Our Homeschool Curriculum Choices (2017-18)

Every year in the spring I start researching and choosing our homeschool curriculum for the fall. This is probably my favorite thing about homeschooling (from the mom side of things anyway). I love browsing and comparing and choosing, I even love the ordering and especially the part where it all comes in the mail!

First, a little about our homeschooling style and schedule. In Georgia we are required to school 180 days per year. In the past I’ve tried to use the M-F scheduling method, but with our family’s comings and goings we often do school on weekends and I needed our schedule to be more flexible. So rather than M-F we do blocks of 5 days. If we take off time from school it is always in blocks of 5 days. This keeps our schedule from becoming muddled. On any given week this is a simple version of what our schedule looks like:

Day 11	Day 12	Day 13	Day 14	Day 15
Math English Spelling Reading Science	Math English Spelling Reading Science	Math English Spelling Reading Science	Math English Spelling Reading History	English Spelling Test Reading

So we do Math 4 days, English/Spelling/Reading 5 days, Science 3 days, and History 1 day. Handwriting and Keyboarding are thrown in about 3 days a week. You can read below why and how this all works.

Math

7th Grade: Teaching Textbooks Math 7
4th Grade: Teaching Textbooks Math 4 & XtraMath.com
1st Grade: BJU Math 1 & XtraMath.com

Teaching Textbooks has less than 180 lessons (each grade level is a little different) and after I ran the math we decided to do math 4 days per week.

BJU Math has 160 or 165 lessons per grade so it’s simple to do one lesson everyday and finish a few weeks early, or in Lulu’s case she likes to do 2-3 math lessons some days and skip it others.

XtraMath.com is FREE, though they do have an app that costs money if you’d prefer to do it on-the-go. You can customize the settings for each child, choose Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, and/or Division and check their progress. This helps so much with memorization.

English/Language Arts

7th Grade: BJU Writing & Grammar 7
4th Grade: BJU English 4
1st Grade: Explode The Code (Books 1, 2 & 3)

I really love BJU English courses. They alternate between grammar chapters and writing chapters, so they get exposure to both in one book. The elementary levels have one page (front & back) as the daily lesson. Secondary levels have more pages each day, but are not an overload. Most days my kids do not need instruction or a lecture from the teacher’s edition. Their lessons have a very thorough section at the beginning that covers what is new that day.

Explode The Code is my favorite for learning teaching beginning phonics and how to read. They are so simple in their design and my kids don’t get overloaded or overstimulated by the colors and graphics. The pictures sometimes need to be interpreted by an adult, but by Book 2 my kids are usually able to read the directions and do the pages with minimal help from me.

Spelling

7th & 4th Grades: Building Spellings Skills

Building Spellings Skills are great. They are cheap (>$8 each) and they are thorough. Each unit groups words together by spelling rules or a theme (i.e. homophones). There are 36 units in each grade level (one for each week of our school year). Each unit has 5 lessons, the 5th being a final spelling test so it fits perfectly into our 5 day block schedule.

Note: We don’t start a formal spelling curriculum until 2nd grade because their phonics (Explode The Code) includes spelling in it.

Reading

Teacher Created Resources Daily Reading Warm-Ups: Grade 7 & Grade 4

Daily Warm-Ups for Reading are great workbooks that work on reading comprehension. There is a daily passage to read on various topics then 3 to 5 questions to ensure understanding. Simple and to the point. They take about 15 minutes to complete on average.

Science

7th Grade: Wonder’s of Creation: The Ocean Book & The Ecology Book & God’s Design for Chemistry & Ecology
4th & 1st Grades: God’s Design for Chemistry & Ecology

This year I let my 7th grader choose two Wonder’s of Creation books so he could do some independent science study. He chose these two and it worked out that there was a parent workbook that includes lesson plans and worksheets for these {NOTE: This parent lesson planner is out of print, but they have it available as a download and others available for the different books in this series at Master Books}. They are meant to be done one per semester. He also sits in on our group science.

God’s Design for Science is a 4 year set that is meant to be repeated. Our edition (3rd Edition) has sections in the first two sets (blue & green) for 1st and 2nd graders so the whole set can be repeated again 1st – 8th grade, doing the harder sections as kids get older. They removed the section for younger kids on new edition and they are meant for grades 3-8. I’m glad our younger kids can participate in these with us as a group. So far we’ve worked through all 4 sets and will start the rotation again in the fall.

History

7th Grade: History Revealed: Romans, Reformers, Revolutionaries & Drive Thru History Adventures
4th Grade: You Report! with Big Book of History & Noah’s Ark
4th & 1st Grades: Where On Earth Is Carmen San Diego?, Liberty’s Kids & Drive Thru History Adventures Videos

History Revealed is such a good curriculum, but I bought it (the whole set) hoping it would be more fun. It is very reading, reporting, and project heavy, which doesn’t suit my kids very well. I’m going to keep it though and possibly use it for high school level. When this wasn’t working I was so excited to find Drive Thru History Adventures. I reviewed the American History course and we will be using the rest over the next few years.

For 4th grade I found You Report! and we’ve enjoyed it. It has a good mix of projects and reading to cover a lot of information. {Edit to add: He does do one lesson 3 days per week on his own. I had said above we only do history on day 4 but that is our group history videos.}

As a group we’ve been watching the various history videos mentioned above together to get the younger kids some exposure to history.

Handwriting

4th Grade: Handwriting Without Tears Cursive Success
1st Grade: Handwriting Without Tears My Printing Book

Since discovering Handwriting Without Tears years ago this has been our go-to for teaching proper letting formation for printing and cursive. I love how they teach to build each letter with basic shapes. The lessons are simple and not overwhelming.

Keyboarding

Mavis Beacon Keyboarding Kidz & UltraKey Online

We started out the year using Mavis Beacon Keyboarding, but found it very juvenile and my older boys didn’t care for it. There just isn’t much structure to it so they didn’t learn much from it. Over winter break we were given a chance to try UltraKey Online and review it. The lessons are more straight forward and less childish. We’ve enjoyed it much more and plan to use it again next year.

Overall I’ve been happy with what we are using this year, with only a couple of changes mid-year. I am already browsing and shopping for our 2018-2019 year!