Tag: homeschool planner

2024-2025 Homeschool Curriculum Picks

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

Here we go again! We are back in the homeschool swing and of course, we changed up a few things again. I wrote a post recently about how we were going to continue to use Acellus Academy for homeschooling, but about 4 days before our school year started I changed my mind. I changed my mind for a few different reasons, the main one being I didn’t like the idea of my kids going to their rooms and sitting on their computers for a few hours and that was the school day. We homeschool so we can do this together, not sit in front of a screen and barely interact. Acellus Academy was what I needed last year. The year was hard and there were a few extended family issues early in the year that were overwhelming, and then we moved. So, for that, I am so thankful I had that option, but I decided not to continue down that road. There were a few other considerations with the curriculum itself mainly because I was not sure how good overall the program was. Most of the programs seemed to work just fine, but we did not care for the writing portion. I had also started looking for Math options that would work better for my daughter, who struggles in math, and that led to me going a whole different route this year. Lastly, I knew that some of the curricula we had chosen and used in the past were great and I wanted to get back to those. I have state-tested my kids twice and they were pretty far ahead in most subjects. Their language skills were always top percentile, so if nothing else I know for a fact what we do for Language Arts is working. All of that together helped me choose this year’s curriculum.

(2024-2025 will be our ninth year of homeschooling and I will have an 8th grader and a 6th grader)

Homeschool Planner

I have not always been great at using my yearly planner. I have homeschooled in three different states and none of them have required that I keep records on hand. I usually keep a homeschool planner for myself, but since it’s not mandated I tend to get a little loose with that planner halfway through the year. I don’t really need it, since we typically have a curriculum where you simply do the next lesson, but I do like to have one. I have tried numerous versions of pen and paper planners over the years, but my favorite has surprisingly been an online planner. So, this year I went ahead and signed back up for the Well Planned Gal’s online homeschool planner. The Well Planned Gal has a great paper and pen planner if that is what you enjoy, but for me, it was too much stuff. I like a plain planner. The online version has a free 30-day trial of the full planner, and if you don’t want that it has a limited free version. I know I like it so I went ahead and signed up for the year subscription. My favorite thing is that I can enter all the lessons/Assignments for the week or month and then print out weekly plans for my kids. I can also print out weekly sheets that tell us everything we did and then put those in a records binder. This is what I did two years ago to make my own records. I will warn you that there is a bit of a learning curve to learn how to assign things well, but it’s worth it. You can also track grades in the program, meal plans, chore charts, and attendance. In fact, it tracks attendance for you as long as you are going in and checking off the daily assignments. For me, this has been the best and most used planner I have tried.

Online Planner- https://shop.wellplannedgal.com/index.php/shop/well-planned-day-online.html

Language Arts

Language Arts was a pretty easy call. As I mentioned my kids have scored high on their language skills so I trust the programs that we have used for years. First and foremost we will be going back to IEW. We used both their Structure and Style and their Fix-it-Grammer programs. Structure and Style is the one thing my kids were not excited about bringing back as the weekly assignments can take a bit of time, but the program is fantastic and we are keeping it. Fix-it-Grammar is also something I have been impressed with for years. They are better at grammar than most adults I know and it doesn’t take very long each day. It’s a simple but very effective program. To round out the Language Arts curriculum we will continue using Wordly Wise for vocabulary, and Spelling Power for spelling. I will be putting an emphasis on read-alouds this year as that was something we let go of for a time last school year, and they, of course, have their own daily individual reading.

IEW- https://iew.com

Wordly Wise- https://www.rainbowresource.com/wordly-wise-3000-all-editions

Spelling Power- https://www.rainbowresource.com/002784.html

Math

Math has been a bit of a tough spot for us for a few years. For most of our homeschool time, we have used Math-U-See. It works great, I have nothing bad to say, but my daughter in particular struggles with math. Some of it is that she hates Math and therefore doesn’t try hard, but some of it is that she needs it explained in different ways. Because it’s difficult for her I have also tried a few online programs. We used Teaching Textbooks, CTC Math, and then Acellus Math. They all work about the same. My son doesn’t struggle with math as much, but he also hasn’t been thrilled with a math program yet. I happened to watch a YouTube video about a week ago talking about Dension Algebra and it sounded wonderful so I ordered it. The thing that really caught my attention is that there is a solutions binder as well as a video for each and every problem he will have. One of his biggest complaints last year was that he would be taught a concept and then have problems that didn’t necessarily line up exactly with that concept. Math is not my strong suit and there were a few times that even I couldn’t help him after watching the instruction video. So, if he gets stuck at all this year there will be a step-by-step how-to for that problem. I also prefer paper and pencil math. He would try to do the online problems in his head instead of using scratch paper and sometimes that would cause him to get a problem wrong that he shouldn’t have. Dension Algebra has instruction videos for each lesson and then solution videos for each problem. This I think is the best compromise for math. It’s still being taught by a math teacher, someone who really understands the concepts, but he has to work the problems out on paper, and if he gets stuck there are numerous help options available to us both. Denison Algebra however only starts at Pre-Algrebra or around eighth grade. Therefore, we cannot do Denison Algebra with my daughter. For her, I decided that we should try something a little different. I have always had them in the same math program but at different levels and I realized that homeschooling is about finding what works for each child. She obviously needs something different. After looking around we decided to try Math Mammoth and if needed/wanted we will add Beast Academy. I have often put a lot of pressure on myself as a homeschool mom, that my kids have to be above average in every single subject. Now, I am starting to look at this like not every child excels in every subject and we do our best to get those children where they need to be. I graduated from public school and barely passed math. I can’t get frustrated with my very artistic child when she doesn’t naturally take to math. My goal for her now is to take it slow, make sure she understands the concepts before moving on, and get her through math.

Denison Algebra- https://www.denisonalgebra.com

Math Mammoth- https://www.mathmammoth.com

Beast Academy- https://beastacademy.com/

Science/History

I am still struggling with both these subjects. I know what I want to do, but I have not found the curriculum. For science, I want to split my kids this year. We have always had them in the same science as a group subject, but they have such different interests and I want my son to be able to get his work done without waiting on his sister. If you haven’t guessed by now I have one child who buckles down and gets his work done, and one who can’t sit still. My son is very science-brained while my daughter is very much an artistic brain. It makes doing everything together a bit of a challenge especially as they get older.

For my son, I am looking for a space-related science program. Even some sort of astronomy unit study. The problem I am facing is that there isn’t really anything geared toward his age/understanding. There are tons of space units for younger children or ones that have basic space facts. He knows more about space than I could ever hope to. We have taken him and let him talk to scientists and they are always amazed at his understanding of space and what he talks about. So, I need something more challenging but also I don’t know that he is ready for something like a high school level course. He also wants to know things about black holes, or other topics that there simply isn’t as much information on as the planets for example. I did order him a few textbook-type books from BookOutlet and I may have him read those and report back to me. I think this is very much going to be a piece-and-go year for us and science. I will have him watch any documentary I can find, use NASA’s, and anything else that comes our way. I am still hopeful that I will find a good program for him soon, but he will learn either way.

For my daughter, she is very into animals, so I am looking for a Biology unit for her. She doesn’t want to do human biology, only animal biology. Again, the problem we face is that we have studied biology and she knows quite a bit. I would love to find something that dives a little deeper into things. For her, I am leaning more toward unit studies so she can study a topic in-depth and then move on to a new one. I will find something this week and print it off for next week. I am not too worried about timing since we take the first couple of weeks pretty slowly anyway.

For History, I am planning on studying American History as a group subject. I am splitting them for science but I think History is still something we can do together. I had a plan to use these great American History books we’ve had for years, but I can’t find them. We moved and I thought they moved with us, but I have no idea where they ended up. It was actually stuff we got from BookShark years ago that we haven’t used yet. If I can’t find them soon I will have to find another avenue to go down. I have looked into programs like the Tuttle Twins, Notgrass History, and what we have used in the past Story of the World but I am not sure what direction we will take yet. Again this is a subject that I wasn’t planning on adding until week two or three so I have a bit of time. We also have been homeschooling for quite a while, so we have all kinds of books and encyclopedias to get us started while we wait.

Reading

I always have a giant list of books I want everyone to read in my head. Don’t all homeschool moms? Last year I more or less let them pick the books they wanted to read and then asked them to read 20-30 mins a day. This ended up not being enough. My daughter also started a ton of books but didn’t finish very many. With everything that happened last year personally, It wasn’t something I really fought. This year however we are going to fix that. I plan on assigning them one book a month and then letting them pick one. For our first set of books I simply took the number of pages, decided if I wanted them to take one or two weeks to read it, divided the pages by the days I wanted it done in, and then assigned them the reading. I haven’t made the list for our entire year but I have quite a few picked out……….

Read Aloud– Howl’s Moving Castle, Wild Robot Series, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, The War that Saved My Life, The Trumpet of the Swan, and a few more yet to be decided.

Son– Glitch, Artemis Fowl, Green Ember, FableHaven, Northwind, Stowaway, Last Day on Mars, and others

Daughter– Stuart Little, Sweet Home Alaska, Caddie Woodlawn, The Penderwicks, Princess Academy, Aggie Morton, and others

I like to leave room to change my mind as I find new books all the time, but also have a plan for quite a few required readings for the year. There are always so many amazing books out there that it’s hard to choose a few for the school year.

Final Thoughts

As always I am very hopeful that the choices we made for the year are good ones. Other than that I know that our attitudes will be the make-or-break aspect of our entire year. I am trying to let go of the pressure to be perfect and instead enjoy this time that I have been given.

Decisions Have Been Made!

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

It’s decision time in our home. I have been putting off a few decisions lately because I was not ready to get back to school. However, the motivation has finally kicked in and I have figured a few things out. First, we will be trying out a four-day school week this year. This is what I wanted to try, but I also asked my kids which option they wanted, and they both agreed the four-day week sounded good. Instead of having weeks off during the school year, we will have every Friday off. We will still take about a week and a half off during Christmas time but that’s about it. Because we have decided on this schedule we will have to start school sooner rather than later. My plan is to school for 45 weeks instead of 36 so that we get all our days in. That means we will be starting school on July 17th and schooling until late May. I do plan to keep track of our days so that if we do something like a field trip on a Friday we can possibly knock off a few days towards the end of the year. Once May hits I want to be done with school. Something about the sun finally coming out after a long winter makes all of us lose our minds and all we want to do is be outside. I am really hoping this schedule works for us this year. I like the idea of it, because this will give me Fridays to grocery shop, put the house back together, and do whatever other tasks get overlooked during the school week. I am sure there are moms out there who can keep it all together during the school week, but I am not one of them. Having Fridays off will give me the chance to get everything back under control.

Final Curriculum Choices

Since the start of the school year is so close now, final decisions also had to be made for curriculum. I knew from the beginning that we had a couple of things from last year that needed to change. For example our Math curriculum. We have used Math-U-See every year except one. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this program, and I love the idea behind it, but it wasn’t working for us anymore. The biggest problem is that my 10-year-old and I can’t do math together. At least not fully. She either wasn’t understanding how I was teaching it or she was being plain stubborn and refusing to even try. Math is the one subject that could derail our entire day. I did not want our homeschool year to be made hard again because of one subject. To help this I started looking for online math programs. My hope is that if someone else is explaining the concepts to her she will listen and understand a little better. I looked at a ton of options before we made a decision. I have never used this program before but I am hopeful that it will be what we need. We are going to be trying CTC Math for this school year. https://www.ctcmath.com/how-it-works/home-school. My husband and I both liked the sample video that was posted and the way the concept was explained. I am also hopeful that this will be good for my 12-year-old as he starts getting into higher math that I can’t help with as much. I was not great at Math in school and we have always known at some point there would need to be a switch to a tutor or some kind of online math program. Outside of math our days go pretty well, so I am hoping this will help our days run as smoothly as possible

The other big change is our Science curriculum. I have talked about this a few times and the fact that we haven’t found a good curriculum yet. We have tried a few different options but I have never been pleased with any of them. I had every intention of going with Noeo Science or Elemental Science this year but changed my mind last minute. I read a bunch of reviews and neither program sounded all that great. I ended up deciding to try out Berean Builders this year. We will be using Science in the Age of Reason https://bereanbuilders.com/ecomm/product-category/elementary/science-in-the-age-of-reason/. While looking for a science curriculum I stumbled upon this awesome resource and we went ahead and ordered the books and experiment supplies from Home Science Tools https://www.homesciencetools.com/. This is a website where you can order experiment kits that go with a few different curriculums, but you can also order difficult-to-find experiment supplies and even dissection kits. It’s a pretty cool resource if you have experiment-loving kids.

As for the rest of our curriculum, most of that is staying the same as it always has. For Language Arts, we will continue to use mostly IEW https://iew.com/. We use their writing program, Fix-it-Grammar, and handwriting. Spelling and Vocabulary are covered by Spelling Power https://www.rainbowresource.com/product/002784/Spelling-Power-5th-Edition-Adams-Gordons.html?, and Wordly Wise https://www.rainbowresource.com/hSearch.jhtm?keyword=Wordly+Wise#keyword=Wordly%20Wise&mpp=24. Then I add in reading and read-alouds to round out Language Arts. For History, we will continue to use Story of the World. https://welltrainedmind.com/c/series/the-story-of-the-world/. This year we will be using the fourth book in the series and adding in other resources as needed. I have a ton of encyclopedias laying around as well as Who Was Books that are always a good add-in. That pretty much covers everything. The only thing I am still deciding on is an Art Curriculum. My daughter loves art so I am still looking for something for her to do. I think I will probably end up using Artistic Pursuits https://artisticpursuits.com/home.

Homeschool Planner

I have also decided to change our homeschool planner. I know I said I wasn’t going to do this because I loved the online one from Well Planned Gal, but I think it might be a little overkill. I am still struggling with this decision but I think I will skip it this year. I can always go back in and re-subscribe if needed. My thought process behind that is that the online planner is great to print out for records, but I don’t really have to keep those. My state does not require it and sometimes I think I am making more work for myself. I like having the records, but no one is ever going to look at them, so do I really need to put in the effort? I did go ahead and custom-create a printed one, also from Well Planned Gal, and then I am working on creating my own. I don’t typically like planners with a ton of extras, so making my own basic one might be a better option. https://wellplannedgal.com/. I do have a bunch of printables available in my teachers pay teachers shop if you have any interest in looking at those https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Phk-Learning, including some planner pages. This year I am trying to make things as easy as possible. There is no need to overcomplicate and make my year harder for no reason.

Final Thoughts

I have never really had a motto for the year before but this year I found one that I am hoping my daughter can use.

Attitude over Aptitude will determine your Altitude

We had quite a few struggles last year with our attitude. I really want to work with her this time to understand that a good attitude will get you further than almost anything. It will also make the school day go by faster. I am hopeful that the changes we have made will make this year run smoother and that our Friday breaks will give us something to work towards. Ready or not, school starts in about a week and a half.

Homeschool Planner

~ wattlesandcombsfarm ~ Leave a comment

Like so many of you, I have spent a lot of time trying to find that perfect homeschool planner. I have watched tons of videos and spent hours researching the best planner, hoping that it will finally help me get my homeschool organized and on track. I start every school year with the intention of keeping a really well-done planner so we have records, and every year I fail. In the past, I have tried every kind of paper planner out there. I have had Erin Condren planners, Happy Planners, and every other version you can imagine. None of them worked for very long or consistently. I would always get off track and find myself weeks later trying to remember what we did so I could write it down. I guess now would be the time to mention that I am more of a write it down after than a plan beforehand kind of person. I don’t have any crazy curriculum that needs a ton of planning. Mostly we just do the next lesson so I don’t really need a ton of pre-planning. After many years of failing with paper planners, I started this year out looking for an online planner. I was hoping an online planner would work for me since the paper ones were not. After a little looking around I settled on the Well Planned Gal’s online homeschool planner. It is a subscription-based planner, but it is worth it for me. I have to say so far I LOVE it! If you are the kind of person who likes to pre-plan everything and have a full schedule to follow this planner works for that. This planner also works great for people like me who like to sort of plan from behind or keep track of what was done. I will say there was a bit of a learning curve and I made a few adjustments to make it fit what I needed, but now that I have it tweaked I think it’s great. I added all of our courses for the year, told it how many times a week we wanted to do them, and then I simply check them off for the day. You can print off a schedule for your students for the week, and one for yourself with all the assignments if that is something you want to do. One of the best parts is that it tracks other things for me, like attendance. If we check all of our boxes for the day it counts that as a school day and I have an attendance tracker without having to remember to fill out another form. There is also a place to easily add grades and then it will make me a progress report. On Fridays, after we have finished school I can sit down and make sure everything is checked off for the week and then print out a schedule of everything we did for our records. I put this printout in our binders with our weekly saved work. It’s really easy to go back into the program and add things like field trips, changes to assignments, and even notes on exactly what we did. It is pretty customizable to what you need or want it to be. The Well Planned Gal online planner has been one of the best changes I have made to our homeschool ever. I don’t see this being something that changes anytime soon. If you want to check it out here is the link to the website https://sso.wellplannedgal.com/login-in-mwpd.php?act=hedua&trail=1. They even have a 30-day free trial if you want to try it out. Now I just need a version of this for my everyday life!