Homeschool Curriculum Choices for 2019-2020

Our homeschool curriculum choices for the 2019-2020 school year. This will be our 17th year of homeschooling!

homeschool curriculum choices

I can’t believe we’re entering our 17th year of home education.

The years flew by so fast! (I’ve noticed I’m saying that more and more these days.)

So, what does it look like when you’ve been homeschooling for such a long time?

Well, I’m sure it looks different for everyone. For us, our two oldest daughters have graduated.

This year we will just have three students in our homeschool. They’ll be in 10th, 8th, and 4th grades.

I’m kind of struggling with a little feeling of sadness that everything has to change. I honestly miss the days when we were all gathered around the table together.

Things are a lot more peaceful these days now that we aren’t balancing babies and toddlers along with our homeschooling. But I sure do miss having little ones in the house!

Related Post: How to Keep Little Ones Busy

So, for our family, our homeschool days are pretty peaceful since everyone is older and able to work mostly independently. I do have a daily teaching time scheduled with my youngest still, and I’m thankful for that.

This year our homeschool curriculum choices were largely influenced by a desire to save money and use what we already had.

A lot of the curriculum we’ll be using this year was already on our shelves from previous years.

This post contains affiliate links, which means I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. Read my disclosure here.

My Homeschool Planner

As usual, I’m using an Erin Condren Teacher Lesson Planner to organize and plan everything. I’ve written about this planner several times before.

(If you create an account with Erin Condren here, you can get a $10 off coupon to use on your first order.)

I still love using these planners.

Here’s how I modify the Erin Condren planner to work for my homeschool planning needs.

This year I also added in this Charlotte Mason homeschool planner (read my review of it here).

The verse I chose for inspiration this year is Romans 12:2.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

Homeschool Curriculum Choices

I’ve shared before how our family tends to lean toward a Charlotte Mason educational philosophy. But we also blend in some classical. We tend to be pretty eclectic in a lot of ways.

As my children have grown older, I find that I’m relying more on resources they can use independently. I still try to find books/texts that would fall into the “living books” category.

Related Post: My Favorite Charlotte Mason Resources

And I really, really don’t want to ever let go of picture books and dress up!

Watch the Video

So, even when our kids enter high school age, we keep on reading aloud and investing in fun historical costumes.

History

This year we’re going to be studying Medieval history. I considered many different options for our history curriculum, but I finally settled on Tapestry of Grace.

We used Tapestry of Grace the last time we went through this historical time period (three years ago).

There are lots of things that I love about TOG, and we already have all the books we used last time, so it was also an economical choice for us.

homeschool curriculum choices

In addition to some of the books listed in the Tapestry of Grace guide, I’m also using a book list I created myself from various sources.

homeschool curriculum choices

And, we’ll be using A Castle with Many Rooms as our history spine this year.

We’re also going to be listening to the Story of the World Volume 2 audio CDs whenever we’re on road trips (at least once a month).

We’re also going to be using this resource alongside everything else:

Geography

For geography, we’re going to be using the geography suggestions in the Tapestry of Grace manual.

And, of course we’re going to be using Pin It! Maps again. Especially focusing on the Europe and World maps this time around.

 

All ages benefit from and love these maps!

Read my reviews of Pin It! Maps here and here.

Math

For math this year we’re going to stick with our tried-and-true math curriculum of the past 6 years, Teaching Textbooks. This will be our 7th year using it!

For  younger children, I love Right Start Math. I used it with my youngest, and I continue to use the games and hands-on activities.

Read my review of Teaching Textbooks here.

Science

For science, my 10th grader will be using this Master Books astronomy bundle.

My 4th grader will be using Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Astronomy.

And my 8th grader will be using Apologia’s Exploring Creation with General Science.

We have the older editions of these Apologia books because we’ve used them for years.

Nature Study

When we do nature study, we’ll continue to go through Exploring Nature with Children. Read my review of it here.

Writing

This year we’re going to be using Writing with Skill. I had planned to use it last year, but then we didn’t end up using it.

Yay for already having the books on our shelves!

Grammar

We’ll be sticking with Easy Grammar for my two oldest.

My youngest will be using Master Books’ Language Lessons for a Living Education. We’ve never used this before, so I’m interested to see how he likes it.

Art

For picture study, we’ll be again using Simply Charlotte Mason’s Picture Study Portfolios. We’ve been using these for years.

For actual art lessons, we’ll be using these free watercolor art lessons.

We used this last year and loved the lessons. I learned so much! And, they’re free!

Music

This year we’re continuing on with the Beautiful Feet Books History of Classical Music program that we started last year.

We love this curriculum, and I highly recommend it! And it’s totally okay to take two years with it. 🙂 It’s worth savoring slowly.

One of my older daughters is very accomplished at piano, and she’s going to be teaching piano lessons to my youngest. I’m so excited for this! She’s going to be using this set of piano books to teach him.

I love the fact that my house is regularly filled with beautiful classical piano music.

Handicrafts

Here are some of the handicraft skills we’re going to be working on:

Evening Time

So, after years and years of planning morning time (which we used to call “Circle Time” when our children were all little), I realized it wasn’t working anymore.

With all the health issues my husband and I have been dealing with the past year, weird work hours, and adult children’s schedules, it just wasn’t working to have morning time.

So, we’re now having Evening Time. And, it’s working!

We basically combined what I was always hoping to accomplish with morning time with our regular family worship time. And, it’s working out well for us.

I made binders for our Evening Time, which include:

  • Our family vision statement and the verses that go with that
  • Hymns we’re learning with Happy Hymnody’s Hymn of the Month
  • Family favorite hymns
  • Creeds (Apostle’s Creed and Nicene Creed)
  • Bible verses to memorize
  • Other things to memorize, such as poems and helpful sayings

A New Homeschool Year

We’re planning to start easing into our new homeschool routine next week. A lot of our start time depends on when our new books arrive, as we don’t have them all yet. Everyone’s excited for new books!

Thanks so much for stopping by and reading about our homeschool curriculum choices for this coming year!

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Homeschool Curriculum Choices

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22 Comments

  1. Are you using Writing With Skill as planned this year? What are your thoughts on its effectiveness? Are your kids enjoying it?

    Reply

    1. Yes, we have been using it. And no, my kids have not enjoyed it at all! 🙂 It’s a very thorough program, and came highly recommended, but I wouldn’t choose it again, honestly. It possibly depends on your child’s learning style, but it just wasn’t a good fit for us.

      Reply

  2. Hi Joy! This is our first year homeschool. I’m looking at changing curriculums next school year. So I could use Tapestry of Grace Year 1 with my 8th and 3rd grader? What do I do when they complete the year 4? Your homeschool info has been so very helpful!

    Reply

    1. Hi Cheryl! Yes, Tapestry of Grace includes all grades, so you can have everyone on the same page, studying the same time period of history at their own level. When you complete year 4, you cycle back through all the years again. Every time they study that time period, they’ll be learning new things and reading books at their own learning level.

      We’ve only used TOG year 2 (this is our second time to use year 2), so I don’t have experience with the other years. This coming school year (2020-2021) I think we’re going to be switching to something different. 🙂

      Let me know if you have any other questions!

      Reply

      1. Hi. Stumbled on you while searching to read everything I can get my hands on about Tapestry of Grace while I try to make the decision whether to use it or not.

        After reading your comment about how you think you’ll move onto something else for the next school year I am left wondering why you wouldn’t want to continue to with TOG. Would you mind sharing?

        Reply

        1. Hi Tammy! We’ve used TOG twice. This year, I made the decision to use it because we needed to save money on curriculum and we already had the year 2 books from the time we had used it before. So, it was a frugal choice for us this time. TOG is a wonderful curriculum, and I have several friends who have been using it for many years with multiple age groups. However, I’m just feeling a desire to do something different for next school year.

          Every year I reevaluate our curriculum choices and make adjustments for my current students. I also take into consideration the thoughts and input of my older kids. Next year I will have 5th, 9th, and 11th grade students. The input from the older ones has been that they would prefer not to do TOG next year. Some of the assigned books for the upper level students are pretty dry and not extremely enjoyable to read. Which is to be expected, of course, for high school. It’s just personal preference.

          You can get a pretty good feel for the curriculum from the book lists and samples on the TOG website. Although I know it’s never the same as actually having it in-hand and using it yourself. We’ve used many different curricula in our 17 years of homeschooling. I know some families are able to find just the right curriculum and stick with the same thing through the years, but I’ve often felt a need to change things up as we go through different ages and seasons in our family. 🙂

          Reply

  3. Hi Joy,

    This is so fun to see how other homeschoolers do it! We are also a homeschooling family and this year we are using The Good and The Beautiful curriculum. We are def also a Charlotte Mason style family and really enjoy doing homeschool in that way.

    I’m not sure if you have ever heard of Lamplighter Theatre before, but they have great dramatized audios of both books, ” Sir Malcolm and The Missing Prince” and also “Sir Knight of the Splendid Way”.

    We love listening to dramatized audios here in our home, it really brings the books and stories to life.

    Thanks for linking up with us on the Homestead Blog Hop!

    -Cherelle

    Reply

    1. Hi Cherelle! I’ve heard so many good things about TGATB. We do have and love many of the Lamplighter Theatre audios. Love them so much, especially when we’re on a road trip! Thanks for stopping by today!

      Reply

  5. Lots of good info here for homeschoolers. My grandchildren are starting to get married now and I pray some of them pick up the homeschooling mantle. Time does have a way of flying by, doesn’t it!

    Reply

  6. This is so encouraging! We will be starting our 6th year of homeschooling in a few weeks and I love reading about families that have successful grown kids who were homeschooled! Also, I loved all the art and music resources, I am definitely going to look into those!

    Reply

  7. Thank you for sharing at Best of the Weekend! We started school this week. I’ve been using aBeka, but this year decided to use Sonlight with a lot of subjects in order to be able to combine subject classes with my 2nd and 4th graders. I like it so far. It was fun to read what you are using. I know there are tons of choices out there and I’m just not familiar with most of them.

    Liberty @ B4andAfters.com

    Reply

  9. HELLO Joy, I have been enjoying your blog for seven or eight years now. Your homeschool posts are some of my favorite ones. They are always so encouraging. I look forward to checking out some of your links.

    Reply

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