Our 2023-2024 Homeschool Plan: Curriculum & Resources

The time has come! My favorite time of year honestly. The pulling together of new resources for the coming school year. Is it just me, or is this part of the homeschool facilitation process more fun than the actual application sometimes? ha! To be clear, I’ve been working on this part of our next year for quite some time now. I just haven’t had the chance to get it all typed up for a blog post.

Let’s get into it!

I am doing things a bit differently this coming year and taking even more of a “Charlotte-Mason-ish” approach to our learning environment. We’ve always loved great living literature, narrating what we are learning about, poetry, a sprinkling of nature study, etc. This year will be a bit of trial and error when it comes to adding in new things, because in all honesty, I’ve got to figure out how to spread myself over four school-aged children this year, combining some subjects, and helping with any individual and independent lessons. To be clear, all of these subjects will not be done everyday. Several are once a week subjects, while others will be a few times a week.

This year I will have a sixth grader, fourth grader, second grader, and kindergartener! My older two will be doing a lot of subjects together, and the same goes for my younger two. However, there will still be a good bit of individual lessons for the younger two that I will need to facilitate. The older two will have several independent subjects and that is always super helpful!

This blog post will be organized into individual lessons/subject areas for each of my older two, subjects my older two will be doing together, individual lessons/subject areas for each of my younger two, subjects my younger two will be doing together, and finally, the subjects all of us will be enjoying as a family.

*Also, as a note, most books we have in our home library have been purchased used or at a discount (new) from places like Amazon, ChristianBook, or Rainbow Resource. I love shopping on ThriftBooks for my used books though, and sometimes AbeBooks has good deals. I’ve also had some great finds at local thrift stores and random free books here and there! You can read more about special savings opportunities at ThriftBooks specifically on my favorites page!

Sixth Grade

Mathematics

My oldest son will continue with Teaching Textbooks this year, and will be working on the pre-algebra course. Last year he completed the Math 7 course, so this is the next step in their curriculum. If you haven’t tried Teaching Textbooks yet, I have a whole blog post review here!

Vocabulary

We took a break from Wordly Wise 3000 last year for my oldest, but I am adding it back in this year with Wordly Wise 3000 Book 6 Student Edition. When on a good sale, I purchased the student book, test book, and answer key. This is a resource that I used as a homeschooled kid, and I really do think it helped to build up my vocabulary, as well as reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. Each week they will be presented with 15-20 new words, and each day there is a different format for how they are to engage with those words.

Fourth Grade

Mathematics

My oldest daughter will also continue with Teaching Textbooks this year. She started with Math 3 last year and really enjoyed it. She’s actually already started Math 4 because she wanted to keep her skills up! Some of the concepts she will learn this year will be: Simple and long addition and subtraction with real world applications, simple and long multiplication & division, simple geometry, including angles, perimeter, area, and Venn diagrams, money, including writing a check, recording deposits, and checks, multiplying and dividing with money, measurements, including metric system and conversions, probability and percentages, and roman numerals.

Vocabulary

This will be my nine-year-old’s first time using Wordly Wise 3000. She will begin with Wordly Wise 3000 Book 4 Student Edition. I purchased the student book, test book, and answer key for her. I like this format because it’s pretty much all done independently and even though it’s “workbook” style, it gives them structure with short lessons, adds to their growing vocabulary, and it engages their critical thinking skills each day of the week when presented with the new words in different scenarios to consider.

Handwriting

My kids have always enjoyed having their own handwriting book each year, and Cursive Success is the next book in the Handwriting Without Tears series for my fourth grader. She has really enjoyed learning cursive and this book will help her to continue working on that skill.

Communal for Sixth & Fourth Grade

Grammar

We really enjoyed working through several BraveWriter Dart selections this past year, and while they do cover grammar concepts, I felt like my kids needed extra reinforcement from week to week. More practical application if you will. We are going to give Fix It! Grammar from IEW a try this year. We will be working through Level 2: Town Mouse and Country Mouse this year. This will be something the two of them can work on mostly independently about four times per week.

Spelling

My older two are fairly strong spellers, but I wanted to make sure that the phonetic concepts (transferring that knowledge from reading to spelling) they needed to learn in order to spell more complex words were covered in detail to avoid any issues down the road. I did All About Spelling Levels 1 and 2 with my oldest daughter, but we took a break from it last year. We will be completing All About Spelling Level 3 together this year.

Literature

We really loved using BraveWriter Darts this past school year, but we weren’t able to finish all 10 that came in the bundle from the 2022-2023 releases (to finish Maya and the Robot, Egg Marks the Spot, Maybe Maybe Marisol Rainey, and Wilderlore: The Accidental Apprentice). We will continue to finish those and then move onto the 2022-2023 Arrows book choices (I got them when BW had a big sale last year). The kids really loved reading these book selections together, and I want to keep that going, but we will also be adding in some other literature choices as well that will be partial or year-long reads. Those selections (at time of posting) will be Robinson Crusoe, Bulfinch’s Greek and Roman Mythology The Age of Fable, and Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We will also be reading poetry throughout the year from Tennyson, Dickinson, and Wordsworth (AmblesideOnline schedule). I purchased the AmblesideOnline Poetry Anthology Volume Four which covers these three poets.

Composition/Writing

We will continue using BraveWriter’s Partnership Writing course this year because honestly we didn’t get to many of the projects this past year. I’ve picked out about seven writing projects from this course that will take us the full three terms. For the most part the children will be providing oral narrations after our readings everyday, but we will also be working on some written narrations as well.

Apologetics & Logic

If you read my post from last year where I described our 2022-2023 school choices, you may remember that we gained access through a family gift, to the Foundations Comparative Worldview curriculum last year. We did not get to all of the lessons, so we will also be using this resource again this year. My sister facilitates the lessons with the older two and they have really enjoyed it!

As for the logic component, even though the above mentioned resource includes that, we will be working through the book The Fallacy Detective (workbook edition) by Nathaniel Bluedorn and Hans Bluedorn. This book will help them to learn how to spot common errors in reasoning and how to engage critical thinking.

Geography

My older two will be working through Minn of the Mississippi with me, along with additional geography studies and mapwork with the younger two, which I will get to a bit later. I purchased a Beautiful Feet map for each child, and they will each add to it as we read through the Holling Clancy Holling book.

Citizenship

Wanna know the thing I’m most nervous about? Plutarch. Plutarch was the father of what we would now call political science, and funny enough, that was basically my husband’s masters degree (International Relations to be exact). I think I may be roping him in! This is at it’s core a study in citizenship and character studies.

Plutarch himself does not label any of the Greek or Roman personalities he wrote about as “good” or “bad”, but leaves it up to the student/reader to engage in discourse about these historical figures and make observations about the decisions they made and how their actions affected those they served. We will read about Publicola, Alcibiades, Coriolanus, and Cato the Younger this year (Ambleside Online schedule). I also purchased The Practical Plutarch to read before starting with the children. This will help guide my teaching of this “subject” and give me practical advice as we dive in!

Science and Natural History

Our science studies will consist of reading through and orally narrating after our readings, along with practical observations in nature, some note booking, and hands-on experiments. The books we plan to use this year are: A Walk Through the Glen: Kingsley’s Lessons in Earth Lore, Volume 1 (a portion of Madame How and Lady Why), The Ocean of Truth: The Story of Sir Isaac Newton, Storybook of Science, Great Inventors and Their Inventions, and The Genesis Debate. This last one presents the three main creation views, each defended by a team in a charitable forum.

Foreign Language

At time of posting, I am still on the fence about introducing Latin with my older two… I have all of the materials (Latina Christiana – mostly used), just not sure we will have the capacity this year. We do have access to the full Rosetta Stone software, so we may just incorporate more Spanish this year as we have time.

Second Grade

Mathematics

My rising second grader is still completing Math-U-See Alpha and then will move on to Math-U-See Beta once I feel she has mastered her basic addition and subtraction facts. This has been one of her more challenging subjects, and we’ve moved fairly slowly so that we have a really solid base to move forward with. I have talked at length about these two levels with Math-U-See in prior year’s curriculum round ups (see the beginning of this post for those links).

Language Arts

As for the individual subjects my second grader will be completing with me, these will continue to include All About Reading (finishing Level 2 and moving on to Level 3), Explode the Code (Books 3 and 4) for additional phonics review, and Handwriting Without Tears (Printing Power). We will be adding in All About Spelling Level 1 this year, which I already had on hand from using before with another child. *Note: We have the older B&W versions of All About Reading Levels 1-3 and you can probably find those used for a lot less!

Kindergarten

Mathematics

My youngest had already begun Math-U-See Primer before the beginning of summer. He is at Lesson 9 and he enjoys working on his lessons like his older siblings do. I’ve used Primer for all four of my children, and I think it gives a nice solid base to work from as an introduction to mathematics. I talk about that more here.

Language Arts

I have pretty much used the same beginning language arts materials (with the exception of an early grammar book we did not like) for all four of my children when just starting out, and I feel like it’s worked really well for each of them (thankfully). My youngest will begin with All About Reading Level 1, Explode the Code Book 1 (after finishing Get Ready for the Code Books B and C), and Letters & Numbers for Me by Handwriting Without Tears.

Communal for Second & Kindergarten

Literature

There is a chance we will add in more literature read-alouds specifically for my 7 and 5 year olds, but for now I have Aesop’s Fables and The Blue Fairy Book lined up, as well as poetry from A.A. Milne (which I love!) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s, A Child’s Garden of Verses. They also participate occasionally when I am reading a BraveWriter Dart selection or other “just for fun” read aloud.

History & Geography

In addition to some involvement with the older two’s history studies this year (see below), my younger two will be enjoying 50 Famous Stories Retold and American Tall Tales with me this year! We will work through Paddle to the Sea together as well, and I also bought Beautiful Feet maps for them that coordinate with this geography study.

Science and Natural History

The Burgess Bird Book for Children and James Herriot’s Treasury for Children will be our primary texts for natural history and nature studies this year for my younger two. We have tons of other materials on hand in our home library to reference, so I’m sure those will come in to play as well in addition to discovering nature organically.

Communal for All Children

Faith Studies

We will most likely use a mix of The Ology (we got about halfway through last year) and The New City Catechism (new to us) for our group time in this area. Have you used this last one before? I’d love to hear about your experience if you have. We also will continue reading our Christian Heroes Then & Now series, finishing Elizabeth Elliot and then moving on to Corrie Ten Boom. We have a lot of reading to accomplish this year, so I don’t want to commit to more than two. ha!

I would also really like to incorporate the Pilgrim’s Progress story by John Bunyan into our year. I read the original as a teen, and the book was really impactful for me. We currently own the original by John Bunyan (my personal childhood copy), Little Pilgrim’s Progress by Helen L. Taylor (this is also a more updated version with animal characters), and Little Pilgrim’s Big Journey. I’m still figuring out how I want to use these. I will probably either read aloud one of the “advanced” versions to my older two and the Little Pilgrim’s Big Journey to my younger two, or give my older kids the original (for my 11-year-old) and Little Pilgrim’s Progress (for my 9-year-old) to read themselves, and just read aloud Little Pilgrim’s Big Journey to the younger two kids.

History and Geography

This year we will be focusing on early American history (mostly pre-contact, but some after that too), as well as a secondary stream simultaneously of British history. Some of the main “spines” we will be using for early American history will be This Country of Ours, Who Was First?: Discovering the Americas, The World in 1492, and We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History. I have a huge list of other books I want to add in, some I’ve already got on hand, and others that are sitting patiently on a ThriftBooks wish list.

As for the British stream of history, I found a great book that we will work through (my oldest already swiped it and read it all) called The Story of Britain from the Norman Conquest to the European Union. I was able to find this used for less than half the price currently on Amazon. I’ve joked that I will just have my oldest teach this stream, because he has already read the book and this is definitely his wheelhouse.

My older two will each be utilizing a book of centuries/timeline this year for the first time. As we learn about something, they can choose to enter it into their timeline with notes that stood out to them and draw or paste a picture to go with it.

In addition to Minn of the Mississippi (for the older two), Paddle to the Sea (for the younger two), and general weekly mapwork/drills, we will be following the Ambleside Online schedule for AO Groups Form 2A using Charlotte Mason Elementary Geography and Home Geography for Primary Grades by C.C. Long.

Shakespeare

We are going to jump into Shakespeare this year with Edith Nesbit’s Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare! I also purchased the audio version of this book because I’ve been told it’s helpful to hear the plays as well as read along. I was super excited to grab the beautiful watercolor puppets (digital download) from Rachel at Our Quiet Growing Time on Instagram (RachelKiwiDesigns shop on Etsy) to use while we read to keep the characters straight. ha. (I also grabbed a pack of puppets to use with our Plutarch studies.) We will read the Bard of Avon: The Story of William Shakespeare before jumping into Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and King Lear this year! Our area Shakespeare performance group is doing Hamlet in the spring, so I wanted to make sure we covered that play this year especially!

Composer and Artist Study

We will be following the AmblesideOnline schedule for composer and artist study this year. This includes Renaissance Music, Maurice Ravel, and Opera Selections for the music portion and Tintoretto, Claude Monet, and Georges Seurat for artist study. I have downloaded and will print the free art selections from Rebecca at A Humble Place, which we will use along with various biographies, documentaries, and casual, organic study of the selected pieces themselves.

I grabbed some opera books from ThriftBooks (not pictured) to assist with that term of study, and there are lots of options out there for experiencing the musical pieces. Maaaaaany years ago we used Classics for Kids and we will most likely use that a good bit again!

Beginners Art Course

We didn’t get as far as I would have liked last year with the Idlewild & Company The Art Studies course, but of what we did get through, my kids seemed to really like it. My sister, an artist herself, has spearheaded the lessons and we will continue to use it this coming year. We don’t do the lessons every day (as the course outlines), but once a week, so the nineteen weeks of lessons will carry us through most of the year. I wrote a little more about this last year here (near the bottom).

Hymn Study

We will continue to use either Happy Hymnody’s 2023-2024 schedule of hymns and free resources, or Ambleside Online’s schedule of hymns for each term. I haven’t decided, and honestly it doesn’t really matter to me. We love hymns and we will incorporate them somehow. We will also continue to use Then Sings My Soul to learn more about the authors and backgrounds of songs included in that volume of the series.

Nature Study

In addition to the natural history special study (birds) and various scientific topics mentioned earlier for both my older two and younger two, we will put specific focus on object lessons in the areas of trees/shrubs/vines, stars/sky, and amphibians following the Ambleside Online 2023-2024 schedule. Or we may just do our own thing. This is subject to change. I hold this very loosely. ha! Oh, and the Beginning Birdwatcher’s Book (I have two) are for my younger two.

Planning

I will be using my Customizable Homeschool Teacher Planner again to map out each week in detail, and I created a different Year-At-A-Glance for myself this year (this is my typical Year-At-A-Glance (free download!)) to get a good outline for the entire year in order to make sure getting all of this accomplished is reasonable. I had to go a slightly different route this year because of the amount of resources we will be pulling from. I typically plan a week at a time the weekend before, and for the beauty subjects I use the Monthly Beauty Subjects Planner component of my planner download to sketch out those details a month at a time. I am still working out how I want to organize my planner this year to incorporate a fourth student and the combination subjects. I may share here if you’re interested, but I will most likely be sharing on Instagram.

What Questions Do You Have?

I know that was a novel, and for that I apologize! I like to use this for my own records as well, and I really like reading what other people are using because it gives me ideas for the future. I never want what I share here to cause you to question your choices, or make you spend unnecessary money. I genuinely believe that your instincts will guide you for your own family’s needs when choosing resources and curriculums for your children’s education. Are we using any of the same things this year? I would LOVE to hear if you’ve used anything similar and what your experience was with it.

If you’re interested, you can see some prior year’s choices below. This will be our seventh homeschool year, but I didn’t have a blog for the first several years to document.

• 2022-2023 Curriculum Picks
• 2021-2022 Combination Subjects Curriculum Choices
• 2021-2022 Fourth Grade Curriculum Choices
• 2021-2022 Second Grade Curriculum Choices
• 2021-2022 Kindergarten Curriculum Choices
• 2020-2021 Combination Subjects Curriculum Choices
• 2020-2021 First Grade Curriculum Choices
• 2020-2021 Third Grade Curriculum Choices