Beginning with Bigger Hearts

We had a wonderful restful Christmas break but we're ready to get back to our routine. We'll start school again next week. Most subjects will remain the same but I'm adding in Bigger Hearts for His Glory from Heart of Dakota. I have my manual and I just have to wait for the rest of our books to arrive. We're both pretty excited about this new addition!

Our basics will remain the same (math, spelling, grammar, etc.). We cover those subjects in the morning in about 1 1/2 hours. One afternoon a week we have friends come over and cover history and art. Another afternoon we do our science study. That leaves 3 afternoons free for Bigger Hearts. By working just three days a week we'll take the rest of this year and all of next year to complete the manual before starting Preparing Hearts in 4th grade.

One of the fun parts of starting a new program is getting organized! I'm trying to keep things fairly easy this year so I'm simplifying as much as possible. We'll be using the weekly poetry and Scripture for copywork so I'll get a composition notebook for TJ to write them in - sort of a common-place book for the year. Weekly vocabulary words will go in a binder - I made a simple grid with places to write the word, definition, and a sentence. I decided against having TJ write things on index cards and keep in a file box because I think it would be too difficult for her to write well on a small index card. So, it will be a plain old notebook instead! History and science notebooking pages will be kept in separate folders and at the end of the year they'll be coil bound and put in TJ's portfolio. For the timeline, I really like Daisy's idea of making a mini-office style timeline, so we'll  be using that. I think that covers everything!

I'm also planning to include Canadian history content using Donalda Dickie's My First History of Canada. I spread the reading out over each unit (there are 21 chapters in the book, each divided into smaller sections) covering about a chapter a week. Some chapters are longer so we'll take two weeks to read through them. Sometimes the timeline/dates don't exactly match what's happening in Bigger but I didn't want to read three chapters one week and not read anything another week just to match up dates. The edition I have also includes some simple notebooking and project ideas in the appendix so I'm adding a Canadian notebooking idea for each unit and adding some extra dates to our timeline.

It's hard to say at this point how smoothly this will go. I'm hopeful that it will be just enough. I'll be sure to update through the year!