Get Excited! Top Curriculum Picks + Plans for the New Year (Grades 12, 8, 6 and 1!)

Summer is drawing to an end. I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to summer nights and lake days, but I have managed to get organized and get our curriculum picks and plans in order for the new homeschool year.

This year, even more than summer ending, I’m digging in my heels a bit because this year will be my oldest’s last year in our homeschool. A senior! How time has flown! Hold them close, mamas…when they say it goes fast, they’re not joking!

Regardless of my readiness, the school year is coming quick! So here’s my annual curriculum picks and plans post!

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Our Curriculum Picks and Routine for 2019-2020: Grades 12, 8, 6, and 1

I’ve been writing these posts for a long time. Maybe I’m old…maybe it’s just because we’ve been homeschooling for 12 years! If you want to check out all the curriculum we’ve used over the years, you can check out these links:

• Learning Well Community Curriculum Directory: this is a post with charts full of all the curriculum we’ve used in one spot.
• Need to save money this year? Here’s two FULL curriculum plans for under $100 each
• Our Kindergarten Choices
• Choices for 5th + 7th Grade
• Homeschool Curriculum Choices Based on your Enneagram Type

If you love to follow along with others’ homeschool routines, I would love foryou to follow me over at @learningwell on Instagram. Every Wednesday during the school year, we feature a different homeschool mama who takes us through her day in the life. On all the other days, I share what we’re doing in our homeschool!

Our Homeschool Plans for 2019-20

If you’d like to listen in and hear a bit more commentary on the picks in this post, listen in here:

We always start our days with a Morning Meeting

We love to start our mornings with a family meeting. Here’s what we’ll cover in our Morning Meetings this year, we won’t do all of these things each day, but here’s the resources we’ll use:

• Daily Calendar: My kids neeeed to know what’s up for the week, so we always have to go over what our week will look like on Mondays. Also, I want to practice more calendaring with Vera, so I’ll use a calendar with magnets she can move each day.
• Bible:
  • We love using the Bible Project’s videos and plans
  • NEW to us: Exploring the Bible
• Read Aloud
• Character Study books
• Daily picture books based on the seasons, holidays and/or our history studies
• Daily Idiom
• The boys (17 and 14) will be reading through Money Matters for Teens and working through the workbook
• Capitalism for Kids: Growing up to be Your Own Boss

What We’re Reading This Year:

We’re doing something a little different this year for our literature picks. We will have some choices that we’ll read together during morning meeting or at night together. It’s pretty easy to deviate from our read aloud plan as we find new books and get off-course, but that’s totally fine with me! It’s fun to find new books.

But this year, in addition to our family read alouds (my oldest two sometimes join us for these and sometimes don’t), my boys (12th and 8th grade) will be reading the same titles each month. We’re not going to do a really in-depth study or anything like that, but they’ll just be reading the same book each month and we will discuss it and/or watch the movie version if that applies.

Here’s what my boys will read this year:

• September: 1984
• October: The Martian
• November: The Odyssey
• January: Of Mice and Men
• February: Night
• March: The Curious Indecent of the Dog in the Night-Time

Our Family Read Aloud Choices:

• September: Crenshaw and The Golden Goblet
• October: THE CAT OF BUBASTES, A TALE OF ANCIENT EGYPT
• November: Mara, Daughter of the Nile
• December: undecided
• January: undecided
• February: The Little Prince
• March: Green Ember
• April: The Hiding Place
• May: The Secret Garden

Some of our read alouds will come from the Beautiful Feet Books Character study we did last year.

After morning meeting, our weeks will look like this:

• Daily:
  • Math lessons
  • Language arts
  • Reading
  • Phonics
• Homeschool band + gym one day/week
• Noah to his co-op classes one day/week
• History 2x/week with Geography
• Writing 2x/week (or so)
• Foreign language several times/week
• Art 1x/week or more!

Our Picks by Subject:

After being at this homeschool gig for a while, we have kind of gotten the hang of what will work and what won’t. We do like to change things up a little bit each year though to tweak the areas that need improvement.

Math

We’ve tried many different math curricula, but we always come back to Saxon. Math used to be so much harder for all of us, but then we discovered Nicole the Math Lady and everything changed!

This year, we’re adding something new that will make all our math lives even easier–My Math Assistant! This is a new-to-us program where the kids (or the mom) can input their answers to their Saxon math lessons. The program scores their answers right there, so they can make corrections where needed.

Correcting math lessons used to take me FOREVER–not so anymore! So excited to use My Math Assistant this year!

You can sign up for a free trial of My Math Assistant HERE and

use the code: 25OFF18788

for 25% off

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 12th grader will be focusing on learning more about business math and how math and money works in the adult world! Here’s what he’ll be using and reading:

• Landmark’s Business Math
• Money Matters for Teens and the workbook
• Capitalism for Kids: Growing up to be Your Own Boss

My 8th grader will use:

• Saxon Algebra 1/2
• Nicole the Math Lady
• My Math Assistant

My 6th grader will use:

• Saxon Math 8/7
• Nicole the Math Lady
• My Math Assistant

I didn’t think my 1st grader was quite ready for Saxon 1, so she will use:

• Math Lessons for a Living Education: Level 1
• Math Manipulatives
• Mobi Math and other math games

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.

Language Arts

We’re honing in on grammar skills this year. We also want to tune up a regular spelling regimen too. We’ve using Spelling Workout forever, but we got away from it last year. This year, we’re back at it!

My 8th grader will use:

• Easy Grammar 8
• Spelling Workout Level H

My 6th grader will use:

• Easy Grammar 6
• Evan-Moore Daily Cursive
• Spelling Workout Level F

My 1st grader will use:

• Hooked on Phonics Grade One
• Draw, Write, Now Journals
• Go for the Code
• Explode the Code 1 + 2
• Handwriting without Tears 1
• Bob Books

Writing

We’ll be working through our writing curriculum a couple of times a week. My 12th grader has checked off all his writing credits he needs for high school–he even has a few college writing credits too–whoop!!

My 6th grader will be using:

• WriteShop Junior Book F (super excited to start this with Sophia! I chose this one because of the literary elements covered AND there’s an awesome grammar pack included too!) You do need the Teacher’s Guide with this curriculum as well as the worksheets.

My 8th grader will be using:

• Writing with Skill

Geography

We will all use:

• Pin It! Maps
• Around the World Stories
• CuriosityStream

History

We love history in our homeschool! This year, we’re heading into the Ancients! Super excited to study this again….

Here’s what the youngest three and I will be using:

• Story of the World vol. 1
• Lots of great literature
• The Precious People (to study saints)
• Homeschool in the Woods’ Project Passports Ancient Greece (We love these studies!)
• History Pockets: Ancient Civilizations
• Beautiful Feet Books Intermediate Ancient Civilizations
• The World’s Story Volume 1: The Ancients Creation and Roman Empire

Want to know something interesting? We started homeschooling 12 years ago, when my oldest was a 1st grader. There’s so many things on this list that we are STILL using after all that time. In our first year of homeschooling, was used Story of the World volume 1 for history. And I’ll be using that same book with my first grader…my last baby first grader again!

Here’s my idea for history:

Vera (1st grade) and I will use Story of the World vol. one. I’ll read the text aloud while she colors the coloring sheet. The bigger kids will be working on independent work while I read–and I’m sure they’ll be listening in too.

Jack (8th) and Sophia (6th) will be using The World’s Story Volume 1: The Ancients Creation and Roman Empire more on their own. This is a new book to us and it looks really good! It has a daily text–much like SOTW. There’s also a guide book too that has maps and tests and more.

We’ll all do projects on certain days together.

Homeschool in the Woods studies are some of our favorites too. We’ll do at least one of those, for sure Ancient Greece and possibly Egypt or Rome as well. I love to combine Home School in the Woods with Beautiful Feet Books too. I have a post all about combining the two HERE. (Coming soon)

In a nutshell:

Story of the World Vol. One (for Vera) and The World’s Story Vol. One (for the bigs) will be our “spine” texts

Home School in the Woods Ancient Greece will be our fun addition

and

Beautiful Feet Books: Ancient History will offer tons of vocab, all our literature, and a timeline for our study.

Science

I am not a great science mom, I fully admit it! This is where fun project kits and great books save my life! 🙂 I’m kinda done buying science curriculum! It never gets used in our house!!

If you want to know how we do homeschool science without curriculum, here’s how! (coming: 8/24)

My 12th grader needs one more lab science for his high school transcript, so he will use:

• Apologia Physical Science through his co-op

The rest of us will use:

• Tinker Crates
• CuriosityStream
• NatureExplorer Guides
• Nature picture books
• Exploring Nature with Children
• Nature Walks + Guides

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Art

I love art so much–if it was up to me, we’d do art every day! For me, it seems that we never get enough art time. We’ve got some really awesome resources that help us get to art often and not over complicate things.

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A post shared by Learning Well Community (@learningwell) on Feb 11, 2019 at 2:45pm PST

The three younger kids and I will be using:

• Art History Kids (LOVE this one!)
• Chalk Pastels Membership site–if you want simple art projects that go with basically ANY subject you’re already studying, this is it! Their memberships is a huge value for our family!

Foreign Language

My 12th grader (and probably everyone else, because it’s awesome!) will be using:

• Rosetta Stone Deutsch

Everyone else will use:

• Duolingo App

Extra Fun Stuff

• Homeschool band
• Baking club
• Book club
• Boy Scouts
• American Heritage Girls
• Field Trips
• Tinker Crates
• Church groups

Looking for the perfect homeschool planner to get more organized this school year?

Need to create a calendar framework for your homeschool year? Get it here:

Your turn! Let me know in the comments what you’re most excited about to use this year!