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If you are anything like me, you really don’t even want to think about school until at least the end of the month (but truthfully if you are a homeschool mom, it’s probably on your mind all year long, right?) I was talking to a fellow homeschooling mom the other day and we both agreed that the summer goes by much, much faster as an adult than as a kid. Seriously, how is it possible that school will be starting in a little over a month?! I will have two 9th graders and one in kindergarten. This will be the first time I have ever homeschooled two grades before. But at least kindergarten will be easy so it shouldn’t be too bad, right? Right…
Last year for 8th grade, we used a site called Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool (not an affiliate link). It is a completely FREE curriculum and she has courses on there from pre-K through 12th grade. Did I mention it’s free? Because yeah, it’s free! Lee Giles, the woman who designed the whole thing, has no intention of ever charging for this curriculum either (though if you do use it a bit, you might consider a donation – she has a link where you can do that). We used her Year 4 History course plus Spanish 1 and English 8 on her sister site, Easy Peasy All-in-One High School (also not an affiliate link). Both kids really loved the Spanish course. We occasionally find a broken link, and she asks that people let her know if that happens. Overall, it was much more in depth than I thought it would be so be prepared for your kiddos to be quite busy. My kids both enthusiastically want to take the Spanish 2 course for 9th grade. But free homeschool curriculum? Yes please!
Another site we made much use of was schoolhouseteachers.com. And let me just tell you guys, THEY ROCK. For $12.95 per month, you can have access to over 200 courses ranging from pre-K through 12th grade. My two older children particularly liked the Career Exploration course! Their customer service is excellent as well. All my questions have been answered very promptly.
So what will we do next year? That’s a great question, one that I have been thinking about probably since the beginning of the year (or earlier – I have a tendency to obsess over these things). We’re going to use Easy Peasy again and take Foundations, Bible, PE/Health, and Spanish 2. The Foundations class incorporates things like time management, study skills, speech, etc. It looks really interesting.
For English, we’re going to use Schoolhouse Teachers again and take the Writing and Classics Based Writing courses plus Daily Grammar. For the literature component, Glencoe has some free (hollah!) study guides you can use so we’re probably going to go through 4 novels.
Science will be Studies in World History through Master Books. This looks like a really excellent course and I would ideally like to get through volumes 1 and 2. We’ll see how that goes.
Oh, and I’m going to be teaching home ec with my kids and with some friends! That will be a separate post coming up so stay tuned for more info. I’m pumped about it!
So what will you be doing next year? Do you have it all mapped out or do you wait until a little closer to when school actually starts? I’d love to hear if any of you have tried the curriculums in this post. We can share and obsess together! 🙂
I think school will be fun. And this is coming from a person that HATES SCHOOL!!