We are in the season of homeschool curriculum reviews. It’s very tempting to buy all the things we see other homeschool mom’s raving about, but before we do, there are 3 important things we need to know first.
If you’ve watched our videos before, welcome back! We appreciate you! If you’re new here welcome! I’m Tonya Johnson and I’m the Holiday Homeschooler where we believe every season is a holiday season. We love celebrating life and showing you how you can have a fun and exciting homeschool while keeping a biblical worldview.
Here are 3 things to consider before you buy this next year’s curriculum.
1. Know Your Child
In the early years this means to know their learning style. There are 4 primary learning styles; auditory (learn best through sound and verbal direction), kinesthetic (hands on learner), visual (learning through sight) and textbook (typical traditional school setting, learn from a textbook). Not all curriculum fits into all the learning styles. I have a training on how to identify your child’s learning style and then which curriculums fit with that learning style that you can check out after this.
As your child gets older this includes knowing the direction they’re going in life. By the time they start their 8th grade year, you need to prepare for whether or not your child will go to college. Homeschoolers can get all the same scholarships public schoolers can, but depending on the state you live in, you need to jump through some hoops to get them. The more prepared you are, the easier your child’s higher eduction experience will be. If college isn’t in their future, you can look into adding classes and possibly internships for whatever future career goal they have in mind. This doesn’t mean it needs to be set in stone, but having a loose path will help you decide which curriculum to use and what classes don’t need to be taken.
Also worth noting that if you have more than one child, there’s a 99% chance they should not be using the same curriculum, at least not for every subject. A huge perk of homeschooling is being able to tailor the learning path to the child. A lot of parents completely miss out on this perk simply because they don’t understand the learning styles.
2. Know Your Finances
As I mentioned last week, sacrificing your finances isn’t a necessary evil for homeschooling. I started making money from social media back in 2016 and put together a training on 6 ways that literally every homeschool mom can make money from home without sacrificing time with their family.
Having said that, whatever you choose in regards to your finances will impact your curriculum options. Some options may be less of a time sacrifice, but they’re more expensive. If money is your main concern as far as sacrifice goes, then you’ll want to choose options that are lest costly. Ive personally seen “cheaper” options that work just as well as more expensive options as long as you're wiling to put the time in to prep. For example, we use the good and the beautiful which is a slightly pricier curriculum if you buy it outright. What they do offer however is a free version if you’re willing to print and bind the material yourself. Option two takes much more time, but saves a significant amount of money. Know your finances and decide which area you’re willing to sacrifice the most in… money or time. Neither is right or wrong, its about what fits your family the best.
3. Know Your Why
Why are you homeschooling? If you need help uncovering your why, there’s a free training at the bottom that walks you step by step through creating your homeschool mission statement. Our mission statement can be broken into three sections:
Our homeschool revolves around God. We keep Him first; we don’t fit him into the extra spaces of our life. When Glori graduates, we want her to have a relationship with Jesus and a working knowledge of apologetics. She should be able to question mine and her dad’s faith and solidify it as her own, fully knowing why she believes what she believes, even if its different than us, before she leaves our house.
Here’s how this fits into our curriculum choices:
-We’re going to put a priority on a good bible curriculum including an apologetics course and make that part of our core subjects vs an elective that we do sporadically or relying on the church classes as her sole bible knowledge
Second to her relationship with Jesus is her relationship with us. We strive to build a relationship with her that will strengthen throughout her teenage years instead of fade.
Here’s how this fits into our curriculum choices:
-We’re purposely choosing parent led curriculum vs letting her sit in a room and teach herself. We’re by her side throughout the learning process having those conversations that come up. The older she gets the more tempting it will be to have her go to a room and do school by herself while I get some of “my time” back. Doing so would be in contradiction to our homeschool mission statement. This is also why we incorporate so many games into our school days.
It’s our privilege to tailor an education to her that prepares her for the future God has planned for her, not just what her dad and I may want to push her into doing for the sake of financial security. We want her to love the learning process, not just go through the motions.
Here’s how this fits into our curriculum choices:
-Our curriculum choices are going to fit into her learning style (see #1)
-We’re going to let her take classes she’s interested in, not just classes we see as necessary
*This also means we need to be walking with God daily so we can be sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s leading when it comes to Glori’s future. We can’t prepare her for what He wants, if we’re constantly pushing our agenda onto her. For the last few years, she’s been really into cooking and baking. As Ive prayed about her education from year to year, I have more and more confidence that God is going to use her love for culinary arts in her adult life which means it’s our job to help her learn the craft to the best of her ability. This may mean eliminating subjects we’d like her to take to make room for more cooking classes or at the very least more time in the kitchen cooking with her.
5th Grade Curriculum Picks
Having said all of that, here are our 5th grade curriculum picks. Keep in mind, we do half grades, so a large part of these we’re finishing up and about to start our 6th grade curriculum, others we're just starting with. Starting with our core subjects: You’ll want to make sure you’re watching the video to get the full scope of this. This isn’t a review blog, its a new curriculum blog, but a lot of these we also used for 4th grade and I just did a review video a few weeks ago if you’d like to see inside some of these and some of the projects that were done last year. It's linked at the bottom of this blog and also linked here.
1. Bible
2. Math
3. Language Arts (Writing, Spelling, Grammar, and Reading)
Math and Language Arts Centers
4. Science
5. History
Handwriting
Typing
Electives
Those are our core subjects, now for our electives. Again, make sure to watch the corresponding video to see how these work in real time.
Let me know if you’ve tried any of these curriculum companies and how you like them! See y’all next week!
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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