Do You Want to See Our Eclectic + Simple Homeschool Curriculum Picks for 9th, 7th, and 2nd Grade?

Is there anything more fun for the homeschool mama than readying new homeschool curriculum picks?? I don’t think so!

Today, I’m sharing our homeschool curriculum picks for this coming school year. I will admit…it was really weird only making THREE curriculum plans opposed to FOUR–my class size is shrinking, and that is so crazy to me!!

Having homeschooled for a while now, I don’t usually have to buy too much because we are reusing so much from years passed. But this year I grabbed some fun, new resources that I’ve been eyeing for a while and can’t wait to share it all with you!

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Here we go!

Our Homeschool Curriculum Picks for 2020-21: Grades 9, 7, and 2

QUICK NOTE: I tried to link up every single thing on our curriculum list this year…I used mostly Amazon links from an ease + timeliness perspective, but be a smart shopper and definitely check out Christian Book Distributors + Rainbow Resources to check prices first. I have often found better prices on those two sites and I like to support these smaller amazing companies when I can!

I’ve been writing these posts for a long time. Maybe I’m old…maybe it’s just because we’ve been homeschooling for 13 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 are two FULL curriculum plans for under $100 each
• Last year’s curriculum picks for 12th, 8th, 6th, and 1st grade!
• Our Kindergarten Choices
• Choices for 5th + 7th Grade

If you love talking homeschool curriculum, I love to share more on my Instagram page @overatalicias

Our Homeschool Plans for 2020-21

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 are the resources we’ll use:

• Daily Calendar: I like to go over what our week looks like on Mondays, so we look over the calendar together. Also, I want to practice more calendaring with Vera, so I’ll use her Meeting Book from her math book for that.
• Bible:
  • We love using the Bible Project’s videos and plans
  • NEW to us: Answers for Kids
  • Kay Arthur’s study Jesus in the Spotlight (for my 7th grader)
  • Cold-Case Christianity + Participant’s Guide (for my 9th grader)
• Read Aloud
• Building Character Through Books: Picture Books that teacher Character
• Daily picture books based on the seasons, holidays and/or our history studies
• Monstrous Maths series
• Sight Word Practice for Vera
• Multiplication Practice
• Daily Idiom
• 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:

I always like to pick our family read alouds for the year, even though it hardly ever goes as plans and we deviate from the plan sometimes. That’s ok! We usually get around to reading most of them! Here are our picks for this year:

Our Family Read Aloud Choices:

• September: Heroes of History: Clara Barton
• October: The Adventures of Geraldine Woolkins
• November: Pilgrim Stories
• December: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
• January: Adara
• February: undecided
• March: The Green Ember
• April: Mary Poppins
• May: The Courage of Sarah Noble

We will also be picking books from the Beautiful Feet Books Early American History study too.

RELATED: Need more ideas for your Morning Meeting? Here are 100 ideas!

RELATED: More read aloud books we love!

After the morning meeting, our weeks will look like this:

• Daily:
  • Math lessons
  • Language arts
  • Reading
  • Phonics
• Homeschool band + gym one day/week (pending)
• History 2x/week with Geography
• Science 2x/week (or so)
• Writing 2x/week (or so)
• Art 1x/week or more!

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.

For 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!

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 9th grader will use:

• Saxon Algebra 1
• Nicole the Math Lady
• My Math Assistant
• Mind Benders for High School

My 7th grader will use:

• Saxon Math 1/2
• Nicole the Math Lady
• My Math Assistant
• Balance Benders

I didn’t think my 1st grader was quite ready for Saxon 1, so she started her 1st grade year with Masterbooks math and we ended up moving her over to Saxon 1 last April, so she’s still on Saxon 1, but we LOVE Saxon so much:

• Saxon 1
• Math Manipulatives
• Mobi Math and other math games
• Mind Benders: Level 1

Our Homeschool Curriculum Picks for Language Arts:

We have really found our favorites for language arts and haven’t changed it much over the years.

My 9th grader will use:

• Easy Grammar
• Figuratively Thinking

My 7th grader will use:

• Easy Grammar
• Spelling Workout
• Figuratively Speaking

My 2nd grader will use:

• Hooked on Phonics Grade One
• Hooked on Phonics Grade Two
• Explode the Code
• Easy Readers
• Sight Word Flash Cards

Writing

I’m going to streamline our writing a bit this year and combine my 7th + 9th grader together.

They’ll be using:

• Figuratively Speaking: Using Classic Literature to Teach 40 Literary Terms
• Research in Increments

My 7th grader will be also be using:

• WriteShop Junior Book F : We did most of this book last year and it was so fun! We do have a few more projects left, so we will try to get those finished this year. You do need the Teacher’s Guide with this curriculum as well as the worksheets.

Geography

We will all use:

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

My 2nd grader will use:

Beautiful Feet Books Around the World with Picture Books II and I cannot wait! We will be diving in and I will be writing a detailed review on this set, but it looks amazing so far! This volume goes through Europe and South America. It includes tons of gorgeous picture books and a guide with recipes, lessons, and more!

History

We love history in our homeschool! We studied the Ancients last year but did not get all the way through to the fall of Rome. That’s ok though, we’ll just keep doing more Ancient History this year!

BUT before we can get back to Ancient Greece, we’re going to take the first half of the year to really dig deep into the early history of American, the Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and how our national elections work!

Semester I: Homeschool Curriculum Picks for Early American History + Election:

• A Child’s First Book of American History will be the main book of the study. It reads like a story and we can read a little bit every day.
• Our Constitution Rocks! Will be a text we will read a little bit of each day. I wanted something that read like a textbook that we could learn about the Constitution but in little bite-sized pieces.
• I went through our history bookshelves and tried to find everything I could from early American history that had to do with the government.
• Literature Picks:
  • Pilgrim Stories
  • Capitalism for Kids
  • Are you a Liberal? Conservative? Confused?

I’ve also ordered quite a few titles from Beautiful Feet Books from the following literature sets:

• Early American Primary Pack
• Early American Enrichment Pack
• E.A. Intermediate Pack

My 9th grader will use the following all year long:

• Boundary Stone’s American Government Textbook + Course
• 1776
• The Faith of the Founding Fathers

Semester II: Homeschool Curriculum Picks for Ancient Greece and Rome:

• Story of the World vol. 1
• Alexander the Great by John Gunther
• Homeschool in the Woods’ Project Passports Ancient Greece (We love these studies!)
• History Pockets: Ancient Civilizations
• The World’s Story Volume 1: The Ancients Creation and Roman Empire

For Ancient History, we will pick up where we left off and this is how it will look:

Vera 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 and Sophia will be finishing The World’s Story Volume 1: The Ancients Creation and Roman Empire . They really enjoyed this curriculum last year, so I’m glad we’ll be coming back to it to finish. 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  Ancient Greece and possibly 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. 

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 + Nature

I am not a great science mom, I fully admit it! This is where fun project kits and great books save my life!  Even though I’m not great at finishing science curriculum, I’m pulling out an Apologia book I get years ago at a book sale:

• Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures

My 9th grader will use:

• Apologia Physical Science 

We also will use:

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

For nature, we really really love No Sweat Nature Classes with Cindy. Every month includes two classes plus a printout to accompany the lesson. The kids learn tons of vocabulary words AND they get to do really great nature journal drawing every time too.

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.

• 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 are a huge value for our family!

SQUILT Music Class is also on our list! We’ve been doing these live classes since spring and Vera LOVES them! Read our full rundown HERE.

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?

Click here:

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!