Our New Curriculum Picks for 8th Grade

We are back to homeschool yet again and for the first time ever, I’m just going to have one sweet student at my table. How can that be!? Last spring, we graduated our third child of four from our homeschool. So now, we have just one–little Vera who isn’t so little anymore. She’ll be in 8th grade. This has been the most incredible ride and I have loved it so much.

In this post, I’m laying out exactly what she and I will be doing for homeschool this year, curriculum-wise, what our days will look like, and lots of other resources that might help you plan your year too.

OUR HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM PICKS FOR 2026-2027: GRADE 8

I have written many of these curriculum picks posts! If you want to check out all the curriculum we’ve used over the years, you can check out these links:

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OUR HOMESCHOOL PLANS FOR 2026-2027

Morning Meeting Plans and Resources

We love to start our mornings with a family meeting. This happens with everyone around the table (or just two of us!), and around 9am. Here’s what we’ll cover in our Morning Meetings this year, we won’t do all of these things each day, but here are the resources we’ll use:

  • Bible: we start every morning this way. A chapter from the current book we’re reading from and usually a few Psalms as well. We also read one Proverb each day to coincide with the day of the month. Sometimes we will journal for a few minutes after our readings.
  • Catechism: I am trying something totally new this year. I found a Catechism + Apologetics combo from For the Mom Ministry and we are going to try it out this semester and see how it goes!
  • World Watch News  for current events (we love this!!)
  • Daily Calendar: I like to go over what our week looks like on Mondays, so we look over the calendar together.
  • Shakespeare reading
  • Logic puzzles
  • Read Aloud

AFTER THE MORNING MEETING, OUR WEEKS WILL LOOK LIKE THIS:

  • Daily:
    • Math lessons
    • Language arts
    • Electives
  • Homeschool band 1x/week
  • Piano 1 lesson/week + daily practice
  • Ballet Class 1x/week
  • BSF Class 1x/week
  • History 4x/week
  • Science 2x/week
  • Art 1x/week

OUR HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM PICKS BY SUBJECT:

MATH + LOGIC

We love doing logic each day in our homeschool. Sometimes we do this in the morning during our Morning Meeting. Other times, we do this instead of a math lesson or in addition to. We use a combination of workbooks and games.

We use Saxon Math for grades 1st-8th and then sometimes into the high school years. Nicole the Math Lady is an amazing supplement to help teach the math lessons. We love that!

We also use My Math Assistant to help make grading math easier!

If you’re interested in trying out Nicole the Math Lady for free, you can try her 7-day free trial! I hope you love her as much as we do!

My 8th grader will use:

Electives:

Worldview + Logic

We will be working through a few things this year. Here are the books I plan for us to read and discuss. We may not get through all of these, but we’ll keep plugging away at the list and roll over whatever we don’t finish into summer.

New CURRICULUM PICKS FOR LANGUAGE ARTS:

The language arts umbrella in our homeschool is a big one. I bundle several different subjects under it to keep things straight in my mind. Handwriting, grammar, spelling, reading and literature, and vocabulary are are found here in this box.

My 8th grader will use:

HISTORY

Vera will be studying Modern History this year. We’re continuing on with our history cycle and after finishing the American History from Compass Classroom last year. These courses work great for your middle and high school students to do together. Even though my kids have a span of ages, I have always liked to have everyone studying the same thing. It helps to make things in the home cohesive even with the varying ages.

For my 8th grader:

I absolutely love these courses because they incorporate rich lectures, writing assignments, projects, and Vera will make a portfolio with entries for each lesson. They are some of our favorite courses for high school and middle school!

LITERATURE

This year, I decided to have Vera do Compass Classroom’s middle school literature course. My older kids did their British and World Literature course several years ago and it was great, so I think this one will be awesome too. In this course, they also focus on writing styles and do some writing as well.

They use Writing and Rhetoric books as a guide for writing instruction in this course as well. So it’s kind of a literature + writing course. I purchased the following for the course (with teacher guides). Book 9 is for first semester and Book 10 is for the second.

For this course, my 8th Grader will read:

  1. Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes
  2. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
  3. Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt
  4. The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
  5. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  6. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
  7. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
  8. Shakespeare, some short stories, and poetry

SCIENCE + NATURE

I am not a great science mom, I fully admit it! But we have done some really amazing science studies together. Read about it here and here!  This year, Vera will be doing a course on human anatomy from Apologia that my oldest did when he was in 8th grade. It was such a fun course. Lots of hands-on projects and fun!

We also will use:

ART + MUSIC

Art and music are my favorites! I almost always make my own project right alongside the kids when we do our art. Usually we find time to do an art project on a few Friday afternoons each month. Here are a few resources we use.

For Art this year, we are doing a few different things. I really want to focus on both creating art–like drawing and painting–but also sewing arts. We will be going through a quilting course that I cannot wait to begin! It’s called Foundations in Quilting for Homeschoolers. I have a discount code for 20% off too: LW20

We will also be doing a course from Yellow Spot Sun. I can’t say enough about their art courses. They are just so good!

Our Art Curriculum choices:

EXTRA FUN STUFF

  • Homeschool band
  • Piano lessons
  • Bible Study Fellowship
  • Dance Classes
  • Field Trips
  • Doodle Crates

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