Getting Ready for First Grade!

I think I just about have it all together... and I'm anxious to start! Seems like I hear that a lot for my homeschooling friends who have younger children. The ones with the teenagers, however, would like to stretch summer out just a little bit longer!

Last year, we used Sonlight Kindergarten and really loved it. I would have been happy to use it again, but I thought since we are still new to homeschooling maybe I should see what else is available.

This year I used What Your First Grader Needs to Know and Sonlight's catalog to assemble my pieces. We will be using:

• Leading Little Ones to God - Suggested in Sonlight 1, for Bible/Devotions. I'll also be getting our memory verses out of the lessons.
• Handwriting Without Tears: My Printing Book
• Math-U-See: Alpha - Some of this we covered with Singapore Math last year, but this will be our first time using manipulatives.
• Continuing to use starfall.com, to finish sections 3 & 4. Then I am considering Explode the Code Online.
• Reading lots of the books that are used in Sonlight 1 and that were recommended in What Your First Grader Needs to Know, most of which will be borrowed from the library. (Those are the ones that we own already.)
• Beginning Spanish lessons from homeschoolshare.com with a little pronunciation help from our tutor, my best friend & former Spanish teacher.
  
• Art & Music - hands-on art & listening to/learning some new songs, playing with & making some instruments
• Apologia's Discovering Creation with Astronomy for science. That book arrived in the mail today & David spent about an hour pouring over it, asking questions about the pictures. I can hardly wait to get into that one, too!
• We're trying History Pockets: Ancient Civilizations & will probably add more books to go along with that. After that we'll do some Geography lessons.
  

Sounds like a lot (to me!), but I've made a schedule and broken our day into 2 school blocks. We'll try the new schedule for a while & see how it works and change it up if necessary.

Elizabeth will also be adding to a preschool notebook again this year and she is already looking forward to her school work!