After a brief time in public school while I finished my associate degree, we are back to homeschooling! Although we pulled the older two out midway through last fall, this year feels like our first official year back. In addition to starting our homeschool after the school year had started, my youngest was still in Kindergarten and not doing serious daily schooling. Most of the school year felt like just getting back into the groove of doing school at home. Now, we are starting the year from the beginning, E is officially in first grade, and the schedule and planning feel more fleshed out and comfortable.
We’re two weeks into the new school year, and things are going smoothly so far. I wanted to take some time to record what we’re doing and how it’s working. Hopefully, this will help me make good decisions later and will be something to check back with when I’m not doing quite as well as I am at the moment.
With that in mind, let’s start with how the schedule is set up. In order to teach 3 children of differing ages and ensure that all the important subjects are covered, I distributed the subjects between individual and group lessons. Math, language arts, and music practice are done on an individual and daily basis, while art and music, science, geography, and history are done as group lessons on a weekly basis. Additional reading is assigned to older children for group lesson subjects as needed to expand on what was learned. Additional subjects include faith-based activities and read-alouds.
This method has worked well, since it cuts down on the amount of one-on-one time I am required to spend with each child for teaching. I still supervise and direct, but long sit-down teaching sessions are spread out over the week. I use a variety of curricula and books to teach group subjects, so I’ll cover those next.
Art and Music
For this subject, I use the Ambleside Online free curriculum. This curriculum is based on the Charlotte Mason method and is 100% free to use. It is book-heavy, and if you follow it exactly, you will still be spending a fair amount of money on acquiring those, but many of them are older books that can be found on thrift and second-hand sites. However, their artist and composer lists are very accessible and inexpensive to use. If you do both together, you will often be covering artists and composers from similar time periods and/or movements or styles. For instance, when we were doing picture studies for Caravaggio, we were also listening to music by Antonio Vivaldi. Both artists were considered Baroque, so we were exposed to music and art from the same style and somewhat close in time. I vividly remember one day when we were doing our group lesson in the carport. We had just spent time looking at one of Caravaggio’s paintings, which often had religious subjects, and we were lying on our blankets listening to music by Vivaldi that was meant to be sung in church. I was struck by how magical worship must have been during a time when churches were filled with paintings by artists like Caravaggio and music by composers like Vivaldi.
These lists have worked really well for me because of how easy they are to follow. I just print the picture lists for the artist on cardstock and look up the suggested music for the composer on a music streaming app. I also like to look up brief biographies on YouTube in the early lessons when we are just being introduced to the artists to give the boys a bit more info than is included in the list as is.
Science
For this, we use The Good and the Beautiful family-style unit studies. So far, we have done the Wonders of Energy, as well as the Motion and Simple Machines units, and we have just begun the Chemistry unit. A few years ago, we went through the Arthropods unit, but I think the curriculum may have been updated since then. We have enjoyed this curriculum so far, and I plan to continue working through the units in the future.
The primary benefit of these unit studies has been the group-style lessons that can be done with a variety of ages. My youngest can sit in on the lesson and focus on listening and responding to questions as well as participate in experiments and activities. My older two in 3rd and 5th grade do all of that, plus complete appropriate activities in the companion student journals. There are two student journal options, one for 3rd-6th grade and one for 7th-8th grade. Full disclosure: I bought a student journal for my youngest for the last two units because he begged me to, but I don’t think we will continue that moving forward. He will be upset in the short term, but there have been too many tears over ‘not being able to do it,’ so I don’t think it’s a good idea right now.
Besides being easy to use as a group, I enjoy these units because of the lesson setup. In most lessons, the reading is kept relatively brief, with a focus on pauses for discussion and engagement. There are companion videos for many lessons, and activities or experiments in nearly every lesson as well. The fact that the required materials were mostly things I already had around the house made the lessons much more approachable. For really complicated experiments, they usually provide videos demonstrating the experiment that you can choose to watch instead of doing it yourself.
Geography
For this subject, we are using Easy Peasy all-in-one Homeschool. This curriculum’s main benefit for us at this time is that it is free and not overwhelming. I will say that my preference is to use a curriculum that is slightly more hands-on and engaging, and we may try others in the future, but for what it is, this is a good program. Early lessons focus on maps, cardinal directions, and other basics of geography, and later lessons focus on specific countries, beginning with those in Europe. My boys’ favorite part of this program is probably the links to online geography games included with a lot of lessons.
I particularly like the early lessons for their thorough coverage of map terms, different maps, and other topics that help with the understanding of how to approach the 2D visual representation of countries and land masses found in maps. I also like that there are two lesson versions, one for grades 1-4 and another for 5-8, which allows for adjustments for older learners. The websites linked for readings usually have beautiful photography and readings of a reasonable length, and the map games provide a fun challenge for my kids that also reinforces knowledge of where different countries are located in the world. Another aspect I like is the linked online chapters to Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. This book begins in lesson 6 for the 5th-8th grade level, and both junior, original, and audio versions are linked. My 5th grader is able to handle a whole chapter from the original book in one day, but if he had struggled, it would have been easy to stretch it over the whole week, or read the junior version instead. I think this may be meant to be followed on a daily rather than a weekly basis, which may explain why I find most of the lessons to be underwhelming. It is working really well for us right now though, and you can’t beat free.
History
This is a subject I would really like to expand on, but I think I will continue to use our current books as a base even as I add on in the future. Right now, we are reading through The Story of the World, vol. 1, and using the companion activity book. The activity book has a lot of add-on options for each chapter, including things like suggested questions, map work, and hands-on activities and has been great so far. At this point, we haven’t been able to do many of the hands-on activities, but we go through the questions and do the map work every week. There are also coloring pages, which I like to use as optional busy work while I’m reading the chapter.
I love the map work because it is kept brief, but the repetition and slow expansion really familiarize them with the area in which the history is taking place. At one point, after doing maps that covered a larger area, we went back to more zoomed-in maps to cover a specific culture. While looking at one of them, my middle kiddo pointed out that China was off the map to the right. It was a good sign to me that the maps were becoming familiar enough for them to mentally place the closer maps in a larger setting.
I intend to purchase one of the recommended extra reading books that show up in most lessons, but until then, I have been assigning relevant readings from books we already have or from the library. I keep these small and spread them out over the week. These are for my oldest two, and my youngest just has the once-a-week group lessons with us. In the future, I hope to incorporate biographies, but for the time being, we are in such early history that it has been easier to keep the information broadly focused.
Individual Work
There is a lot of overlap in the individual work curriculum for my 3rd and 5th-graders. While they are in different grades, I have been using the same programs. It’s my youngest who differs the most right now, but I will likely move him to the same curriculum when he’s in a higher grade.
Math
I was homeschooled all the way through high school, and while there were one or two different math curricula in the early years, most of my math education came from Math-u-See. This program was very approachable, manageable, and made sense to me growing up. My older two are using this and it’s worked so far, but perhaps some of that success is due to my familiarity with the program. I did not use Math-u-See in the early years, and I’m not using it with my 1st grader, but it is working great for my older boys. For each lesson, there are three worksheets that specifically focus on the topic covered in the lesson, and three that cover both recent topics and ones learned in previous lessons. In addition, there are lesson tests for each subject, and unit tests every few lessons. While we haven’t needed them yet, the accompanying videos for each course book were really good for me when I was working through them as a kid, so if we ever hit a subject I struggle to explain to the boys I’ll be glad to have those as an option.
The other thing I love about this program is the accompanying math block manipulative. The use of the blocks with more difficult concepts helped me a lot growing up, and they have been useful for many lessons outside of this program when I was introducing my boys to math and numbers early on. We’ve found the math blocks so useful that I’d say they’re worth having even if you don’t use Math-U-See. I picked ours up second-hand before I even had kids, and I’ve lost count of how many times they’ve come in handy.
For my youngest I am using The Good and the Beautiful math for this year. While I love the approachable and inexpensive nature of Math-U-See, it is very worksheet heavy and uninspiring for young children. I wanted something a bit more colorful and engaging for his first official year of school. If he was still very early in his learning journey I would probably stick with TGATB for a few years, but it is a slow moving course. He is already in their math two book, so he’ll likely be ready for the challenge of Math-U-See by next year.
Language Arts
Language arts is also different for the older two and my youngest. As with math, my youngest is going through TGATB language arts two book. We aren’t using the supplemental materials, but have with previous workbooks and they are always very colorful and interesting. I especially appreciate the diversity of art styles used in their readers for the younger levels. In this case I am using TGATB because it covers multiple topics outside reading and writing alone, incorporating art appreciation, grammar and spelling rules among other things. I could see myself bringing the courses back later for my older two as well to ensure we haven’t missed any important topics.
For my older two I am using a collection of resources to cover grammar, writing and reading.
For grammar we are following the Easy Grammar books for 3rd and 5th grade and I have liked the approach so far. The method of memorizing prepositions in order to more easily identify the subject of a sentence makes things much easier for my boys. Additionally, having now bought two different levels, I noticed that the list of prepositions starts small and each book adds a few more to the list, making it less intimidating to younger learners.
For writing we do copywork for now, however, I am hoping to take them through Writeshop Jr. by Demme Learning once it finally ships (if it ever does, may have to give up getting it second hand). What I really like about copywork is that it has multiple benefits, helping my boys with spelling, handwriting, grammar, and writing conventions, as long as they’re copying from good writing. I love practices like this that teach more than one concept at a time. Where it falls short for us is in teaching format rules or giving them confidence in creating their own work — things I really want included in their education. That’s why I’m hoping Writeshop will work as a replacement.
All of my boys do narration on a daily basis, but I read aloud to my youngest for this. Once again I reference Ambleside online for this subject. I assign readings from their recommended literature list and have each of the older two read a section and then tell me what they read. I adjust the section based on the difficulty of the book and the capabilities of the child. My oldest is struggling a bit with deciphering Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, so we do shorter selections and he takes notes on what he read to help him narrate. I read small parts of a larger story to my youngest and ask leading questions as needed for his narration. I have done similar strategies with my middle, but he’s reading The Incredible Journey right now and finding it fairly easy. I also allow re-reads as needed. The benefits of narration include reading comprehension, retention, condensing information, and note taking among other things. It may be my boys’ least favorite activity, but it is so, so good as a learning tool. I will say that there have been some books on the literature list that I decided to read aloud rather than have them read and that I didn’t bother with narration. So far I’ve done this with The Pilgrim’s Progress and Parables From Nature. I ‘translate’ when reading into more modern words as I am able and stop to explain when needed. Additionally, I felt uncomfortable with a few of the stories from the Parables From Nature and either skipped them (and explained why to the boys), or read them and then discussed what I felt was off about it.
Faith Based Activities
Currently, we try to do a slightly altered version of the one of daily devotions from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer each day. I have assigned a few Bible verses for memorization and plan to do more in the future, but my long term plan is to invest in a set of Truth and Grace memory books to cover that. I am also interested in buying the My Brother’s Keeper devotion from Not Consumed to work through but it has been nice to have the daily devotions to fall back on in the meantime.
That covers the backbone of our school year so far. Of course, we’ll add extracurriculars and other activities along the way, but it’s exciting to see how things will progress and change throughout the year. Here’s to a great homeschool season!
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