Need Help Gathering Materials for Grade 1

When I first was looking at this site I remember wondering why all the subjects had to be separate.  Can’t they just tell you exactly what you need for every subject in a particular grade?  Now I am very happy it is set up this way because it truly is a curriculum ‘guide’, not a curriculum.  It shows you all the subjects you could teach and gives great suggestions for books to use in a variety of grades.  Since most of the subjects  can be done with a range of ages, it doens’t make much sense to assign particular books to each grade level.  You get to pick and choose what you and your kids will like.

I would look into getting the ‘Planning your Charlotte Mason Education’ book.  It will help you go through your goals for homeschooling, what subjects you want to teach over all and for this particular year.  Then you start plugging in what books you want for each subject and that is where the curriculum guide and bookfinder come in handy. Originally I printed off every page of the guide and made notes on them.  That works fine too. 

I agree with those suggesting Planning Your CM Education. I believe I downloaded it and printed it off to put in a binder. I just took it with me and worked on it while I was waiting for my dad to get out of surgery (a year or so ago).

I have used the curriculum guide, and I love that you can just look through the lists of books and pick from various levels of abililty. (They are listed as grade levels in the guide.) The books listed are linked to the bookfinder, which is helpful in deciding which books to use. The listings show you how many chapters, suggested grade levels, and how many pages in the book.

Also, don’t get confused when looking at the Science listings. There is one column that suggests textbooks and one that lists living books. You can just use one or the other (or selections from both), but you don’t have to use both together. Of course, science for first grade is often mostly nature study….unless you seem to have a budding scientist on your hands!