I received so much wonderful feedback from last week’s episode where we talked about your mindset and your heart set, and what it looks like or what it might look like for you and your family to step into homeschool. I am so encouraged that so many of you were so encouraged. And I think that it’s so exciting to hear that so many of you are either currently homeschooling or you’re really interested in learning more about it.
I did want to address one thing…I received an email from a super sweet lady who is an avid podcast listener and has listened for quite a long time now. And she really gave me a lot of good things to think about when it comes to homeschool. She actually brought up the importance of finding a great support system, and the importance of finding a seasoned or a veteran homeschool mama to really lean into and to glean wisdom from. So, I want to piggyback on that wisdom that she shared with me, and just encourage you to find a veteran homeschool mom as you’re taking a look at this homeschool journey and pick her brain and ask her the ins and outs and the ups and downs. And another great thing about this is that you’re able to share sort of accountability that way, which I think is so great.
We have a local co-op that we lean on really hard and you better believe that the leader of our co-op, who is an incredible veteran homeschool mom of many, many children of her own, you better believe that I really leaned into her for support and that we sat down and had a meeting and I really picked her brain before we jumped into homeschool. I share about that several episodes back when I talked about how our family has stepped into homeschool. So I just want to encourage you don’t go it alone on the homeschool journey. Stay plugged into the podcast, find a local support system or co-op, and definitely take a look around and try to find a veteran or a seasoned homeschool mama to really lean into because that will really help your family be successful in this homeschool journey.
Why Your Homeschool Curriculum Choice is Important
Curriculum is the thing that everyone always wants to know about and talk about. It’s the number one question that I get as a homeschool mom. Here’s the thing, the curriculum is not the most important thing. And you’ll hear seasoned homeschool moms say this over and over. You hear it a lot in the homeschool world. It’s not the most important thing. We talk a lot about mindset and a lot about heart set and relationships and family dynamic and all these other things. But I want to add to that and say that it’s also not the least important thing. In fact, I feel like I probably put more value on the curriculum than a lot of homeschool moms do and there are multiple reasons for that. It is important and I want to stress that to you today.
I spent hours and hours researching and talking to other homeschool moms and families who are having great success with their curriculum. There are three reasons for that. First, I myself was public schooled and so coming from public school, which is primarily what we would call a traditional schooling approach, I grew up with textbooks where you read the books, you take the quiz, etc. So that’s the place that I’m coming from. Number two, we actually transitioned from public school. Although that definitely does not mean that our homeschool models public school, it really doesn’t, but my kids for eight years prior to us homeschooling were in public school. And so they were using traditional textbooks and that kind of format with traditional curriculum. The third thing is that I really want to ensure my kids’ success, and I want to ensure that they are on track or even ahead of where they should be. And solid curriculum is a big piece of that. I personally love a Christian-based curriculum that is going to help them stay on track or ahead of where they need to be in all of those core areas, including the Bible here at our house. And so those are the reasons why I do put a lot of value on the curriculum. And it’s really important to me to choose wisely.
Homeschool Curriculum We Chose for Our Family
So what I want to do next is actually share with you, as we’re prepping for the new homeschool year ahead, the curriculum that we chose for this year. Let me preface this by saying that my kids are headed into fourth grade, seventh grade, and ninth grade.
Language Arts
Let’s start with language arts. For my youngest, who again, is going into fourth grade, we are using All About Reading from All About Learning Press. Canyon was a kindergartener when COVID hit back in 2020. And so he essentially missed a third of his kindergarten year, which as you probably know, is foundational when kids are learning how to read and they’re learning phonics, and sight words and all of those things. That is a foundational time in a child’s learning process, especially for reading. And so Canyon, although he was well ahead in all other areas of his education, he honestly was right at average, if not a tiny bit behind in his reading when we jumped into homeschool starting last year. And so, I wanted to find something that was really going to fast-track him to really take a big jump forward in his reading, and I came across this program. Oh, my goodness, this program is just an absolute gem. Had I started my kids with homeschool from early on, I would have absolutely started them with All About Reading. In fact, my sister Dori, who is doing homeschool for the first year this year with her kindergartener, she snagged All About Reading at the and she is so excited about it. It is so cute and colorful and engaging. And I know it’s really going to help her family be successful as she’s raising up her girls and beginning to teach them how to read.
A few things I love about this program…. One, it’s pretty open and go, so you would want to take a look at it before your first day of homeschool, just take a quick glance at the lessons that you’re coming up on. But it is so open and go and it literally kind of gives you this script to go through with your kiddo. And there are a lot of interactive activities. It’s beautifully illustrated, and it’s just altogether a fun program. Your child will be having so much fun with the activities that they don’t even really know that they’re learning because it’s just so engaging. Canyon and I would just laugh during a lot of the lessons because they’re just some funny things in there, but let me just tell you, it was so successful in helping him to read. I mean, it skyrocketed him to where he needs to be and so far beyond and now he is actually a very, very advanced reader with just one year of the program under his belt. We will be using a more advanced level of that this year. So I can’t say enough good things about that program.
Canyon is also going to be using Language Lessons for a Living Education through Master Books. You’re going to hear me say Master Books a million times because I love this company, and I love their curriculums. This program is kind of a Charlotte Mason type of program, and it goes through some grammar, but it has a lot of emphasis on parts of speech, and it’s all done from a biblical worldview. There’s actually a little book that goes along with it that is full of Bible stories.
For my seventh, and ninth grader, we use IEW which is short for the Institute for Excellence in Writing. I cannot say enough good things about IEW. This company was founded by Mr. Andrew Pudewa, who I just think the absolute world of, and it’s on my bucket list to get him on the podcast someday. I just think he’s phenomenal. In fact, my daughter, and I got to meet him at a homeschool conference this last spring, and it was so fun. He’s just a wonderful, wonderful man with a huge heart for successfully helping the kids to be great writers, thinkers, readers and speakers. So at IEW.com You’ll find lots of great curriculum for middle school and high school kiddos. They do have some things for younger kiddos as well, but I would recommend it more for middle school and high school. The program that my kids are going to be using from IEW is called Structure and Style for Students. And it is an intensive, classical writing program. Now, I will say it is an intense writing program. In fact, the kids are expected to write one paper per week using the structure and stylistic techniques that they learned inside of this program. But my goodness, my oldest Chloe used this program last year, and by the end of the year, she had written 26 or 27 papers. And her writing is just phenomenal. I mean, she is writing at a college level, and I attribute a lot of that to this program. I can’t say enough good things about it, and I’m super excited for my middle child, Chase to start in with that program this year.
For grammar, both of my older kids will be using Fix It Grammar, which is also from IEW. Chase, my middle schooler, does not love grammar, and in fact, this past homeschool year, a lot of days when it would come to grammar, he would end up in tears or feeling very frustrated because we just had not found a program that really fit well for him. Well in the middle of the year last year, I decided to switch him out to this Fixit Grammar, and now I joke with him that he’s a grammar wizard. This program is phenomenal.
Math
Let's move on to math, which is not my wheelhouse, especially bringing my kids from public school into homeschool where they had previously worked a lot with common core math which is, in my opinion, incredibly confusing and unnecessary and very different than how I learned math growing up. So, they would feel frustrated and I would feel frustrated until we found this amazing program which is called Teaching Textbooks. You can find this program at teachingtextbooks.com This is the only piece of curriculum we use that is online. All of our other curriculum is textbook or literature based. So Teaching Textbooks is an online program, my kids use it with the iPad, but it can be accessed from a desktop or laptop computer as well. I love this program and as they're going through it, it kind of almost feels like a video game. I don't want you to feel like it's not a solid program, because it absolutely is. My kids all moved up a level beyond where they were in math last year. And through the lessons, they were digging in and learning some amazing things. The thing I really appreciate about teaching textbooks is they were teaching the kids to do math the way that I learned to do math, which made so much more sense to me. And so when they hit their goals, and they get answers right, they get these little animation things that pop up and tell them great job and they get little stickers and all this kind of stuff. And then I'm able to go in, look at their answers, check their scores, go back over things with them. And then I actually get a printout of their scores and how they're doing so I can then file that away. So again, we're doing this for seventh and ninth grade but I'm pretty sure that this does start with lower elementary, and it goes all the way through high school math.
Science, Social Studies, & History
For Earth Science, including geology and for social studies/history, we use Master Books, I just love it. We're going to be studying American history with their program, which is called America's Story. The thing I love about this is that even though it is textbook based, they have audio that goes along with the textbook, and so we're going to be able to play the audio and listen together as a family as we study American history. We're also going to be studying U.S. geography this year, so states and capitals. Then coming back to geology, we're going to be studying rock formations and more as we study the different parts of American geography. So those are kind of going together this year.
Read Aloud
We also do read aloud which I love. This is something we started doing last year, a lot of homeschool families do it, reading books aloud together. Sometimes we've done it in the morning, sometimes we've done it in the evening. My plan for this year is actually to go back to that evening reading time where we gather around in the living room together as a family before bed. My husband even gets in on this. Last year we did Summer of the Monkeys and my husband did so much of the reading. The story takes place kind of in the southern Midwest, and he's from that area so he had the perfect accent as we were reading through this book. It was so cute and just such a precious book and precious time together to do read aloud in the evenings. Anyway, this year for read aloud, I'm super excited because we're going to be reading all nine books in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series. My daughter has read through all of the books twice, I've read through them once, and now we're going to bring the boys in on it and we're going to read through the entire nine books together as a family. So one book a month, which should not be hard because they're chapter books, but children's books. And it goes so perfectly with the Pioneer era and American history that we're going to be studying. So that's fun.
Bible Learning
Next, Bible is so important. It is one of the foundational things that we learn from, that we teach upon, that we study, that we dig into here in our homeschool. Everything is biblically-based, and so last year, we actually read bits and pieces of the Bible from the beginning to the middle. So, the Old Testament, we read all through creation and kind of jumped through, picked out some of the most important stories. And then when we got to the New Testament, the kids and I actually read through all four of the Gospels in order together, which was so incredible for them to read those, the four accounts of Jesus's life, and just to really glean the wisdom from that.
My three kids and myself, we have CSB Bibles, Christian Standard Bible and my favorite is the She Reads Truth CSB Bible. And so that's what we all were reading from this past year. We also used a company called Not Consumed Ministries. They have fantastic devotions and Bible study material. And then jumping forward to this coming school year, we are already digging into a book that I found that we are loving called The Biggest Story Bible Storybook and it is essentially a recap of the Bible, sort of in storybook form. If you're familiar with Veggie Tales at all, it reminds me a little bit of that, but it's way more for older kids, if that makes sense. So very engaging, very, very beautifully illustrated. My kids have loved looking at the pictures in this book, and it reads more grown up, so like middle school, high school-aged kids. And then we also have another piece of curriculum that is all about generosity. It's a biblical-based curriculum that goes through the Scripture, and it teaches all about generosity and being a generous Christian.
Homeschool Curriculum Customization
So just a couple of things I want to hit on. It's so cool because with homeschool, you can really lean into the things that they're interested in, the things that they're good at, or passionate about, or want to learn more about. So electives are so open-ended, and there's so much room for exploration here. As a family, we are going to be studying German this year. It's a big part of our family history and culture. I am actually one quarter German, and so my kids really wanted to dig into that. I did pick up a ukulele so that's something fun that we're going to be working on this year with something I found called the Ukulele Buddy.
We also use a program called World Watch which is an online program. You might have heard me talk about it on the podcast before. It's sort of like a CNN, but totally not. It is completely 100% Christian journalists, and it is brought to you from a biblical worldview. It's 10 minutes a day every weekday and a lot of times we'll start our morning by flipping on World Watch. You can watch it anytime inside of the app on your smart TV, and it's just a great way to get us started in the morning and kind of get a better understanding on what's going on in the world. And a lot of times it opens up the door for great conversation. Some of the stories are more serious, some of them are more fun. They cover all sorts of different things.
Okay, the last thing I want to tell you about is just a fun thing that we try to do. We do a lot of field trips. Last year, we sprinkled them all throughout the year, kind of whatever we were studying, we would go hunt things down, local things and put together field trips. My kids planned some field trips, I planned some field trips. We did some things over the summer that related back to what we were studying last year. And that also related to what we're going to be studying in the year ahead. And so if things go right, what I'm planning right now, at the end of this school year is to do a great big field trip where we stop by a lot of the Laura Ingalls sites, all the Little House on the Prairie sites out in the Dakotas and up in Wisconsin, and then also planning to hit several national parks and take a look at the landscapes and the geology there as we're also learning and talking about and studying geography and maps. So we're planning to kind of tie it all together with a big end of the year field trip next summer. So just throwing that out there as a fun thing that you can do and it really brings the learning to life when the kids are able to travel and see it, touch it, smell it and feel it with all of their senses, all the things that we've been learning about.
I would love for you to message me if you're a current homeschool family and I would love to hear about the curriculum that you love. I'm always excited to learn more, I believe in lifelong learning. You can send me an email, katie@katiehedrick.com
And if you haven't already, jump over to the website, teachmetohomeschool.com so that I can help support you on your homeschool journey.
