Before I share our homeschool curriculum, I think you will get a kick out of this. So I’ve been planning our year for weeks now trying to get all of my ducks in a row and gather all of my books and supplies. I was ready!
We dove into History and I thought, this is fascinating to me as an adult but my third grader was falling asleep and I could barely hold his attention. I tried looking online for supplemental activities but I couldn’t find any fun activities for how the Quakers conducted meetings and what not. It started off interesting discussing the Mayflower but once they landed it was 25 pages of TMI (at least for a 3rd grader). But as I looked at the other chapters it wasn’t getting better.
We did this for 3 days.
I finally figured out that I was using the WRONG History book.
What a relief! I was getting ready to go searching for another History option because I was getting no where in my Google searches for how to make this History fun for my third grader. I loved History growing up and I know it can be fun and I am thankful that the book I was using was not the correct one.
Our Homeschool Curriculum
I did lots of research on curriculum before I settled on these. I loved the Charlotte Mason approach but for my first year of homeschooling I felt a little overwhelmed in trying to figure out how to implement her method. So I found Sonlight and discovered that there curriculum is literature based which Charlotte Mason’s approach.
This is not a homeschool curriculum review it’s just me sharing what we use. I know when I was trying to figure our curriculum out I was hunting down as many of these types of post to get an idea of what people are actually doing in their home not just reviewing. Enjoy!
Math – Math U See Beta – and my son is absolutely loving the blocks!
Science – Apologia Zoology Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day – I’ve supplemented some of the units with more hands on activities. Hopefully, I will get around to sharing some of that with you.
History – The Story of the U.S.A. and Living books (I am following the Sonlight Curriculum for this). Now that I am using the right book I will supplement some fun activities using books I found at Teacher Express from Scholastic.
Spelling – Sequential Spelling book.
Handwriting – I just downloaded some free stuff online and a few books from Scholastics dollar deals, to help him practice his cursive and he does copy work from the Bible. Usually it’s his memory verse of the week.
Art – Art Projects from Around the World another Scholastic Dollar Deal I found.
Foreign Language: Spanish – I am building my own curriculum with this and I also bought some books from Scholastic.
Physical Education – We will run or ride bikes every other day for a little over 2 miles. It will be less when he starts baseball.
Grammar- If you’re familiar with Charlotte Mason and Literature Based curriculum their philosophy is that grammar comes when they are older. So I am using Sonlight for Language Arts and it’s very light on grammar but the grammar pretty much all revolves around our living books. I usually add a fun practical activity to bring it home. For example, we went on a long walk this week and we played “I Spy Adjectives” game and he loved it. Hopefully, I will get that game up on here at some point.
Bible – I love this website I just discovered called Kids of Integrity. They go through each character and they have a whole pdf file for each character that is accompanied with bible verses, prayer for kids and parents, craft, bible story (lots to choose from that may fit your child better) It’s lovely. We are doing one character a week. Last week, we did acceptance and this week we are studying courage.
Do you buy your curriculum or do you get it for free here and there?
I was blessed to have gotten all of my Sonlight curriculum for free because a friend let me borrow hers and the rest I bought used online via E-bay or FB groups that sell used homeschool curriculum.