2nd Grade Curriculum - Coralee

How can my baby girl be a 2nd grader already? 

Math - Saxon 3
Saxon is the one part of our curriculum that I've never felt the need to change.  I'm so looking forward to 5/4 next year because I taught it years ago and loved it.  I didn't feel like she was doing as well as I thought she should at the end of last year.  Perfectionist Momma translation.... she didn't make a 100 on every worksheet like she did with Saxon 1.  The benefit of Saxon is that the beginning of the year is all review.  The math facts I was concerned about are coming back around and I'm hoping a summer's worth of maturity and growth will get them in her brain.  I'm also hoping that fractions will click, too. 

Reading
We're starting the year by reading D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.  We'll keep it simple and read the stories and do an art activity to go with them.  This will be all skate.... Lincoln & Lauramae will hopefully join us.  I plan on us making Zeus's family tree and then making cards with pictures of everything else from the book (etc. Midas, Heracles, etc.).  My general goal for her is to read lots of books and attempt book report type projects.  Again, I'm trying to make this fun for her and she loves to make things & be creative.  My only concern is comprehension and that will check the box for me.  I tried pre-made curriculum with questions & vocabulary words but so many of the questions were way above her level of understanding and they took so long that it took the fun out of reading a book. I would love for my kids to actually enjoy reading good books and what we were doing wasn't helping. I also want to make sure to read higher level books aloud to them.  Right now, I'm reading Little Women to Coralee and I'm not sure who's enjoying it more. 

Greek
She loved Songschool Latin last year so we bought Songschool Greek.  After slugging through some of Climbing Parnassus I decided that I would do Greek with her.  We had ordered two books because the cd was damaged (by my sweet baby girl) in one of them. I'm a little overwhelmed by actually trying to read Greek.  Sure I can recognize most of the letters but putting them together is altogether different.  She's already learned the alphabet.... woohoo, she's ready to join a sorority.

Spelling
We'll continue using Spelling Plus. We'll just do fun things to practice the words.  I found a lot of great ideas on Pinterest and they're already in her binder.  I also want to make sure that we use the dictation sentences that go with it this year. I pretty much stunk at using those last year.

Handwriting
New American Cursive Workbook 2 from Memoria Press
I had bought Cursive First last year and really didn't care for it that much.  This is a nice blend of instruction on how to make the letters, practice & room to write her own sentences, stories, etc.  I'm just hoping she's ready to move on like that!

English
This will be the first thing to go.  I bought a Bob Jones 2nd grade English workbook last year and we started on some of it.  I'm trying to trust that CC has it all taken care of in Essentials but the fact of the matter is this doesn't take much time or effort on my part.  That being said, it will be the first thing crossed off the to do list if we get overwhelmed.

Classical Conversations
This is truly my lifesaver.  Instead of having to pour hours into science & history (as well as the other subjects), I'm able to focus on quick glimpses there.  We'll try to add some projects to those two areas and will at least attempt to read some of Story of the World that coincides with our history sentences.  I'm so excited about the new CC timeline cards and new song to go with them.  Veritas was good but this seems to fit so much better with CC.  I'd love to have Coralee be a Memory Master again this year but I'm going to try my best to keep up with things better this year.  We'll plan to keep up with the memory work so it's truly in her brain instead of having to stuff it in later. 

Other goals
Poetry - Memorize 1 poem/month; use as handwriting practice

Memorize Romans 1:18-23 - I think it coincides well with our study of Ancient History in CC.  All of that points me back to Precept's Covenant study.