Our 2019-2020 Curriculum Selections + Homeschool Schedule and Planner

I LOVE reading the posts from bloggers this time of the year when curriculum choices are revealed. I also enjoy planning my new school year and trying new things. My only homeschooler left will be in fifth grade and she is looking forward to our new school year as much as I am because I am teaching to her passions.

If you want to skip through all my explanations, feel free to scroll to the bottom for a bullet list of our 2019-2020 curriculum selections. You can also read how we will schedule our year and stay organized. 

Bible

We use Character Concepts’ character workbooks for our morning Bible time. We will be using Proverbs People Volume 2. We grab our Bible and our workbook and dig in. We used Proverbs People Volume 1 last year and will pick up where we left off. In the evenings we read from The Child’s Story Bible (we are on our second round). 

5th Grade Math

We are sticking with Teaching Textbooks for math. We have been using Teaching Textbooks with my youngest since the middle of second grade (we were anxious to get out of workbook math, so we started grade 3 early). My daughter doesn’t love math, but this independent, self-teaching math curriculum makes it tolerable for her. I screwed up my oldest by being indecisive with math curriculum, so it’s Teaching Textbooks all the way!

5th Grade Grammar

Grammar is something I am passionate about teaching my children. Easy Grammar was so successful for our oldest that we decided to keep using it all the way through twelfth grade for our youngest. This homeschool grammar curriculum really is easy to teach and easy to learn. There is no sentence diagramming, but my kids can pick apart a sentence like it’s nobody’s business. There’s no fluff or busywork (at all!) and it’s very straight forward and non teacher intensive. 

Vocabulary and Spelling

We just finished Daily Skill Building: Vocabulary Volume I and will be using Daily Skill Building: Vocabulary Volume II and the spelling companion Daily Skill Building: Spelling Volume II. Can I tell you how thrilled I am that my daughter loved the vocabulary curriculum I created {for her} and is excited to use Volume II in the fall?! She’s even more happy about using our new spelling companion though, because she wasn’t happy with what we were using for spelling.

Both Daily Skill Building: Vocabulary and Daily Skill Building: Spelling are open and go resources that are independent and do not require a teacher’s guide. Spelling will be a little more hands-on as you have to give them their spelling words orally for tests and check them, but that will not take long at all. 

Creative Writing/Composition

Last year we used JacKris writing and it was pretty good, we didn’t finish it though. I think it was just a bit too much of drafting, editing, and final drafting (for outlines and writing assignments). My daughter enjoys writing, so I want to help grow her love of writing by not being so technical and just letting her write and correcting her grammar mistakes. We will be using Story Starters: Helping Children Write Like They’ve Never Written Before, which is a Charlotte Mason style writing “curriculum” by Karen Andreola and is part of The Gentle Art of LearningTM series.

Story Starters is designed to:

• Replace dry, dull writing with exciting writing
• Invoke sympathy for the characters and encourage writing with feeling
• Expand a child s literary powers with the practice of narration
• Develop a child s imagination with embellishment of story plots
• Stimulate reasoning powers with opportunity for problem-solving
• Reawaken and interest in language arts
• Uphold Biblical virtues

Story Starters is a one book per family, non-consumable, lavishly illustrated, multi-skill levels (grade 4-12), supplemental English course.

Elementary Science

I have mentioned numerous times that I have a budding meteorologist. After searching for a full weather curriculum and coming up empty-handed, I got permission from Master Books to create the Weather Student Notebook – A Meteorological Notebooking Adventure that uses The New Weather Book from Master Books. Students will use a combination of written narration, copywork, drawing and labeling alongside the book to learn all about weather, natural disasters, and meteorology.

Homeschool History Curriculum

It’s no secret that we LOVE The Mystery of History! We cycled through all four volumes with our oldest who graduated in 2018 and will be starting The Mystery of History Volume I with our 5th grader in the fall. This Christian history curriculum is chronological and written in a conversational tone. It weaves in Christian history right alongside all world events for a full overview of what is going on across the globe at the same time. 

When we first used The Mystery of History, I learned that history can be very exciting and not at all like I remember when I was a kid in public school! We created FREE Planning and Portfolio Pages for use with The Mystery of History.

Cursive Handwriting

In fourth grade we used The Good and the Beautiful’s Handwriting curriculum level six, which was 95% cursive. My daughter enjoyed the artwork and drawing and I especially liked that volume six focuses on U.S. Geography (the 50 states and capitals), which was perfect because we studied U.S. Geography last year. For fifth grade we will be using volume seven. The handwriting curriculum volumes are flexible, meaning that the volume doesn’t equal grade level. 

Custom “Geography” and Culture Study

My daughter has many passions and learning about Japan is one of them. We will be using a conglomerate of resources to dig deep into Japanese culture, including Japanese language learning,  Visits to Asia from Simply Charlotte Mason, and possibly portions of Sonlight’s Core F, Eastern Hemisphere. At the very least we will use Journey to the Eastern Hemisphere along with the companion Eastern Hemisphere Notebook Pages.

To summarize our 2019-2020 homeschool curriculum choices:

• Bible: Character Concepts’ Proverbs People
• Math: Teaching Textbooks
• Grammar: Easy Grammar
• Vocabulary: Daily Skill Building: Vocabulary Volume II
• Spelling: Daily Skill Building: Spelling Volume II
• Writing: Story Starters: Helping Children Write Like They’ve Never Written Before
• Science: Weather Student Notebook – A Meteorological Notebooking Adventure
• History: The Mystery of History Volume I (using the notebooking pages)
• Handwriting: The Good and the Beautiful’s Handwriting curriculum – level 7
• Geography: Visits to Asia, components of Sonlight’s Core F – Eastern Hemisphere
• Foreign Language: Japanese language learning (my daughter begged for this!)

That looks like a lot, but 5 of those topics are for language arts alone. I plan to stay super organized this year – keep reading to see how I will avoid homeschool burn out and stay on track!

Keeping Our Homeschool Organized

We will be using Homeschool Planet to plan our homeschool days. We both thrive on checkboxes and being able to spread everything out that we want to use (they have lessons plans for almost everything we will be using) with our custom homeschool schedule will be so amazing.

All I will need to do is pick out my lesson plans for each subject, input our school year/schedule (those details come next), and then click a few things and voilà!​​ It spits out our daily schedule. WHOA!

Homeschool Scheduling

We are excited to be incorporating our old homeschool schedule into our daily routine for the fall. This way of scheduling our homeschool will help prevent us from getting burned out. Since this post is about our homeschool curriculum selections, feel free to read more about this amazing homeschool scheduling method. I have a sample schedule for you to visualize how it works. We will be able to input this into Homeschool Planet to plan out our homeschool year in just a few clicks!