Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

School is starting on Monday for us, and this post is about what we have on our shelves for MK to work through this year. Sometimes, as we found out last year, life events result in the books going off the desk and back onto the shelves. Sometimes the books never even make it off the shelves and onto the desks during the year but that’s OK too. This will be our seventh year hs’ing and I really feel like this is going to be an exciting year! MK will be entering 5th grade, the Logic Age as we Classically Educators call it, and even his older brother has been noting how MK’s argumentative skills are constantly showing themselves. Mark has on his shelves:

MATH

Singapore Math 5A & B

Calculadders

Extra Practice for Primary Mathematics 4 & 5

Mathematics Topical Problem Sums 3 & 4 (these are quite challenging word problems that get us both stretching our brains)

Family Math — I never got to this one when SK went through this age so we’ll see if it even makes it off the shelf this time.

Then there are all those fun math picture books and math games that we will pull out over time too.

Language Arts

Writing

Copywork 2x weekly from whatever Great Book MK picks from

Dictation 2x weekly from whatever Great Book I happen to grab at the time

Narration 2 - 4x weekly from MK’s reading; either Fun Books—he won’t even know that he’s doing school when he tells me about the story he is reading, or Science, or History, or one of his assigned books. He’ll write up one or two of these every week.

Classical Composition–Fable Stage

Grammar

Rod&Staff 5 — we will continue doing the vast majority of this program orally. Great one-on-one time and MK has plenty of other writing he will be doing.

Since I want both MK and SK to improve their proofreading skills I picked up:

Daily Paragraph Editing 4 & 5 (picked this one up from Rainbow Resource)

Editor in Chief A1

Spelling

Spelling Power — this will be MK’s second year with SP. His spelling skills really improved last year, and he loves doing this subject now.

Vocabulary

Worldly Wise 3000 Book 2

Handwriting

Pentime Cursive by Pentime Publishers — this was something I found at the Amish BookStore I visit and MK enjoys working through the books. Rainbow Resource has these books too.

Latin

Matin Latin Book 1 & 2

MK has already worked through these two books but to build his understanding of Latin I’m going to have him work through the books again. He really isn’t ready or eager to move on to Henle Latin so he’ll have this year to gain confidence in Latin by reviewing what he’s done before.

Logic

Mindbenders B Series

MK started into this series last year and it is a favorite pastime of his to work these logic puzzles. A friend shared Perplexors with me and I plan to purchase some of these books for MK to work through too.

Science

As usual I put together my own Life Science program for MK. I can’t even say that we are using some book as a spline since I’m drawing from a 3′ long shelf of Biology books. He’ll be doing lots of hands-on stuff and we’ll take as much time, or as little time as he wants on this. I might post my outline in the resource section of this blog later on.

History

For the last four years we’ve used Story of the World and really enjoyed it. This year we are moving on and I’m turning to a program from Pandia Press,

History Odyssey Ancients, Level 2

History through the Ages, Timeline Figures

Plus 9′ of Ancient History books, and tons of library books will find their way into our home and most will be read.

Music

MK plays the piano and after this long summer break he’ll probable have to start back at the beginning.

PE

Hiking, biking, canoe rides, ice skating, roller skating,…. This just sort of happens around here.

Art

The Renaissance Art Game — it was on our shelf last year and perhaps it will actually make it onto the desk this year