THIS POST WILL NO LONGER BE UPDATED AFTER 5/2015. NEW PAGE HERE.
There’s a lot you can do to help yourself out, before next year begins. You don’t have to do all of this; any little bit helps. The biggest time saver for me is the online syllabus through the school, but the following list doesn’t assume you have that.
THINGS THAT MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE:
- Look over the book levels and read aloud times for History. Check out History Read Aloud Times 3GRD-5GRD and see the book levels and how long it would take you to read it aloud. For my fifth grader this year (2013-2014), we did Johnny Tremain, Amos Fortune, Great Horn Spoon, and Long Road to Gettysburg on audio. If they’re not at your library, consider getting them from audible.com. If you have a dyslexic student, or other print diagnosis, learningally.com has everything for this year on audio except Kat Finds A Friend. For more discussion about dealing with a mismatch in reading levels here, see this post.
- Plan for Directed Reading in your schedule. There are several MoDG assumptions that don’t make sense until you read the Writing Manual and Language Arts Overview and Teaching Tips sold by the school. The big one is read-alone, read-aloud, and history. The Berquists had two read aloud groups in the evenings. One parent took the big kids and one took the littles. That’s when the fiction happened, and it wasn’t strictly stratified by grade level. Just bigs and littles. For more details, see either of those resources. Also, “directed” reading (read-alone) was separate from history, unless the reader was a struggler. Then, getting through history was hard enough. In my family, the struggler has history on audio and the directed reading is below grade level so that she doesn’t tire out.
- Bundle your memory work resources; try to do it in one sitting. I print out this book that I use during circle time and has all the memory work.
- Order your blank books. If you don’t need a bunch of other stuff from Emmanuel, Barebooks.com is the best pricing. I get the “kits” that have a plastic cover and line guide. If you followed my recommendations last year, you don’t need to buy any books. If this is your first year with it, see the bottom of THIS post to figure out how many books you need and what sizes.
- BUY an illustrated copy of Paul Revere’s Ride. It will save you both from frustration. The weekly chunks are HUGE!!!!
- Bookmark my youtube playlist for 5th grade. Most of the assigned pieces of music are already linked for you.
- Make sure you already understand WRTR. For the first little bit of the year, you review phonograms and write them in the first 7 pages of the notebook. Then you start going down the Ayers list, 20 words or so at a time. I have a post on this HERE. Also, in the past, the school has offered a one-day online course for parents. It was really helpful.
- Trim GWW. It’s much too big for a child this age to get through in six weeks, usually. I cut out all the European history to make it manageable; it’s not the *Catholic* version of those events anyway, so pass an eye over to see how you want to handle that. Here’s an amazon review from another MODG parent that quickly explains the problems.
- Make your outline maps for Ultimate Timeline and Geography. As a commenter mentioned below, the maps recommended in the syllabus need to be HUGE. They are generally a map of the whole continent, but the map-it items go down to the “country” level, so on a one page continent map of North and Central America, it’s going to be pretty hard to map the everything listed for Canada unless you make that map BIG. (this site has them any size you like for free!) Alternatively, if you have access to outline maps of your own, you can just print out closer views of regions after you map the continent, like we use a map of Canada rather than blowing up the North America map big enough to map Canada.
- Get Draw Squad to at least SUPPORT the McIntyre drawing book. It’s JUST LIKE McIntyre (even names the exercises after him) but the instructions are step-by-step VISUALLY. Also convenient, print out my4GRD-5GRD Art Paper. If your kids already hit the wall on the McIntyre work, here’s a really great group game that practices a limited number of the drawings.
- Copy all your Music Worksheets, Latin Quizzes, Science Tests, and P&P Study Tests. Unless you have a copying printer and intend to do them one at a time.
- Make timeline decisions. Not in the Objectives or Scope, but there are instructions on “how” to do it in the back of the syllabus. Regardless, there’s no “when” in the daily lessons. We do it in big chunks as a review unit throughout the year. Maybe four times a year? HERE. (EDIT 3/2015: My first version is overkill. I made a second version.)
- Typing Thoughts: Not in the Objectives or Plans, but my consultant has us start 4th or 5th grade. We use Dance Mat at BBC, about ten minutes a day four days a week. After those lessons, her children then started typing one assignment a day, like the science.
- Check out my PRINTABLES page and see if there’s anything I didn’t mention here that would be useful.