Homeschool Complete is a company that is committed to providing Christian parents with high quality homeschool curriculum that not only teach but also instill higher level thinking and problem solving skills and create a love of learning. For the last few weeks my family has been working hard learning with 4th Grade Complete curriculum from Homeschool Complete.
The first download is the Teacher's Manual. The Teacher's Manual is a 690 page PDF file that contains everything necessary to teach the first semester of the 4th Grade Complete Homeschool Curriculum. It provides step by step instruction, various activities to engage children of any learning style, all practice worksheets along with answers that the student will work on, reading practice pages, enrichment activities for advanced learners, and an appendix with additional resources.
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| Sample Lesson from 4th Grade Complete Curriculum |
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| Sample Worksheet from 4th Grade Homeschool Complete Curriculum |
The first semester for the 4th Grade curriculum is comprised of 8 different units over the course 72 individual lessons.
- Back to School
- Southeast States
- Baseball
- Penguins
- Tall Tales
- World War 1
- Behavior
- Economics
Each of these units focuses on a particular book for the length of the unit. Each day the student reads a few chapters from the book and then works through activities in various subjects. Many of these activities directly tie in to something mentioned in the book.
How We Used It
For this review, I used the curriculum with both Garrett and Ashleigh at a pace of one lesson day, five days a week. We started with lesson one with the unit study "Back To School". This particular unit had a primary focus on the state of Alaska and had the kids read a book entitled " The Year of Miss Agnes" by Kirkpatrick Hill.
This curriculum also incorporates a daily routine at the start of each day. Each morning the kids and I would stand in front of the American flag on our wall and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They also began to keep a calendar to keep track of the date as well as projects and assignments they were working on. This is a habit they have really enjoyed over the course of the review period and they do it each day, without fail. The curriculum also suggestions plotting the weather daily, but as we live in a desert, the weather is almost always sunny or windy, without much variation, so we skipped that suggestion.
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| Garrett marking his calendar today before putting it back in his binder. |
Our routine using Homeschool Complete was pretty straight forward, allowing the kids to develop a routine and have an idea as to what they would be doing each day. Following our Pledge of Allegiance and marking the calendars, they read the required chapters of the main reading selection and then answer a few reading comprehension questions.
Teaching the curriculum is super easy. The Teacher's Guide explains everything and tells you how to present the material to the student. I would just basically sit on the floor with the kids and teach the lesson, writing the information on our white board as we went along. They would then demonstrate their knowledge of the information we covered in the worksheets provided for the lesson.
The kids are really enjoying the various activities that are included. For example, on one day, we had had a lesson in regards to sign language and braille. This information as introduced into the lesson because the sister of the main character in the book we were reading was deaf and the teacher was teaching her sign language. The kids were provided a hand out that taught how to finger spell the alphabet. The kids enjoyed spelling their vocabulary words and their names using sign language. The lesson also included information about the braille alphabet and so the kids used a pushpin and wrote their name in braille (which mind you, had to be written backwards so they could feel the raised bumps on the other side). That lesson was a number of weeks ago but really stuck out with the kids and they now point out braille anytime they see it out in public.
Another activity they did involved trying to identify items based on their smells. I took various essential oils as well as liquids such as vinegar and rubbing alcohol, saturated cotton swabs and cotton balls with them, and had the kids try to identify what they were just from the smell.They actually did pretty good identifying the various smells and a few of them were rather difficult, like black pepper, basil, spruce tree, and rubbing alcohol. Other smells like orange, lemon, cinnamon, and grapefruit were pretty easy. Both kids were able to correctly guess all the scents I gave them to smell
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| Language arts - Working on Contractions |
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| Art Lesson - learning to draw an airplane |
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| Working through a language arts worksheet
One thing I personally like about this curriculum is the use of reading activities that are grade appropriate using books that the kids actually like. A Year with Miss Agnes was a new to us book and the kids really enjoyed it, so much so that Garrett, who absolutely hates to read aloud, was more than happy to pull his weight and read his half of the assigned reading.
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My only minor complaint is that some of the additional reading suggestions for each unit include out of print books that are a bit harder to locate. My local library is very limited and so many times, I must purchase books out of pocket and paying 30 bucks for a 40 page books is a bit out of budget. However, these books are not required and I was easily able to substitute another title that my library did have in place of them.
Overall, we have been very happy with this curriculum and will continue to use it through it's entirety and will consider purchasing the 2nd semester for the 4th grade when that time come.
To find more information about Homeschool complete, be sure to visit their website. You can also find them on the following social media sites:
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Members of the Crew reviewed Curriculum for K-4th grade, as well as individual unit studies offered by Homeschool Complete. Be sure to click the banner below to read the reviews.
Could you give me an idea of how many extra books have to be purchased. Our library is small and I doubt they would have all the books required but I love everything else I see posted about thus curriculum
ReplyDeleteWe have a very small library here on our base as well and I did find it difficult to find many of the books needed. I had to purchase many of them from Amazon.
ReplyDelete