2024-2025 Curriculum Choices
We are thrilled to be venturing into our second year of homeschool! We enjoyed Mills’ 1st grade year more than we could’ve ever imagined, and while we are eager for 2nd grade, we are currently enjoying a well deserved summer break. During our first year of homeschool, it was confirmed that we have a traditional approach to schooling, but we also really love spending a lot of time reading good books and integrating children’s literature into our studies. When considering our curriculum for next year, I revisited our values for homeschool:
I will teach all subjects with a Christian worldview.
I want to spend more time snuggled on the couch reading books to, with, and alongside my children and less time learning at the table.
Even so, I don’t mind a good workbook. I like measurable learning.
Our academics will be fun and engaging, but they will be rigorous.
I want to honor childhood. We will play, travel, and go on adventures.
Below I’m sharing our curriculum choices for our 2024-2025 school year as well as some systems we will implement in regards to scheduling and planning. I hope our choices help to guide and inspire your homeschooling decisions!
Bible
Daily Devotional — Indescribable and How Great is Our God
The Ology — We will read and study one truth each week.
Answers Bible Curriculum, Year 1 (4x a week)
K-1 Workbook (Saylor will participate!)
Math (5x a week): Abeka, Arithmetic 3 — We chose Abeka because Mills is strong in math (we’re working one grade level ahead), and it’s an open and go curriculum. We have really enjoyed the spiral approach of this curriculum. It is definitely a traditional approach to math, but I am always able to grab manipulatives and a whiteboard to teach the how and why of math (when this curriculum is mostly teaching mathematical procedures). I also appreciate that it is inexpensive. (tests)
Language Arts (5x a week): Last year we used Abeka for our Language Arts curriculum (Letters and Sounds 1, Language 1, and Spelling & Poetry 1). We enjoyed those selections, and I would recommend them to other homeschool families. It would make sense to continue with the same curriculum, but after looking through Abeka’s 2nd grade language arts options, I decided we should switch things up to include more writing and word study. BJU Press & 180 Days of Spelling will support this change. BJU Press English 2 teaches both writing and grammar, swapping back and forth from chapter to chapter. 180 Days of Spelling and Word Study is not just learning to spell words, it’s also understanding and applying the words. I’m excited about these selections.
BJU Press English 2 — grammar & writing (tests)
180 Days of Spelling & Word Study, 2nd grade
Handwriting/Typing
Handwriting Without Tears — Cursive Kickoff
Reading (5x a week)
Christian Light Education, 2nd grade — Mills is a fluent reader, and I’m excited to have a formal reading program that will support reading comprehension and other reading strategies like inference, cause and effect, main idea, predictions, etc.
Independent Reading (20 minutes per day)
Shared Reading — I will update this post with a list of the books Mills reads independently and the books we read together.
Science (3x a week): God’s Design for Heaven and Earth
Social Studies (4-5x a week):
Other
Piano — Hoffman Academy
Composer Study — We will be using A Child’s Introduction to the Orchestra to study Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Artist Study — We will study Georges Seurat in the fall and Wassily Kandinsky in the spring.
Poetry
Planning
I used a homeschool planner the first half of last school year, and it just wasn’t working for us. We switched to the “Weekly Schedule” and “Lesson Plan” templates shown below and they served us so well that we’ll be continuing this system for our 2024-2025 school year. Each Sunday, I fill out and print the Weekly Schedule and clip it to a clipboard for Mills to refer to and check off all week long. This system gave Mills so much autonomy, and I love quickly seeing our week at a glance. Below is a look at our template for 2nd grade. The first section includes our devotional and Bible curriculum. We start each homeschool day with Bible. The second section in blue includes lessons and activities that are a bit more independent. I sit alongside Mills to teach, he works independently, and then I check his lessons. As he finishes his lesson books, he can independently work on handwriting, typing, reading, and piano. He typically picks the order in which he wants to complete the checklist in blue. The third section includes Science, Social Studies, Artist Study, Composer Study, and Shared Reading. All of these topics are ones that I must prepare in advance and directly teach.
I found that with a traditional homeschool planner, I was rewriting the same things every day. The reality is that I only need to plan specific lessons for a few subjects. The others are preplanned for me and we can just move from one lesson to the next: “Math Lesson #42” or “Spelling List 15”. Each week, I can simply update the lesson numbers on our Weekly Schedule template, and the lessons themselves are open and go. The only lessons I really need to pace, plan, and prep for are Science, Social Studies, and our Artist, Composer, and Poetry studies. I decided to create a super simple Lesson Plan template for each of these subjects. I prefer to plan out these lessons a few weeks at a time. Since we do Science 3 days a week, I like to plan 9-12 lessons at a time so that we’re good to go for 3-4 weeks. This lesson plan template allows me to organize what materials I might need for our lesson, plan picture books to accompany the lessons, and consider videos we might watch or handouts I might create to support our learning. Since I’m planning to homeschool the rest of my children using the same curriculums, having these lesson plans created and saved will be a gift to myself in the future!
It is really such a simple system, but it has been a wonderful way to simplify our homeschool! I have linked the PowerPoint slides for you to download and edit. The font I used is “Letters for Learners”.
I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about our homeschool. You can reach out by email at heyfrancieoutlaw@gmail.com or on Instagram (@francieoutlaw).