We have been taking a few weeks off of school to enjoy a summer break and get settled into our new home, but when we start back up in a few weeks I will have a 4th grader and a 6th grader. I am still baffled by how quickly time feels like it has flew. I love being home with my babies every day.
It has been a few years since I have shared any of our homeschool curriculum, but I thought that since we have switched things up over the last couple years that it would be a good idea to share. I hope that you can find some inspiration for your own homeschooling adventures.
Today I am going to share all that we will be using for my 4th grade son and my 6th grade daughter.
2025-2026 Homeschool Curriculum Choices
Bible
Each morning, we spend time reading our Bible's individually. It is so important that our children not only see us reading and spending time in the Word, but that they spend time in the Word as well. We have done this since our children were toddlers. At that time they would simply look through storybook Bibles for a set amount of time, and as they grew and learned to read, they spent time reading as well. Establishing good habits when they are little will help to set them up to be successful as they get older.
Math
We have previously used both Masterbooks math (our first few years of school) and The Good and the Beautiful Math curriclums and loved both during the seasons we used them. Last year, we made the switch to Apologia math (from TGTB) and my kids have LOVED using it and have thanked me numerous times for switching. TGTB is a very thorough curriculum and certainly keeps your kiddos ahead of where they "need" to be, but it was getting to be so time consuming. It felt like we were spending hours a day on just math and language and never had time to get to anything else. It was hard for me to swap away because TGTB and Masterbooks have everything, teacher material and student material, all in one place, which I absolutely love, but at the end of the day we have to do what is best for our children and family unit and also have to listen and obey the direction the Lord is leading.
4th Grade Math
This year my 4th grader will be continuing the
Level 4 Math from Apologia that we started this past year. If he finishes before the end of the year we will move onto Level 5.
Please note that in order to complete all of the fun warm up activities at the beginning of each lesson and any chapter tests you will need the Teacher's Guide and Answer key.
6th Grade Math
This year my 6th grader will be continuing the
Level 6 Math from Apologia that we started this past year. Once she finishes this we will look into doing something else for her, but I am not quite sure what that looks like yet. Again, the
teacher book is necessary for completing the course.
Language Arts
After swapping away from TGTB for Language Arts, I really couldn't find anything all in one that I loved or felt like would fit my kids well so for this year we will be doing a variety of different things.
Grammar/Writing/Phonics
At the end of this last year, I did something I said I would never do as a homeschool mom...I purchased curriculum from Abeka. Growing up I attended a private Christian school that used Abeka and disliked it greatly. I absolutely LOVED school, but remember thinking the curriculum was so boring and said I would never use it with my kids. But alas, here we are and we are loving it.
4th Grade Grammar & Writing
My son has only recently taken an interest in reading, but when he did he took off so quickly that he made up for all the years of no interest in a short time. To start the year he will be finishing
Abeka Level 3 Language and moving onto the
Level 4 book afterwards.
We also started using the
Fix-It Grammar books last year and will continue working through those as well. This was something he really enjoyed and having some extra sentence structure/editing practice will be great for helping him with his writing. We won't do these every day, but will mix them in here and there.
6th Grade Grammar & Writing
She too will continue using the Fix-It Grammar books that we started last year, but she will continue on with the
Level 2 Book. Spelling/Word Study
For spelling we started doing our own thing and have actually liked the ease and simplicity of it. I start the week by giving them a word list pretest and from there they will practice the words they missed throughout the week in various ways (rainbow writing, writing sentences, etc.) and then on Friday they take a retest of those same words. Any words still missed carry over into the new week.
Reading/Literature
We will be doing a variety of different things for reading this year. I have two bookworms on my hands, one in particular who I cannot even keep up with. I joke that I should take stock in a book company or something, so we will be incorporating a lot of rich literature into our days.
For reading/literature, we are going to continue using some of the Treehouse Schoolhouse Book Studies and will do these family style. We have done several of them together and love how we were able to study several different subjects with our one read aloud book each month. This year we are going to complete the following book studies:
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In addition to read alouds and book studies together as a family, this year I am going to have my kids do book reports. My 6th grader is more excited for these book reports than she is on Christmas morning. No joke. She will happily read and write about the books she reads all day long if I would let her so I know they are going to be a great addition to our year. I have loved seeing all of the creative ways that
Little School of Smiths has done book reports so we will be trying the Accordion Envelope Book Report method for them and tailoring it to their own individual needs. My 4th grader is going to start with
The Wild Robot (a book we read together as a family, but he will love to read it himself because he is Robot obsessed) and my 6th grader is going to start with
Mary Poppins. Handwriting & Cursive
We keep handwriting practice and cursive practice simple and incorporate it into our other subjects as much as we can. We use our Bible Journals to practice good penmanship and handwriting. My kids simply practice writing a Bible verse and drawing pictures to go along with them. They do a lot of other writing too when we use any of our notebooking journals.
For cursive, both kids will continue using this
cheap little cursive book that has honestly been wonderful for them. I love that there are so many wonderful curriculums like the
Dash into Cursive curriculum out there, but sometimes keeping it simple works too.
Science
In addition to any of the science/nature study related topics we will be studying with our Treehouse Schoolhouse book studies, we will be doing a study on the Weather. This will be a family study that we do together and I will be putting this unit together myself based on books and resources I already own or have created. We love doing hands on activities so there will be lots of them. When my daughter was a preschooler, we did a
weather study and it was one of my favorite units we ever did. I am sure many of the hands on activities and experiments will be making a come back from that.
Social Studies/History
We will also be taking time to learn all about our new home state of Texas.
If you are looking for something super simple to do with your kids that is FREE, be sure to check out the website
littlepatriotslearning.com We have been doing this video curriculum throughout the summer just for fun and my kids both LOVE the Star Spangled Adventures and honestly have been learning so much.
Foreign Language
We are so excited to be using
Homeschool Languages Spanish 1 Curriculum this year. We recently moved across the country and are settled in an area where we are encountering more Spanish speaking people. Our whole family is looking forward to learning more Spanish together so we can communicate with our Spanish speaking friends. You can only get so far if the only thing you know how to ask is where the bathroom is haha I am already so incredibly impressed with it. It comes in a custom shipping box in addition to a beautiful storage container. When it arrived, my kids couldn't open it fast enough and are asking when we can start almost daily. If you purchase the physical copy, it comes with all of the games you will need , a little book, lesson book, puppet, blow up globe and many other fun things. It's so cute which this mama loves.
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I am so excited for this school year ahead. I haven't quite figured out what our days will look like yet, but just like every year we will start out with what seems best and tweak it as we need to. We will be doing most of these subjects family style (my favorite), with the exception of Math and some Language Arts and we won't be completing everything every single day, so while it appears that we are doing a lot, it really will be a manageable amount of fun and learning each day.
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