Curriculum Choices – 2024/25
Pierce – 5th grade, Aliza – 3rd grade
We have officially started our new school year! The weather is blazing hot, the grass is crunchy, and the mosquitoes are on the prowl… so we are getting back to our books.
I’m gonna say this next part really fast – this is Pierce’s last year of elementary school – oy, that was painful. But true. One of my main goals for homeschooling elementary school is that the kids would continue to love learning, so that when middle school and high school come around they aren’t rolling their eyes, but excited to continue on! Knowing this was one of my top goals for him really helped me choose curriculums this year. Instead of choosing in fear and feeling a panic that he has to ‘be ready’ for middle school next year, I chose what I knew he would love to learn and what would open them up to new places and ideas.
While I lean more toward a Charlotte Mason approach, we love a good a unit study! It makes the year so much easier for me to plan. And the kids just thrive in it. So this year we are learning all things Africa & Asia!
Literature, Social Studies, Geography, and Science
Our core curriculum will be Around the World with Picture Books (Part 1), from Beautiful Feet Books. Which, of course, covers Africa and Asia. We’ll be reading amazing living books about the people, places, and histories of Africa and Asia (Beautiful Feet always has such great booklists). Like most curriculums we use, I’ll be using it more as a guide – adding rabbit trails, etc. to make it more our own. This study is listed as K-4th, so I’ve added some chapter books for each of them to read independently, and some great read-aloud chapter books for us to do together.
Pierce loves maps and flags, so we’ll spend a lot of time focusing on the geography of each continent. We’ll learn as many names and locations of the countries as we can, and also focus in on some of the countries, taking a closer look at their specific geography. We’ll use map drills, notebooking, and puzzles to do this.
For science we’ll be focusing on nature study – the animals and trees found in these places, observing what we can at our local zoo, and studying the biomes that are found in both of these continents. I’m sure there are also some fun animal documentaries we’ll be adding as well!
Morning Time Devotions
After breakfast, getting dressed, and taking our dog for his daily morning walk, we start each school day with our morning devotion time. This year we are using Marty Machowski’s new book, The Treasure, which walks you through the books of Luke and Acts. We’ll be memorizing scripture passages from these books of the Bible, singing some new hymns, and memorizing poems from/about Africa and Asia.
Language Arts
Both of them will be keeping a copywork notebook, (which we got from School Nest this year and are really liking so far). They copy a Bible passage or excerpt from one of the books we are reading most days. We will also be continuing our written narrations, this year going back to using loose cardstock and watercolors, Jodi Mockabee style.
Pierce will also use the Evan-Moore Building Spelling workbook. Aliza will be reading aloud to me from The Good and the Beautiful 3rd grade readers, and using Explode the Code workbooks (starting with #6).
Other than the reader books that Aliza is using for LA, we are not using the Good and the Beautiful this year for the first time since we started homeschooling. I know a lot of people have strong feelings one way or the other about TGTB. We had been slowly fading out on using their Language Arts as I learned more and more about the Charlotte Mason approach and just realized they really don’t need everything that’s included in TGTB. After a few years of purchasing the books, but skipping many portions of it, I realized we just needed to move to something different. The readers were the only thing I really liked about their LA – each chapter focuses on a different phonics skill – and it’s set up so that the teacher and student take turns reading. She enjoys the stories and it’s a much more enjoyable way to practice phonics than flash cards and worksheets.
Math
Pierce – BJU PRESS
The last few months of last school year I started to really question using TGTB math again the next year, different reasons for each kid. Pierce is great at math, while he doesn’t necessarily enjoy math, he picks it up very easily. I was using TGTB because I thought he would enjoy it more – it’s colorful and fun, but I found that really all the extra was just distracting him. He was taking almost an hour to complete each lesson! He just needed something simple and to the point. After MONTHS of researching other math curriculums, talking it out with several other moms, and watching every Youtube math review video out there (thank you to the ladies who make those!), I finally landed on BJU Press for him.
It’s not a perfect curriculum, (I still cling to the hope that there is one out there somewhere!), but it is already a MUCH better fit than TGTB. We are only 7 lessons into the new math, (so it’s all review of what he learned last year), and he’s already said that he knew how to do this last year, but is just now understanding the reasoning behind how it works with this new curriculum! A problem that I hadn’t even realized was there. He is now getting his math done in less than 30 minutes a day!
Aliza – Math with Confidence and Addition Facts that Stick
Pierce started with TGTB before they made those big changes, so I feel like he got a good foundation. But Aliza started with the new edition, and it has always felt shaky to me. I’m kicking myself for not switching her sooner. When she took the end of the year evaluation, she technically did fine, probably got around 79% of it all correct. In public school, she would have passed on. But I just wasn’t feeling right about moving her on. She was working really hard to get those right answers and she was using her fingers (and toes) to answer many of them. Moving her on to 3rd grade would mean starting multiplication, and I did not feel peace about that.
After listening to many older and wiser moms on the topic of math (Carol Joy Sied, Cindy Rollins, etc.), and reading up on Charlotte Mason’s approach to math, I started to see that there was no need to panic, it truly is better late than early. At the same time a good friend, (and former elementary math teacher), recommended Math with Confidence – remembering that my goal is for her to still enjoy learning math and not see it as cause of stress, I realized that was going to be a perfect fit for her!
So she is working through Addition Facts that Stick right now (also written by Kate Snow), which has helped her IMMENSELY! And when we have completed that, we will work through the 2nd Grade Math With Confidence and see where that takes us. Because she really did have many of the aspects of 2nd grade math mastered, I don’t anticipate it taking a whole year to complete. When she’s done, we’ll most likely continue on the 3rd grade level! One of the perks of homeschooling!
Enrichment
This is a year of changes I guess, in addition to changing our Math and LA curriculums, we are also no longer participating in the tutorial they both started in Kindy. It was a very hard decision to make, but ultimately came down to the fact that it wasn’t a good fit academically. We had been using it for enrichment only and it’s just not what it was designed to do. As hard as it was to say goodbye to that community, I am so sure we made the right choice for our family and I’m very thankful for the peace we all feel.
Music – That being said, we will still be doing the music tutorial we were in last year! Pierce will continue with playing the bass in the orchestra and Aliza will start playing the violin with the beginning strings group! She will also continue to sing in the choir, which she loves.
Nature Club and Book Club – both will continue on this year! Most of the families participate in both clubs, so it’s a strong and wonderful community for us!
Co-Op – One of the families from Nature/Book Club have also decided to stay home this year (and only live 2 miles away!), so we decided to join forces twice a month and have a mini co-op! We will alternate hosting and focus on enrichment subjects – handicrafts, life skills, art, playing chess. It should be fun!
That’s our plan! We’ll see how it goes and what changes along the way… it’s always an adventure!
