Small Steps to Big Ideas Level 1 Teacher Manual

Small Steps to Big Ideas

Small Steps to Big Ideas has been years in the making. It’s not that it
took that long to write it…only months actually…but the final product
is the result of over thirty years in education and literally thousands of interactions with home schoolers who have told us what they need…what they have been looking for. So many folks have said to us, “We really like the Classical model of education but it just seems too inaccessible at times.” Since we wanted to produce a curriculum that did indeed follow Classical Christian methodology but was also useful to parents, we joked that we should call this material “Practically Classical”. Not good marketing maybe, but the play on words accurately describes what Small Steps to Big Ideas is…”Classical” in its methodology and “Practical” in its structure and application.

Small Steps to Big Ideas is written for children who typically would be in Grades 4 to 6 (9 to 11 years of age)…although students a bit younger or older may benefit from this program depending on their skill set and needs. Skills taught and reinforced in Level I of Small Steps (available this year) include the following: reading, comprehension, copy work, dictation, summarisation, finding the main idea, outlining, oral narration, arranging events in chronological order, written narration, introductory logic skills, timeline and mapping skills, English grammar, memorization and recitation, and a host of necessary skills taught in our ground-breaking “Essential Skills Opener” to begin each day. What kind of things are we covering in this section of the curriculum? Just this…dictionary, thesaurus and atlas skills, spelling rules, literary terms, art and music appreciation and much more.

Intriguing isn’t it? There’s more…we have taken these skills and concepts and organized them into a 120 day schedule based on a four day school week. This schedule covers topics typical to English Literature, Grammar, and Composition, History and Geography, Logic, and Bible. You just add Math, Science, and other subject areas you wish to cover. That’s not all…suggested answers are provided for the parent to quickly and efficiently check your child’s understanding and, for those who need it, we are even offering an optional evaluation service to grade your child’s written compositions. There is nothing quite like this program available on the home education market…and the best news for you, the busy parent…is that it is “Practically Classical”.