Thursday, March 04, 2010

A Curriculum Decision

We reached a decision about what we would do for school next year -- we're going to be using the Mother of Divine Grace third grade lesson plans. We used their lesson plans loosely for Pauly for first grade and I really liked and agreed with the methodology of lessons, including memorizing poetry, reading lots of literature for history and using "narrations" or retellings, but Bob wasn't really happy with their focus on American history rather than world history in the elementary years so last year we enrolled with St. Thomas Aquinas Academy. STAA was fine, I do like a lot of their suggestions, but they don't have lesson plans available without enrolling, and enrolling is pretty expensive. I am planning on following MODG's plans pretty closely for next year, simply switching out their religion plans and using the Faith and Life books instead. Best of all, since we still have the plans for first grade, we'll spend very little money on Roger's curriculum next year.

3 comments:

  1. I would LOVE to see the MODG curriculum from first grade whenever I see you next (hinthint) ;)

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  2. I hope we can get together soon (the kids keep talking about it!), and I can bring the lesson plans, but I don't know how good an idea they can give you of how the older grades would be. MODG is really basic at the lower grade levels -- basically reading, math, narrations and poetry memorizations, then literature lists that you would just read on your own, whenever you want. They don't schedule a lot of reading, just encourage you to do it on your own. They don't get more detailed until higher grades, when they get into the whole "history and coordinated literature" plan. Tomorrow I'm going to go visit a homeschooling mom who uses MODG so I can see more of the older levels. They do have brief samples of the syllabi on their website, and book lists.

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  3. Oh, and if you're interested you might request a catalog from Emmanuel Books, http://emmanuelbooks.com/, they carry the MODG lesson plans and books to use with them and have a lot of information about them.

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What do you think? Let me know.