I am really excited to be sharing this post! We have been homeschooling my oldest now since she was in preschool. This year we will be going through preschool curriculum, kindergarten curriculum and third grade curriculum.
I will have a separate post on the curriculum we are using for each grade level, but what I am most excited to work through with my girls this school year though is all of our family units! So I am going to share that first 😁
My girls really thrive with hands-on learning, unit studies, and art projects. I gain a lot of ideas from several homeschool profiles that I follow on social media. Many of these different profiles write so many amazing and FUN curriculums. So I have bought several to try this year. I had such a hard time narrowing down our choices because there are so many fun units!
Our Homeschool Year
I want to give some insight to what our school year looks like. I consider us to be year round schoolers. Meaning that we don’t take a long drawn out break. We definitely take it easy when we need to though. We usually slow down around holidays and incorporate mini units that relate to that holiday. We also shift our learning as it warms up outside. We are typically doing less book work and focusing on family units and all the time outside.
The thing is, I feel like learning is taking place every day. Maybe you aren’t always as intentional with your instruction as you would be on a “normal” homeschool day, but we are still always learning, even on those low key break days/weeks during holidays or simply if we are just in a busy life phase.
I usually run our homeschool from July 1-June 30 and we school four days a week with our books. We use Fridays to run errands, take field trips, and spend quality family time together. We do use Fridays to make up any work we maybe don’t get to throughout the week when our extracurriculars like dance and sports are in full swing.
We like to take our mornings slow. We soak in some family time, read some books, maybe watch some cartoons, and have breakfast. We then get everything cleaned up and ready for our day. We do core curriculum like language arts/reading and math in the mornings. We then take some time to play and get outside on nice days. We have lunch and rest, then family unit studies in the afternoon. This works really well for my girls and knocking out our core to get to these units that intrigue them more.
How to Choose Mini Units?
I really love to try and focus a lot of my girls’ learning by following their interests. My girls love anything with arts and crafts. They love to paint and draw. Many of our mini units have the option to notebook and I really love this for looking back over their learning through the year and the progression of their skills and my girls love to look back at so many of their projects documented in their notebook.
I also look to see if I will be able to work through the units on different levels with my girls. My oldest is a bit advanced with her reading and writing skills so I want to be able to challenge her in areas but not make things so difficult on my younger girls. So having a mini unit that all of my girls can do something in is really helpful. All of these units offer something for my preschooler, kindergartener, and third grader.
So let’s dive in and talk about each unit! My girls are already begging to start them, so there is a good possibility we will be starting some of them before July.
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Bible
We are working through two different “curriculums” if you will for bible. I’m trying really hard to incorporate more biblical teachings with our girls because I feel like it is so important to be practicing and living by the biblical word daily rather than just learn about it one day a week at church. We really try to slow down on Sundays as a family, and I love that we can use one of these as a family (well both could be really) and we work through the other daily through the week.
Ok, so let’s get into what the curriculums are…
The first one is The Word Studies by Idlewild and Company. The curriculum is designed for four days a week, so we use this in our daily bookwork and studies.
I really love the simplicity of this curriculum. It is very straightforward. It offers the Bible readings right in the curriculum, offers discussion points to work through with your kids and usually some type of play or art to tie it all together. This is especially good for younger kids to make scripture more relatable to them.
This curriculum is based on a nature curriculum, The Organic Studies, which I will talk about more soon, but you could simply buy this curriculum to go along with your Bible and you are set. I added a few nature resource books with ours to engage my girls a little further with other topics.
A few of our favorite resource books to go along with the Word Studies have been Five Minute Devotions for Children and Slow Down: 50 Mindful Moments in Nature.
We actually started on this early because I couldn’t wait. You can work in order or skip around. I am slightly skipping around when things work out that I know we are taking a specific trip or can tie something into a lesson. If something like this doesn’t come up, I slide back to working in order.
The second Bible Study we are working through is The Bible Recap Kids Devotional. We usually work through these readings and lessons on Sunday morning as a family. It’s nice to be able to involve dad in our Bible studies some too. This one has been great and my girls really love it so far! The lessons are pretty quick. You could always plan ahead and add more to it if you wanted, but it tells you what scripture to read, has some discussion points and usually a simple activity like a drawing, word puzzle or something similar.
I really love how the Bible Recap goes in chronological order. I think this is important for kids and adults, for that matter, to see the order in which everything happened. It’s been really great so far and I love being able to incorporate the Bible more into our lessons.
Science
I loved science growing up! My girls really love anything nature inspired that offers crafts, experiments, or being outside. Naturally I had a lot of fun looking through science curriculums this year. It was hard to choose just one, so we have a few that we are going to work through!
The first one I am going to talk about is the Organic Studies from Idlewild and Company. Our Word Studies listed above works hand in hand with the Organic Studies. You do not have to have both to complete one or the other but they compliment each other wonderfully. These would also work really well for preschool-kindergarten working through letter of the week. This curriculum is set up in 34 weeks. Most topics are a week long but a few with more information are two to three weeks long. It does not have to be done in any particular order. Each week correlates with a letter/topic in alphabetical order.
My girls and I have already started working on a couple topics and are thoroughly enjoying them. These lessons are very straight forward, offer tons of recommended resource books to introduce the topics to young children, have discussion questions and an exploring/art prompt. I love that the lessons run four days and then on the fifth day suggest field trip ideas or it could be used as a time to slow down and go back over a topic your child really love. They really give flexibility to move at your own pace and choose where you take the learning. The downside to this curriculum is you need to invest in some reference books, so it can be a little pricier in the beginning. I love building our family library and try and find good thrift book websites to order from. Several of the read alouds mentioned in the curriculum are available on YouTube so that helps too.
Next up, we have The Waldock Way Weather Unit! I am planning on starting this unit in the next month or so once we finish up some extra curricular activities. I have had fun prepping this unit and can’t wait to dive in. This unit is all about weather and climate that the entire family can enjoy. I am excited for this to really work as a family unit because it reaches my young littles with different games, play dough mats and simple activities, while also reaching my oldest in more challenging ways.
These units are set up to really be open and go once you prep your materials. Prepping is printing off the curriculum, printing the student journals, and I will prepare materials needed for each week. I like to plan a week of materials at a time the weekend prior. I grabbed a Weather and Climate Science Lab experiment book to add a little extra to the units. There are 16 topics covered in this unit.
Last but not least for science, I grabbed some units from The Good and The Beautiful. We use math, language arts, handwriting and a few extracurricular from here and I have loved everything we have tried. We are using the science for little hearts and hands winds and wave and the fields and flowers units. I actually bought these for resource books to go along with our Organic Studies and our Weather Unit but I am sure we will work through the books in full because the lessons are so good! The come with a storybook and a parent guide. The lessons alternate between a story and a video then offer up discussion points and extra activities.
These could be used as stand alone science units. There is one more on the website so depending how we do getting through the curriculum we have I may need to go back for the last unit.
That’s it for science and we are really excited to dive into all of these awesome lessons!
Geography
This will be a new topic for us this year. I’m looking to slowly just introduce this for my girls. I mostly was looking to add a little more for my third grader but my kindergartener and preschooler will be able to listen to stories and work through some of the activities with us.
We are going to be working through another Waldock Way unit, Traveling the States.
This unit looks so fun. You get to take time allowing your child to find each state on a map to color in, learn about each state’s flag, state bird, flower, etc. The unit comes with color sheets, educational games, and a YouTube playlist.
I really love immersing my girls in different literature and books to fuel their learning. I picked up some great resource books to go through and learn about some of the state facts. A few that look amazing to go with this unit are Only in America: The Weird and Wonderful 50 States, National Geographic Kids Beginner’s U.S. Atlas, and 50 Adventures in the 50 States.
History
Growing up in school, I always found history pretty boring when it was taught to me. However, the more I find curriculum and mini units to work through with the girls, I find myself really loving the fact that I am learning along side them.
This year we are going to be working through Adventures Through the New World and Adventures Through America by Little School of Smiths. We will also be sprinkling in a few of her American Girl History Units throughout as they fit in the timeline. We have worked through a few of the American Girl Units already and my girls have really loved them.
These units are simple to incorporate the whole unit as is or pick and choose some activities to go along with some of the stories. They are very inviting, tons of crafts and recipes.
I love that you can do the curriculums in chronological order. That is my plan because I really love to learn that way, however, you do not have to complete them in any particular order. My girls have already been asking to start these units as they flip through them and see some of the projects.
With so many crafts and projects, this curriculum really is really great to notebook and journal to see your child’s progression. My girls love looking back on their note booking journaling when we finish up the units to see everything they have learned about.
We are also using Me on a Map from Little School of Smiths. We have already worked through this unit with my oldest around her kindergarten year, so it is time to work through it again for my next girly in kindergarten. This unit is fun though so everyone wants to participate again!
This unit again is simple and straight forward. The unit is based on the book Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney Several fun activities, recipes, and crafts to choose from or work through all of them. Start with my home, my street, my city, my state, my country, my continent, my planet, and all about me. We are excited to work through this unit again!
Art
Last but not least we are trying an art curriculum this year. My girls love all things creating and especially anytime we get paint out. So we are trying out the Lily and Thistle Watercolor Course. This course is expensive but you get a lifetime access to it. I love that you get videos and print offs to trace and paint.
I have also looked into the Idlewild and Co Art Studies Course. We really love the course we recently started through this company and the art studies looks like it focuses on a lot of basic art techniques. So while I can’t speak to this course, it is definitely one that I am considering.
That’s a wrap…
We are really excited to be working through all of our family units through the next year. Most of these should last us through the entire next school year. It may even extend a little more. This is the beauty of homeschooling and working through units are the girls’ levels and interests. We have so much freedom at how we move about.
We have an exciting year ahead. Stay tuned for a post on each individual grade level core curriculum my girls will be working through. ☺️