Mars Hall Legacy Academy is Back in Session

Welcome to another exciting year at Mars Hall Legacy Academy!

When the Covid-19 pandemic shut the world down and there was little else to do other than just be at home we made the decision to transition fully more of a “year round” schooling approach. Then as things progressed we shifted again and now even though we do a “year round” model we have moved to where the “reset” or “start” of our year, the time when the kids will move up in grade level or begin a new program is in January rather than in August like a typical academic calendar. So that means our first day of school was January 8th this year!

This year we have an 8th grader, 2 6th graders, a 1st grader and a kindergartner in the house. So here is what we are doing for curriculum this year.

8th and 6th Grade

If you have been around this little corner of the internet for any amount of time you know that for the most part we have been die hard My Father’s World curriculum users. The great thing about that curriculum is that everyone does the same thing for the majority of the subjects which takes a load off of me, the teacher. The only thing that is entirely “grade level” is math and language arts, what I call skills based work.

This means everything works in a cycle and at some point there is a chance that you will cycle back to stuff that has already been covered, just with the option for a bit more advanced level work. This is where we found ourselves this year. As I looked at what we would be doing I realized the next cycle in the MFW curriculum was something I just wasn’t all that interested in going though again. We could have skipped it and gone to the next cycle but that didn’t seem to fit either. So with a lot of thinking and praying over it we made the decision to use Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool.

This curriculum is free and available entirely online. It also has a great option to create student profiles and each day I just log them in, sign into their own profile and they just follow each day’s lessons. I don’t have to do too much prep work and it will help the 3 bigger kids begin to learn some independence and self direction. There are a few things that are worksheets or projects that are printed and done offline but for the most part it’s online work.

Bible Curriculum

While most of what we will be doing is Easy Peasy, we will be doing a different Bible curriculum. This year we will be using Not Consumed Faithipedia Old Testament study. This curriculum looks awesome. it has a flip books style teachers guide and journals that each of the kids will used on their own. They even have a primary level journal that the 1st grader will be using to go through this with us. A friend of mine used the Old Testament last year with her kids and is into the New Testament with them now and have loved it so I’m excited to see how it goes.

6th Grade Math

For the 6th graders I will continue to use the Beast Academy online math program. They love it, it’s easy to navigate, and it seems to be working so why mess with a good thing. The 8th grader will be doing Algebra I with the Easy Peasy curriculum.

1st Grade

This year for 1st grade we are also going a different direction away from My Father’s World. This year we will be using The Good and the Beautiful’s 1st grade program. The joy of this one is that it is also available online and mostly for free. (I still have to print the workbooks but that’s easy enough). It’s a little more simple for what I am going to be needing and the pages are just breathtaking (hence the name of the company).

Kindergarten

This is the one level that we are sticking with the My Father’s World. Its the program that all 4 of the other kids went through and we have enjoyed it. The good thing with this one is that if we need to slow things down and take our time we can. If we want to speed things up and get through it faster we can do that too. So MFW Kindergarten is the way to go for us.

Learning Add Ons

Along with our school subjects this year we will be playing a fun game of “Bookopoly” that I learned about while scrolling social media when I should have been doing something more productive.

The way this will work is that each kid (plus mom and dad) have a “bookopoly” board. Each of the property spaces is labeled with a category or a theme. The “railroad” spaces are “readers choice”, the “utility” spaces are award winner book choices, the “chance” spaces have cards to draw from and they must do what is on the card, the “community chest” spaces allow the reader to mark off a space kinda like a free space in bingo, and the “tax” spaces require the reader to take a librarian’s suggestion. Each color group will be worth a set amount of points and at the end of each 6 weeks, just before our break they will be able to cash in their points for a variety of prizes (Prizes are TBD as I’m still kinda making this up as I go along.) We will try to go to the library at least every other week but if we need to go weekly we will because the more properties they “acquire” the more points they get. As they finish the book for that property they will get a sticker on the space to show they have already completed that and they won’t be able to “double up” if they land on an already finished space they will roll again.

I’m not going to lie! I am super excited about this game. I made our bookopoly board but if anyone else would like to use it feel free to download it, along with the points break down.

Final Thoughts

There we go. A brief look at what we will be doing here at Mars Hall Legacy Academy in 2024. I hope you join us on our schooling journey this year!