How to Get Started Using The Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool 0:00 Hi. My name is Lee Giles the creator of The Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool. I m gonna try and talk you through using the curriculum. How to get started. Let me point out a few things. This is what it looks like when you first come to the site. At the top of the page there is an About-Donate Page, the How to Use Page, and the Frequently Asked Questions/Contact Page. You can use these to learn more On the FAQ Page you can get some suggestions of what to do if a link isn t working, um, what might be the problem. And just the questions that people frequently ask, and you might have those questions too. So that s a good place to check before you write and ask your questions. But you can write and ask your questions. And you can email me, but the best place to go if you have a question is to join our user support group on Facebook. There are moms there who help me out by answering questions. You can join and once you get used to the curriculum you can answer questions too. So that s the place to go. There are also something like 70 Easy Peasy Facebook groups. So there s different groups for different states, for people using different grade levels..if you want to commune with homeschoolers that s the place you can go to join and get specific help for your area or for whatever you re doing. If you would like to be able to get updates from me, notices about new courses or changes You can follow the blog this is on or you can follow me on Facebook. Okay, It is a completely free curriculum, uses free resources, it s not supported by ads, it s supported only by donations and you re never obligated to donate. I just tell people to give if it makes your heart happy. 1:48 So it is super simple to use. Alright, to get started all you really need to do is just choose your child s grade level, go there and just follow directions on day one. That s all you have to do to get started. But let me walk you through that. So on the side of the page here we start with levels. I just call them levels instead of grade levels in the hopes that you will just choose an appropriate level instead of worrying about what would be considered, what you think is the correct public school grade. Getting Ready 1 here is called.is the equivalent of preschool and Getting Ready 2 is the equivalent of Kindergarten. I just call them that because I am really not interested in doing full school at this age I want them to play, just be curious. I m mostly interested in preparing them as great readers so that they can work independently when they get to the First level. So Getting Ready 1 here is learning the alphabet and learning the sounds the letters make as well as things like shapes and colors and counting to 10. McGuffey Primer is where they first start learning to read and they do sight reading at that point. Sight reading gets them reading quickly and fluently. Getting Ready 2 they continue with sight reading and they move into phonics and there is a full phonics course in there. And by the time they re done they re ready for First where they will be starting to read
novels. So if you have a what you would consider a first grader that is not able to read the books on there, consider going back to this point right here, the McGuffey Primer, moving as quickly as your child can through those reading lessons to get them to be an independent reader. There is no point in them being not successful at being able to do their assignments. You want them to be successful. So take the time to get them reading well. I ve gotten a lot of great feedback from parents with struggling readers who use this and now are confident readers.which makes me very happy. 3:49 So when you re choosing a level, I would suggest using your child s reading ability to decide. To do that you can go down here under the levels under the heading Individual Courses and under that is the list of everything that s on the site. Now if you are going to use the whole curriculum all you have to do is pick a level and your child will get every course. They ll get English; they ll get math, history, science, et cetera. All you need to do is just go to your level and just follow directions. That s all you need to do. But if you only want to use math or only want to use science et cetera, you can find that course on the list. The other thing this is useful for is to read course descriptions. Like when I click on Math 3 at the top of the page it ll give me a description of what they ll be studying. So if you re trying to place your child that might help. So when you re choosing a level about reading ability, looking at a child s reading ability, click on the English course and at the top of the page it ll give you a description of what they ll be doing, but it ll also give you a reading list. So you can look at those books to see if that s something you think your child will be able to do. Every year starts with poetry, but poetry is harder for a lot of people so I wouldn t use poetry to decide if they can handle that level or not. I would go scroll down look for the books, you can find links to the books in the curriculum. And see, have your child read a page, read a chapter. If they stumble over a couple words that s fine, that s not a problem. You want them to grow. It shouldn t be too easy. But if they re stumbling over lots of words and have no idea what the story was about at the end of it then you should consider using a lower level. 5:26 Now remember that this first level is reading novels so this is ahead of the public school grade in that respect. So please don t, you know, be concerned if your child s not ready, if your child wasn t prepared to be reading novels at that age. Getting Ready 1 in this curriculum starts with four year olds, that s the recommendation. But this is not a school, this is a homeschool resource and you need to make it work for your family. You can, you know, if you have a great math student but a slower reader you can mix and match these different courses. You can use English 2 and Math 3 or however you want to do it. You can mix and match okay, you need to make it work for your family. I can t do that for you, okay.i can only do so much. (laughing.said jokingly) 6:15 Okay, so let s pick a level here, let s go to Second. At the top of the page you ll see a Daily Progress Chart you can print out. When you finish day one you can check off day one so you can keep check of where you are. At the top of each page you ll see Materials list; this one only needs the basic supplies list. If you ll click on that it ll give that list to you. Sometimes you ll see extra materials listed there. This is a
free curriculum so I am not going to ask you to buy any fancy materials. If you want fancy stuff you re going to have to add that yourself because I try and keep it cheap and simple. Alright, let me scroll down here, so you ll have to scroll down to get to today. So when you re on day 6 you ll have to scroll down to get to day 6. Let me show you something here..there s an asterisk * next to the 6 so that means there is something to print on that day. I did that so you can quickly scroll down through and find what needed to be printed. I like to print out up to like a week ahead of time so it s all ready in my child s notebook for them. They can find what they need. Some parents can have their kids print stuff out for themselves each day and that s great. Some people like to print out a year at a time, which I don t necessarily recommend because sometimes the links change in the curriculum and I m always updating things. If you print out ahead of time it s not the most up to date curriculum. People put these lessons on like PDFs and like to work from there. Again, those don t get updated so.please don t Um, You know, you can use that for your family if that s what works best for you but don t pass those around because they re not getting updated like the curriculum is. 7:51 So there s an asterisk here, something needed to be printed. So you can look down quickly.it s Math* that has something to print, and here it is. It s this assignment that needs to be printed out so you can click on that. So every level has English and Math. English is broken into different subjects. There s reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling, and grammar. Now you can see this just has reading and vocabulary. While most days have reading, the other things are not done every single day. Some days it s spelling, some days it s grammar, some days it s writing. On some levels there s more writing, some levels there s more spelling, some levels there s more grammar. There s no weekly spelling list. There s no weekly vocabulary lists. It s a loose approach. I just pull things from their reading or of different places. So far my children have been very successful in like standardized tests and other people have reported the same thing. So personally I think it s enough. It s enough for my family. We try and keep things short, so we re not.we don t add a lot more than we think we need. 8:57 So once you get to the bottom, you follow the directions, click on the links, then it says down here.click on what year you are studying: I probably should ve called these themes. The Year 1 theme for history and science is Ancient History and Biology. The theme for Year 2 is Early American History and Zoology. The theme for Year 3 is Geography/Cultures and Earth Science. The Year 4 theme is Modern History and Chemistry/Physics. So, I do recommend doing them in order but you don t have to start with year one. You can pick whichever one you want.they sort of go in an order from Ancient to Modern here. But you could really choose whatever you want. Now I did it this way because all your kids can study the same thing at the same time. So these lessons here are for all the elementary students, all the first through fourth level all have the same assignment for history and science. And then all your middle school students, your 5 th, 6 th, 7 th, and 8 th, level students will have the same assignment for history and science. Okay, and I did that so the families can stay together in what they are studying. You
can have, maybe want to use read alouds or field trips or just sitting around the dinner table every day, asking what they read about that day and what they learned. You can all be doing the same thing. 10:24 So let s go to Year 1 here. I had opened this up earlier so it s not at the right day, but when you click on that link it will jump you directly to the day. Alright, so they have Bible every single day as well. They have history and science every single day. They have music once a week, they have art once a week, PE Health once a week, computer lessons once a week, and what I call Thinking School once a week. So here in history they re reading about the Sphinx and in science they re learning about muscles. Alright now let s go to a middle school level. This is 6 th level and I m going to go ahead and open this up in a new tab here. Alright, now while that s loading I want to show you some different things. Starting in the 5 th level, math is not given to them in their daily lessons. It just has a link to math to remind them to do it. So they click on math, it s going to take them to the middle school math page. And it just is in steps here, step one, step two, step three and then they move to algebra. And this is so that students can move at their own pace. I have a son that moved very quickly and a daughter that moves very slowly through math, so at this point I separate them and let students move at their own pace. So when they go to these pages it s divided up for them. Step one is just an ordered list that they ll move through. And these.it has all the days there, but they ll be able to move more freely whatever level they re at. And then when they re done with that they move to Algebra 1, which is held on their high school site. Alright the other thing starting in 6 th level is foreign language. Beginning at 6 th level of foreign language is for everybody. It s just a learning about learning languages, it uses some Latin. Later on in the year once we get passed that, there s a link to Foreign Language. There s a Spanish Right in their level is a Spanish course. But if you decided to not have your children learn Spanish something else they can click on the Foreign Language link and it ll take them to a page with some other options. Like my daughter was using Mango for Arabic. Too, that s all I can do. I can t have a course for every single language people might want, but Spanish is put right into the course but you can instead use the Foreign Language link and choose to learn something else. 13:05 Alright, so let s go to the history and science, this page is open, here it is, it jumped right to Day 6 there. So this is the 6 th level, day 6 now. This is the same for 5 th, 6 th, 7 th, and 8 th, will all be taken, when we click on that link to Year 1 for Ancient History and Biology. They ll all be taken to the same page. So your middle school students will all be learning/having the same assignments for history and science and your elementary school students will have the same assignments for history and science. So they have Bible every day. Here s the answer right here. You highlight it to reveal the answer. If there s a link here, sometimes it s the word answer with a link is there anywhere on here(searching the page to see if there is one as an example).. If you see that you click on the link and it ll take you to an answer page that requires a password. The password is parentsonly, all one word, all lower case. And if you don t what your children to be able to see the answers you ll need to check the answers on a different browser because your browser will remember the password. I did that basically for reading
comprehension. I wanted to be able to check to make sure my children understood before they had the chance to read the answers. So can you see here for history, this is for the middle school now, they re also reading about the Rosetta Stone, let s see the Sphinx, the younger kids learn about the Sphinx when they read about the Sphinx. And here s muscles just like the younger children. So your family, they have different assignments most of the time, but they re learning about the same things. So I hope that gives you a good understanding of how to get going. Again this Facebook Group, our user support group, is the place to ask questions. And I hope the curriculum is a great blessing to your family. Thank you!