Competency Bags

     Like most homeschooling moms, spring is the season where I begin to think about what we want for our kids for the next school year. I'm a non-traditionalist when it comes to curriculum selection, and I really hate buying complete packages of curriculum only to find that at the end of the year we really haven't used many of the components. Seems like a waste of money and still leaves me wondering how we could have done it better. I tend to try new things each year because even after 7 years of homeschooling among several different personalities, I have yet to find too many things that work for everyone for every grade level. So in the midst of planning a graduation for our son Brandon this year, I am busy hunting and planning out what next year will look like for the rest of our crew.

     There will always be textbooks and workbooks and writing and reading, but what I look for most in this curriculum search are those things that stand out as fun, educational, and something my kids might actually enjoy. We spend a HUGE amount of our homeschooling time outside of the home doing book-fairs and other events, so school needs to be portable but still educational. I hate doing busy work, and I imagine that my kids would hate it too, so we really don't do that. When they are working on a school assignment, I want them fully connected to the material they are working on and I want them to learn through every process. Completing another worksheet as a "review" isn't a good use of their time unless of course, they really need the extra practice.

     So with that said, I have found TONS of amazing resources called "Busy Bags". The concept of these is fabulous. You simply fill different bags with different materials and each one is a self-contained exploration for little ones. My toddler will be completely set when I get all of his finished. The problem with these is that everything I am finding is focused on toddlers and preschoolers, and pretty much end with Kindergarten. So it got me thinking. What if I could create these bags based on more than these basic Pre-K concepts and create bags based on COMPETENCY? There's a bunch of talk these days of the Common Core Standards, and that's generally where I begin my curriculum search, so this idea is to create multi-level grade projects that each center around a competency. So for my upcoming second grader, I began with the core standards for second grade. I browsed through looking for specific competencies- those things that at minimum she should have mastered by the end of next year. My list had about 40 different ideas on it, but this will give you some ideas of some of those items:

greater than/Less than
two digit addition/subtraction
contractions
compound words
identifying nouns, verbs and adjectives
counting coins
telling time to the minute
inventions
and so many more!

So I set out to find fun ways to teach each, and found some fun ideas.

So my next few blogs will be dedicated to some tutorials around creating wonderful COMPETENCY BAGS and some ideas for planning these out for all grade levels. These bags are terrific for homeschoolers, and could work great as centers in classrooms as well. Enjoy!