Hey friends! Before I pack up all of our homeschooling supplies for the big move, I wanted to give you a little homeschool recap for our year!
Well as you all know we had a baby last spring (some about that here), so along with homeschooling the girls, I nurtured a baby in the first year of life. He is definitely my neediest and least predictable baby! We never had a set daily routine because the day really centered on Levi’s needs. We used a daily checklist and just focused on doing what we needed to do for that day and let school be in whatever order it happened! That’s one of the great things about homeschooling; you can tailor it to fit your family’s needs.
Here is what we did this year.
Literature/History/Geography/Science
This year we used The Gospel Story Bible and an amazing family devotional called Courageous Christians. I absolutely loved that book and so did my kids. Each day is a brief autobiographical reading about a famous or courageous Christian.
For our main curriculum this year we used the Kind Kingdom from the Peaceful Press. It is a year-long literature-based guide to European history. We listened to the Chronicles of Narnia along with a beautiful selection of picture books that covered our history and science. The curriculum offered picture study and themed weekly recipes and projects. Each week was a different science focus, such as space or gardening.
My favorite thing about this year was the timeline we built with the cards that can be purchased with the guide! By the end of the year our hallway had a full timeline of European history from medieval times to World War II. My girls also finished drawing their own progressive maps of European nations with a special book called Draw Europe.
The great thing about the Peaceful Press is that it is designed for families with a spread of ages and pulls in the best of many homeschooling methods.
Kiwi Crate and Atlas Crate supplemented some of our science and geography this year. I have a love-hate relationship because of the mess and all the trinket-y STUFF they generate with the projects! I may or may not have hidden the last two boxes the came to our house. (Soooo this should probably be our last year of Kiwi Crate!)
By the way, I really recommend the audio books for the Chronicles of Narnia. The English accent narration just make the stories come alive.!
Math
We used Math U See for the second year. I really love it because it is simple to execute but also provides a set of manipulatives for my daughter who is more hands-on.
Language Arts
For language arts we stuck with our tried and true Explode the Code workbooks. They could do these independently while I nursed the baby or made lunch.
The other activity that we do for language arts is written narration. You could also call this note booking, I guess! It is our own version that worked for us. I only require us to do one a week at this stage.
Audio Books
One highlight of the year was audio books. A huge change for our homeschool this year was my ability to sit down and read aloud for long periods of time. (Or some days ANY periods of time!) As a result, we did the bare minimum that we needed to for school and then outsourced all other read alouds to audio books. They really have become a staple in our weekly routine! Both of my girls made big leap into chapter books after listening to the Beverly Cleary Collection on audio. (I mentioned that series here in this list of must-listen audio book collections!)
You can also go here to check out my ten favorite audio collections for hours of summer listening.
I also feel like we minimized our school even more this year in terms of supplies. We know what we like and use often! Basic art supplies, bluetooth speakers for audio books, and our library cards!
Well, I must say, it did me good to process this school year in words. I just finished tidying supplies and organizing our notebooks, so writing this post is a little like turning out the lights and shutting the door on a clean room.
Did anyone else feel the loss of the library like we did? How did Covid affect the rest of your school year?
Notes
Unschooling is our main philosophy (more about that here), but we utilize some Charlotte Mason principles to enrich our home and equip our kids to self-educate.
Each year I choose a literature-based curriculum or book list along with one math and one language arts program. From about September to about March, we do short lessons, projects and read alouds with these curriculums. The remainder of our time is spent on interest-led learning. I plan our year without a calendar or planner using a simple homeschool planning schema.
- Here’s how we structure our day, and here’s how we approach learning to read.
- If you liked this post you can find all seven of our homeschool year recaps chronicled here.
- For more homeschool encouragement, ideas and resources, sign up for my newsletter, The Lounge.
CORE RESOURCES USED THIS YEAR:
