A Peek Inside the Elementary Bundle and What We’re Using This Year
The second annual Elementary Bundle is available this week over at Intentional Bundles and I wanted to take a few minutes and share a peek inside some of the products and what and how we will be using them in our homeschool this year.
UPDATE: The Elementary Bundle is now over BUT from time to time the bundles are brought back for a short flash sale, so make sure to be signed up for my newsletter to hear if that happens for this one!
The thing I like about the bundle is that even if we won’t be using a product this year I can download it and use it in years to come, I’ve already done that with some of the past bundles!
We’ve already started using some of the products and I have plans for many of the other ones so I thought I would take some time today to break down what we have and will be doing with them to incorporate them into our homeschool year.
LOOKING TO SEE WHAT OVERLAPS
The first thing that I did was look to see what products overlapped with things I already had planned for the year.
There were a number of different products that jumped out right away like the Autumn Seasonal Bundle which we will be using for our fall nature study, I’m especially excited about the mushrooms unit.
The Vintage Moth Study cards
For grade one we focus on living things for science including animals, the human body and plants so there are a number of great resources we will be using for that including: From Seed to Table, my Bird Literature Guide, the Black Bear Mini Unit, Life Cycle of a Frog, Life Cycle of an Ant, Pond Unit Study and the Moths Study!
Another product we are going to be using this year is Menu Math. I love that there are different pricing options for the different restaurants so there is an option with whole numbers that will work well for my first grader and a couple of menus that include more complicated addition for my fourth grader. Plus, if we want to do something different there is even a blank menu we can add our own prices too! Oh, also there is a legitimate looking receipt for kids to write on, I know mine sure enjoy playing restaurant and they may not even notice they are doing math!
He’s in the 60’s in the TYCTR lessons so we started with those word cards.
Another focus for this year is to get my first grader reading, he is getting so close and I’m so excited that there are Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lesson Compatible Word Cards included and I love that the lesson number the words go with are included! I just wish I would have had these years ago!
A major focus for our homeschool year is teaching my kids to love God and enjoy studying the Bible so I am really excited about going through the Prayer Bible Study with them.
PLAN MINI UNIT STUDIES
One thing I decided to do this year was to plan weekly mini unit studies. I shared a little about it in our homeschool rhythm post and each week I hope to share a list of the different resources we used for our unit study.
We did our first mini unit study this week on owls and one of the resources from the bundle we used was the Nature Themed Word Search and Coloring Pages, there is a word search on owls which we started right away. There are also word searches and coloring pages on a variety of other nature-y things so I know we will be using it many times throughout the year.
Doing the word search from the Nature Themed Word Search and Coloring Pages.
Another topic on my list of mini unit studies is color theory and we will be using some pages in the Colors Art Journal as we go through the unit study.
A fun topic that I know the kids are going to love to study is gemstones, I mean, it just sounds fancy and fun! We’ll be using the beautiful Gemstone Fact Cards to help us with this study.
PLANNING & RECORD KEEPING
There are some great resources included in the bundle for planning and record keeping, including two different homeschool planners, a daily docket, Simplifying Planning Pack and an ebook on How to Plan a Unit Study. Everyone plans in a different way so with a couple of different options available you should be able to find something that works for you.
I created my Homeschool Mini Planner earlier this year and plan on continuing to use it, it made my year end reporting so much easier.
The weekly spread from my Mini Planner.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO USE IT ALL
There are some other products included in the bundle that I don’t have specific ideas for right now (like the Travel Journal because we have no trips planned!) but I hope to use in the future.
In addition, there are a couple of products more geared towards preschool and kindergarten like the Play and Learn Calendars and Colors of the Rainbow Number Tracing printables that my kids are both past but because we are in the process of becoming foster parents I may be able to use these products yet! (That being said, there are definitely parts of the Learn and Play Calendars that I actually may use for my older kids, there are some fun activity ideas in there, plus a recipe for apple pie playdough!)
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to use every product in the bundle to make it a good deal. Really, if you add up the value of the products you plan on using and they total $25 or more it’s a good deal because you’ll save money.
I personally find that bundles like this enrich our homeschool experience. If I had to buy all these products individually I wouldn’t but because they come at such a great deal I now have all these different resources that we can use for our unit studies and throughout our year.
Remember, the bundle is only available until Saturday, August 24th at 9am PST so if you are interested in buying it you need to do so as soon as possible!
