Homeschool Year 2018-2019 Curriculum Choices

I wanted to finish the first week of homeschool before I wrote about what we're doing this year.  I'm still not entirely sure what all we'll be learning and what resources we'll be using, but I'm excited to see what happens.  This is my fifth year of blogging, so I'm calling it our 5th year of homeschooling; however, my oldest is only seven.  Ok, here's what I know so far.

Dragonfly is seven years old and has recently become very girly.  I'm not sure what happened, but my rational, fact-based "science girl" is now an emotional, fantasy-loving dreamer.  She's been moving away from playing her brother's games and has discovered unicorns, Barbies, and ponies.  She's learned how to braid and has started to care about hair styles and crafting.

This school year, we're focusing primarily on the 3Rs.  For handwriting, we're using A Reason for Handwriting, which is a workbook which includes writing out Bible verses.  Although she's not reading yet, the handwriting is bringing in a lot of sneaky word learning, and I'm sure she'll be reading by the end of the year.

We're not using a specific curriculum for reading, but I have a lot of resources in the home including some that I have made like the Rainbow Reader sight word tracker.

For arithmetic, we're using Horizons, which she is able to do nearly on her own.  The math workbook is another sneaky way for her to practice reading.  I also intend to add in some interesting theme units according to her interests.

Skimmer is six this year, and still very excited about vehicles.  He has a large collection that he hauls around everywhere in a bin.  He particularly loves cars that have sound and spinning wheels.  This summer, he learned how to ride a bike without training wheels and has mastered the monkey bars.  He's always moving.

This will be Skimmer's first year of formal learning.  Like his sister, he's been working on the 3R's with a bit of extra emphasis on fine motor skills like cutting with scissors.

For handwriting, I was planning on using A Reason for Handwriting, but I discovered that he needs a bit more pre-writing practice before writing letters.  I found a free printable of Pre-Handwriting Worksheets from 3 Dinosaurs, and he's doing great with them.

Like her sister, we were planning on using Horizons math, but then I found something more fitting- Brick Math!  It's a series that teaches math concepts up to fifth grade using Lego bricks.  The kids have just discovered Lego this summer and play almost every day.  He's going to be so excited!

I will be adding phonics into our day later in the year.  I want to work on his attention span, fine motor skills, and handwriting first.  I have Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons book which we might use later.

Tadpole is five years old and is my bug boy.  He spends a lot of time looking for bugs, chasing them down, holding them, and studying them.  He's appears to not be afraid of anything, and is always calling his sister for a snake, lizard, or frog hunt.

At least for the beginning of the year, Tadpole's schooling is just like his brothers.  The boys enjoy being "on the same team," and have done well taking turns with my time.  It's a bit of a juggle to set up one boy with an activity to do something with one of them and then to switch back and forth all morning.  I'm hoping to be a bit more organized in this area soon, but luckily I have a large cupboard of items to throw at them.  They're always happy to poke holes in a box (pencil grip practice) or destroy something with scissor.


I have no idea what our homeschool year will look like this year, or what my blogging will look like either.  In previous years, I tried to plan out theme units and then blog about those unit every week.  I know that I won't be doing that, but I think it would be good to do some sort of weekly review.  I have a few printables to get on the blog, some new homeschool resources to tell you about, and lots of pre-Christmas posts.  Check back often and keep me moving forward.