When my dd was in younger, she had difficulties with recognizing the teens. We played the following game for practice, and she absolutely loved it. I printed out this sheet of flies (they go with a Sunday school lesson about the ten plagues of Egypt). I wrote the numbers she was having difficulty with on each fly, then cut them out and spread them on the floor. Then I gave her a flyswatter and had her swat the fly whose number I called out. She had a ball with it, and eventually got straightened out with recognizing those numbers that were tricky for her.

I periodically read to the kids during breakfast or lunch. Reading aloud would probably happen more often if I was more consistent with that.

I asked Kate Snow this question during her subtraction webinar the other day. She said that ideally, the child will be able to come up with the math fact in 3 seconds or less. She also said that was Ideal, and that some children are slower, but what you want is a kid that answers without really thinking about it. Xtramath.org allows kids to practice, and tests for the 3 second mastery.

It might not be exactly what you are looking for since it is not a standard textbook, but BFSU is secular, and definitely not scatter-shot (although it kind of feels that way when you first start.) It presents topics in such a way that they build on each other, but you have a lot of wiggle room as to the order in which you present them. Right now we are doing more physical science sorts of things (ie. air pressure), and saving biology for the spring, when plants and animals are easier to observe.

Anyone who lives in New York State can get a card to the New York City Public library system. See here: https://www.nypl.org/help/library-card. This is where you can find what ebooks they have available: https://nypl.overdrive.com/

Joy of Handwriting works for us. It's a $10 pdf, so I can use it for multiple kids. We have not yet used Drawing for Better Penmanship for Cursive, which is more of a supplement since it does not provide instruction on how to form the letters. It's just some extra practice. Dd loved it for printing after becoming really bored with Seton.

SOTW 1 has a lot of great activities and is a lot of fun. Plus, there are oodles of books at the library on Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome that are fun to look through, too. Like Tanikit, we use BFSU, too, for the reasons she gave. We also used Explode the Code online, which was nice because it works at your child's level, and was about $35/year from Homeschool Buyers Co-op. We dropped that this year, since we are using AAS. I am growing into the opinion that you do not need to worry about grammar in 1st grade. FLL was a flop for us (it moved way too slowly) and Shurley English 1 was overall kind of a meh.

I use my lesson planner. There's the excel grid I print, and then daily plans are written in pencil. If it gets done, it gets a check mark next to it. If it doesn't get done, no check mark. Sometimes, we do something differently, so I erase what was there, write in what we did, and put a check mark next to it. There's enough space to put extra notes, like a play date, field trip, or whatever. I periodically take photos of projects that don't fit nicely into a 3 ring binder. For me, it really isn't any extra work at all.

You are getting a million great ideas, and I am probably a less experienced hs mom than you, so I won't add my two cents with additional suggestions. But, the following blog post might be an encouragement when contemplating going off-curriculum. It sounds like you have very similar plans to what she describes, but it's always nice to have some affirmation. http://blog.aussiepumpkinpatch.com/2013/08/lets-talk-math.html

An Evangelical friend gave us a copy of The Jesus Storybook Bible. We love it! The illustrations are colorful and engaging, and ALL the stories bring it back to Jesus and God's salvation plan. Even though it's written in a storybook style, they do reference the particular scripture passages (by book and chapter) so you can go back to them. We read that every night to our daughter from the time she was 2 to 4; she knew those stories backwards and forwards.

We talked about St. Patrick with the Celts of Britain chapter in September. For us, it underscores the fact that St. Patrick was a real person and gives some context about the times he lived in. He is a patron saint within our family, so we always have some sort of special recognition on his feast day. I became really impressed with Patrick after listening to How the Irish Saved Civilization on audiobook.

As the teacher, WriteShop tells you what you need to do when, which I liked. My kid was not enamored of it, but YMMV. She did not want to be told she what has to write about, and did not like the guided writing exercises. She has been resistant to any kind of writing guidance at all, aside from editing sorts of thing.

We loved Understood Betsy.

2. Could you incorporate more games into your curriculum? Like perhaps look up some games on Pintrest or you tube and see if anything would tie in well with what you are planning to teach him that day. That's where my shortcomings are - I am just not a very creative person that way. In my experience, the games do not have to be complicated. To adult point of view, they can be down right tedious, BUT highly entertaining for a 6yo. There have been times as we were playing a simple roll the die, go around a really simple board sort of game where I thought to myself "I cannot believe this game is that much fun," but here is my child clearly enjoying herself. Themeasuredmom.com and thisreadingmama.com have a lot of freebie games in reading and math if you sign up for their newsletters.

We use Math-U-See, which is not exactly inexpensive, but does the job. We use MEP as a supplement and I agree with HomeAgain's comments about it. I like it because it is such a different approach from how I was taught and from our regular curriculum. It is also very affordable. We also do Life of Fred Apples (which I believe is the easiest/earliest volume), but I would definitely save it for a kid who has some grasp on addition. My dd did not enjoy it in 1st grade last year, but loves it this year. I have used Math Mammoth just a little, as a backup for additional help with regrouping addition. It's nice they offer books that target specific skills, as well as a regular curriculum, and it's affordable. I am loathe to change curriculum if something is working well enough. If in the future Math-U-See stops working, or if I could time travel and counsel myself two years ago, I would tell myself to seriously look at MEP or Math Mammoth.

I just got an email from Bravewriter where they make you guess what the 30% off code is. I am not really into the whole writing-as-a-lifestyle thing - I detest puzzles and riddles, and will definitely not be visiting their Monday sale. For those of you that have been thinking about Bravewriter and love puzzles, this might be worth your time.

I have plenty of time to do some research before we get to that. Thank you so much for taking the time to look at old plans.

You are right to want to keep up over break. We did not do much spelling or math practice over summer, and it took over a month to get dd up to speed. Everybody talks up Yahtzee for math practice but we are fond of Triominoes. It's great for first graders to practice addition with the tiles. My second grader keeps score now and it is perfect practice for what she needs right now. We also use MEP as a supplement to MUS because it is such a different approach (and free!) We are in the middle of the Year 1 book. We also play Appletters and Hangman.

Vol. 1 of SOTW seems too easy for a 5th grader, so The Catholic Textbook Project looks like a really interesting option. The samples are definitely well-written and engaging. Would you mind sharing what parts of SOTW you discuss, skip and/or heavily supplement? I'm a recent convert and am afraid I'm going to miss something.

Huh. I never ran across this curriculum, not that that it means much. :-) It appears to wrap up a bunch of LA aspects in ways that have intrigued me - but all in one place. Language Arts curriculum is the bane of my existence. This kind of looks like it might work and I might not have to think about it for awhile. Thanks for mentioning it!

This is something I am still working on. We do MUS Beta, but because my dd usually does a worksheet in very little time, I started using MEP as a supplement, but we are currently using about the middle of year 1. On Fridays, I plan for a more relaxed day. We skip the MUS and MEP and instead read a chapter from Life of Fred Apples, and a living math book from the library. We also do some kind of game that includes addition or subtraction. Yahtzee is a favorite with dd.

My DD, like yours, is definitely not into the discussion part. She is almost 7 and this is our second year going through Vol. 1. However, I think this curriculum is excellent in the way it presents topics and how they build on one another. I would use it even if she totally hated it. That being said, there have been some great ideas already posted on how to tweak it. There was a another thread awhile ago where someone mentioned writing an outline of the lesson first and presenting from that instead of doing it directly from the book. I have tried this with better results. I am also in the middle of trying to present lessons through the books listed in the back of each chapter. Apparently, we have a great library system because I can usually get at least 75% of the books. There are usually a lot of overlapping topics, so one certainly does not need to use ALL of the books suggested.

I have never found a planner I like, so I make my own. After having used it for a year, I am still tweaking it. I only print off what I need for a month, because, I will probably want to change it. We have a laser printer. It gets frequent usage and the toner lasts well over a year for us.

I attempted doing a writer's workshop a la Lucy Calkins et al, and just felt lost. I had no clue what to teach or what topic I should be focusing on - I hate flying by the seat of my pants. So I ordered WriteShop C. So far, it seems to be working, but we haven't finished the first Lesson yet. Some of the subdivisions of the lesson seem a bit long for DD, so it is taking us a little longer to complete. Somebody posted something about MEP and I am giving that a go as a supplement to MUS.

This is what we do. On Fridays, we go to the library about every other week, which I count as "school." Math and spelling/language arts are done in the form of games, and not the usual lessons. Everything is just more relaxed, so it's a day every week that we look forward to. You could do a one day unit study on a book you're reading aloud. Or find a day to celebrate. For example, this past Tuesday, we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day. She was the first computer programmer, so everything we did was math, logic, or computer related. And I pretty much managed to squeeze in all the subjects we usually cover, only from a math perspective. It was a fun break from the same old, same old.