Fourth Grade Curriculum: Geography, History, Science, and Math

Another year, another custom-made curriculum. This is my fourth for J. I absolutely love it! As I've said before (if you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know this), I would find a boxed curriculum stifling. It works for a lot of people, but it's just not for me. Of course, that means a WHOLE lot more work for me on the front end, but I'm delighted to get to do it. I find it, well, fun!

For those who are interested, I'm going to break this subject down into three separate posts because, believe me, it is a lot of material. It's a good mixture (I think) of the challenging, enjoyable, and stimulating. If knowing my plans for the next school year would cause you to glaze over in boredom, the title will give you advance notification and you can wait for non-curriculum posts which will follow this series.

In this post, I've grouped together the four areas of Geography, History, Science, and Math.

GEOGRAPHY

J has a really great handle on how the world is divided up since we went through it a few years ago. Now I'd like to build on his previous exposure and enjoy doing a continent a month. Beginning in October, the order will be North America, Australia, Antarctica, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Krypton.

Each month we'll head to the library and just absorb everything we can about each continent. There might even be some activities and food tasting. What? Oh, you noticed an 8th continent? Well, we had an extra month and I asked J if he wanted to do something different. He did. He decided that we'd study Krypton and its 14 continents. This should be interesting.

HISTORY

We've been working through history chronologically using Susan Wise Bauer's Story of the World series. I did not use the workbooks or the test books that she also provides. Instead, we read the series and then went to the library to add to our knowledge with a variety of books. After that, J's imagination would run amuck which would solidify the information in his mind. HERE is an example of the results of learning about the Ishtar Gates and HERE shows how he absorbed what he learned about Egypt. This totally works for us!

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SCIENCE

In following the suggested order of presentation from The Well-Trained Mind, the history and science time periods match up. This year we're studying Physics. I decided, since we're only at elementary level, to use this book about Isaac Newton that includes experiments and

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THIS really cool book! The lady who does our end-of-the-year evaluation recommended it. We'll do one experiment a week out of this book.

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MATH

We'll be enjoying learning with a mathematics professor whose name is Fred. I will do a separate post about him in a few days. J and I LOVE Fred.

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Post 2 of 3 will be about Bible, Art, and Music.