science, I purchased the audio for the Apologia book.  Again, since my son struggles with reading, having the book read aloud will likely be helpful.  I am also record the audio for at least the next two books as well. 

For poetry, I have decided to not do large sheets.  We are just going to do 8.5x11 sheets and store them in a standard binder.  Larger sheets just took my oldest a long time to paint (background color mostly).  And this child has amazing fine motor skills, so he will be fine with a smaller canvas.

Here is a picture of his current material on his desk:

Getting Ready for CtC

My oldest started Creation to Christ (from Heart of Dakota) this week.  Our goal is one unit over three weeks, as we are kind of in summer mode.  It is nice to start the guides at the beginning of the summer, work through them slowly while enjoying all of the summer things, and then be ready to go full speed when public schools start here in mid August.  Hopefully we will have 5-7 units done before then!

After finding one huge binder was not ideal with Preparing, I decided to go with smaller binders for CtC.  We will continue the same common place book and composition books for dictation and grammar.  We started the composition books back in Bigger, and they are still less than half full I think!  We do a large portion of Rod and Staff English orally, and we also do most of the workbook pages.  So that cuts down on how much gets put in the composition books.  As for dictation, we are still on Level 3.  We didn't do it as often as we should have I think, as it was something easily skipped.  We are trying to be more intentional about it now, so hopefully we can get through Level 3 by Thanksgiving, if not sooner! Here is everything but DITHOR on her shelf.  You will see math (Horizons 5 with the spiral bound answer key next to it), Dictation (in the teal report cover), Rod and Staff 5, and then a writing program we will try.  The rest is the guide, binders described below, and the books we will be using for the first few units.

Now for the set-up of everything else. I decided to do three 1/2in binders for CtC.  The first binder is for the history notebooking pages.  I also put a few page protectors in the back of the binder for history projects, etc.

The second binder is for science.  There are three sections to this binder: notebooking, lab, and questions.  I decided not to do page protectors this time around.  Hopefully it will work well.  Each section has the needed paper already hole punched and ready to go.

The third binder is for Bible study and geography.  I printed the maps and a few travel logs for geography from the CD that comes with the book.  For Bible study, I ended up printing Genesis 1-11.  You can just use your own Bible for this, but my daughter was not happy about having to mark up her Bible.  She has one she marks up a lot, and with so many markings, she wouldn't be able to read what we were doing for school.  So I was going to have her use one of her other Bibles (she has 3), but she wants to keep that one "clean."  I think there will be other paper things created, but I am unsure what they are at this point!