Our Homeschool Curriculum Picks 2022-2023

Our Homeschool Curriculum Picks for 2022-2023

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Did the writing curriculum work well for the kids last year? Did it progress them? Or do nothing?

Did the math curriculum teach them what they need to know that didn’t involve tears and loss of hearing from the wailing and loss of hair from pulling it out?

How did the science and history curriculums do? Were they interesting? Information-retaining? Dull? How about this…can your kids tell you about it?

It’s good to look back at how effective the curriculum was that you used last year in order to make educated choices this school year. I mean, you aren’t going to reuse that math program that ends in tantrums each lesson, right? (Please don’t.)

Each year, I do the same. I re-evaluate our curriculum choices for the kids and determine what stays and what goes.

And let me tell you…each year I get that much closer to not changing too much as we finetune the curriculums that work best for us! So, yes, it does get easier each year!

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Of course, we first start out again with deciding on what we need to primarily focus on in skills for the year. Then we line up our homeschool vision with what’s important to us this year. After that, I fine tune it a little more on how we’ll reach those goals.

For example, my kids struggle with writing. So I’ll be implementing writing in all the subjects just about…even down to taking math notes! See what I mean?

But this isn’t about making a homeschool vision statement (or homeschool mission statement). This is all about our curriculum picks for the year! But check out how to make a good homeschool vision statement if you need to!

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Our Family Dynamics

Daniel is 12, Zoey is 11, and Scout is 4.

In theory, Daniel and Zoey do all subjects together except for math (of course).

Which means they do the same level of writing, grammar, spelling, that kind of stuff. If you want to know why, you can see what made us start homeschooling in the first place.

Daniel and Zoey are in “middle school level.” And not necessarily in a grade level. If I had to pick a grade, they’ll be in 6th-5th-sometimes7th-sometimeseven4th grades. (lol) We go where they need to go!

Scout is starting preschool. Although we’ve been working on stuff all last year, so I’ll know more definitively how it goes this year. Maybe he can even do Kindergarten in January?

Curriculum We’ll Use for 2022-2023 Homeschool Year

I’m going to list out the curriculum we’ll use this year, but you can see what resources we use with these here to supplement these curriculums.

Also, keep in mind that we don’t use ALL of these curriculums at the same time! I’m a HUGE fan of Loop Scheduling! By loop scheduling, we can do much more stuff, hit all the fun stuff, and still get our work done.

I also like the Block Schedule, which means we do some subjects for one term and then other, different subjects for another term. So please don’t let this list overwhelm you at all!!

Math

Math Mammoth continues to be our math curriculum of choice. My son thrives in simple worksheets and we’ve been doing this curriculum for years now, and I don’t see us changing it anytime soon. I mean, he requests the worksheets for math and not the online stuff or fancy manipulatives. Fine with me. It’s been doing him VERY well.

My daughter has bounced around math curriculums though, but we’re making it simple and also sticking with Math Mammoth for her as well. Teaching Textbooks was okay, but I’m a fan of pencil and paper when it comes to math. ThemeVille Math is actually a good one, but they don’t have anything past Grade 4, I believe (I’ll have to look back into that). Now, CTCMath is an option worth looking back into. We used it for a year to coincide with Math Mammoth, just to try out, and I liked the video lessons and then the paper work after the video lessons. This may be a future solution for me if I’m finding my time limited much more than I anticipated with Scout now in the homeschool mix. We’ll see. You can read about CTCMath in my review here.

We use composition notebooks like these from Mead for notetaking in math, and we’ll continue to do that this year. I find that when the kids take notes on our math lessons, they retain the information so much better! Try it!

Also, the kids are big fans of The Good and The Beautiful math and language arts curriculums, so I will add it into our days as well. If TGTB happens to be beloved over Math Mammoth, then I guess we’ll just stick with TGTB.

History

home school in the woods world history

Aaahhh our favorite subject yet! I love history. For history, we use interactive notebooks! But, in addition to our interactive notebooks that I either create or buy, we use Home School in the Woods for the history era! I find that I can use Home School in the Woods as the “spine” and then we build our interactive notebooks around it. Kind of like creating a unit study.

In addition to Home School in the Woods, I really like Beautiful Feet, which is a living books type of history curriculum. It utilizes lapbooks/notebooks, too, and has a list of living history books to read for their curriculum. I *mostly* follow this as I’m doing Home School in the Woods simply for any additional information but mostly for their book list.

So as we are learning, for example, the Colonial Era, I’ll see what BF’s curriculum has to say about that and I’ll pick out what I like about that and them implement it into my interactive notebooks along with Home School in the Woods! Home School in the Woods is primarily a hands-on history curriculum and I love it, though I prefer to read living books for history, which is where Beautiful Feet comes in. And then for the activities and such, that’s where the interactive notebooks come in.

We use an organized timeline notebook for everything (all subjects, but mostly history and science) called History Through the Ages, which is also by Home School in the Woods. It has ALL timeline figures you can put in a timeline book according to when it happened – for person, event, place, invention, and so on. I love it! Because with it, you get ALL the necessary timeline figures you’ll ever, ever need, and it’s ALL you need for the rest of your entire homeschool career!!

One more thing – the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia is something I love and have used since the first year of homeschooling – nearly 7 years ago. And you can either use it alongside your own curriculum, or use it as a spine to make your own curriculum or even unit study. Check it out on Amazon here. I’ve looked around other places and besides Amazon, you can try Abe’s Books which are used books but usually cheaper. But if you want brand-new, do Amazon!

Geography

I have all 3 years for Let’s Go Geography, and it’s my preferred way to study geography! It really hits all learning styles!

I love it! Also, we’ll be studying the states of America and learning the capitals this year, so we’ll be using *MY* resource call the 50 States Unit Study Course edition! Fun, fun!!

50-STATES-UNIT-STUDY-COURSE

Science

We like the living books style so we’ll be continuing that with the Sassafras Twins in the Zoology book, along with their Scidat logbook! Surprisingly, the kids liked learning about the different animals and habitats and then writing their notes in the Scidat logbook.

We MAY extend this into volume 2 OR we’ll grab the Zoology one from Apologia. Not sure yet.

We will be studying a few different things this year, however, for science:

  • Classification of animals and zoology (term 1)
  • Human Body, anatomy (term 2 & 3)
  • Plant and Animal cells (term 4)
Anatomy & Physiology

I think that’s about as far as we’re going to go for the planning bit of it, but we’ll see. For now, we’re heading into the Sassafras Adventures into Zoology to begin with!

Language Arts

Language arts can be a mix or match of things, so I’ll break it up here. However, we will be going back to using The Good & The Beautiful this year for language arts and, as you know, TGTB language arts encompasses MULTIPLE SUBJECTS (writing, grammar, poetry, reading, literature, vocab, spelling, geography, art, etc). Therefore, we’ll start with TGTB and see how that fares before jumping into the rest of the other Language Art subjects below.

Even so, there are a few things I want to focus on in a few of the LA subjects below, like interactive notebooks for poetry and focusing on reading and writing hardcore this year, so we’ll probably coincide those with TGTB until I see it’s no longer necessary.

Here are the subjects we’ll use either in addition to TGTB or later on in the year:

Spelling

Believe it or not, my kids actually liked that spelling curriculum from Abeka last year. We did both curriculums last year, and learned a lot, so I’m not exactly sure which way I’ll go this year. As you can imagine we finished neither, so we’ll probably just be picking up where we left off last year. We’ll probably do Spelling Shed though because it’s more hands-on and game-minded. Plus there’s a spelling app to go with it! And Math Shed is its “cousin”! TGTB will have spelling words throughout their curriculum as well, so I’ll see which ones to do! The kids like how we study TGTB spelling words and they like the games of Spelling Shed and they like the words of Abeka! Ha! See my dilemma? We’ll definitely start with TGTB first, though, and move on from there if needed.

You can read my review on Spelling Shed here.

Writing

I REALLY like the way these workbooks are structured and it’s helped my kids a ton understand writing mechanics and the foundations. We’re going to finish the book, so we’ll pick up where we left off here as well. We’ve been merging 2 grades into one, and I’ll continue doing that this year!

I also focus on writing completely separate from Evan Moor’s workbook by doing interactive notebooks! Now these are where the interactive notebooks shine!

You can read my reviews on Daily 6-Trait Writing for Grade 4 here and for Grade 3 here!

Poetry

  • Interactive notebook

We’ll be learning all about poetry all from our interactive notebook lessons. However, The Good and The Beautiful will have poetry throughout it as well.

Reading, Reading Literature, Informational Texts

We will be doing all the reading this year through interactive notebooks too! Although, I have been considering All About Reading by All About Learning Press for Daniel and Zoey because Scout uses the pre-reading one and he’s been doing well in it!

We’ll study literature, read it, understand the mechanics of it, and also delve into informational texts and nonfiction. We’ll use what we have for these subjects for our interactive notebooks!

We will be doing chapter book readings and work throughout the year.

We will use Reading Comprehension from Abeka once a week, usually on Fridays. Just a story about something and then answering the questions about it.

Scout has been learning his prereading skills with the All About Read Pre-Reading program and he LOVES it. You can read my review about the pre-reading program here!

Free Resources

Vocabulary

We don’t have a vocabulary curriculum, however, I’ve thought about making my own for an interactive notebook. But we do use Word Roots for understanding words by The Critical Thinking Co., and we’ll continue with that this year.

Health

I tried other health curriculums and I didn’t really like them too much. But we do like Abeka’s workbook reading style of Abeka. I really like it, to be honest, because it reads like a conversation and it has spurred many a conversation between me and the kids. So we’ll continue it this year.

Grammar

You know, we used Abeka’s Language grammar curriculum last year, and it was okay. Mostly repeated itself a lot, though, and I’m not really a fan of that. Nor are the kids.

We do have Grammar Galaxy, but it was pretty late in the year when I was testing it out with the kids and I think they were just burnt out period. They say they didn’t like it. Actuallly, the beginning was a bit confusing for us, so we didn’t continue after lesson 1. But, I’m going to see about it this year. I’m not putting it on the list because I just don’t know yet.

We did The Good and The Beautiful a few years ago and my kids LOVE TGTB language arts curriculum. Like, as in excited levels. Enthusiastic about it. So we are picking up this year and having at it!! Plus, it encompasses all the other subjects so we might not even do the other stuff and save us a whole bunch of homeschool time!

Foreign Language

  • TBD

We were using Memoria Press’s Latin program (read the review here), but now my son wants to learn Japanese! So, I’ve been thinking about doing this. Going the Japanese route or going the Spanish route.

If we go the Spanish route, we’ll be going with Suzanne Gose Spanish Genius classes or Flip Flop Spanish curriculum. If we do Japanese, I have no idea!!

This is still, obviously, yet to be determined. . . .

Music and Art

Not quite sure about the art, because we never follow a curriculum for that! I’ll look up things and we’ll make art part of our lessons or do other stuff.

But for music, we have Music In Our Homeschool that we use often. I like all the different music courses for the different types of topics, and MIOH does a good job of that. I’ll be using that one, and I’ll also be using The Composer Detective by Jus’ Classical.

I think it would be awesome for the kids to learn about the composers! Plus, the creator, Justina, dresses up as the composers while teaching her lessons and I think that’s AWESOME!!

PreK Homeschool

I listed some of the things in the post, but here is a list of Scout’s preschool curriculum. He’ll be doing science, history, and Bible with the big kids but doing his-level type of activities and worksheets for each one. But he’ll definitely be part of the discussions, the videos, everything!

Reminds me when Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 19:14 (ESV).

Here’s his overall homeschool curriculum:

What makes me pick curriculums? The curriculum usually follows this:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Phillipians 4:8

I look to see if the curriculum is honorable, show moral standards as GOOD, lovely to read, rich in literature, worth of praise and of God. (Similar to TGTB standards of reading books on their book list.)

If you have a 2-4 year old, I recommend the Gentle & Classical Preschool Curriculum! Or Wonder Wisdom Project. We used parts of Gentle & Classical and we absolutely loved it. It’s good for all subjects. Same with Wonder Wisdom, though I think Wonder Wisdom is best for Literature and Reading more than anything else.

Preschool curriculum recommendation - Gentle and Classical Curriculum - Homeschool Curriculum Picks 2022-2023

Our 2022-2022 homeschool Curriculum Picks

This is our year’s worth of homeschool curriculum at a bird’s eye view for this year! Like I said, we won’t be doing all of these things at the same time, so it may seem like a big, long daunting list, but it’s not so much when you spread it over over the course of the year.

Plus, The Good and The Beautiful will primarily be our Language Arts this year, with special emphasis on writing and reading since those are our focuses this year (our homeschool goals).

I just want this year to be fun and easy, and I know I have a good curriculum foundation to set us up for just that!

This is in no way our homeschool schedule, just our curriculum listings.

If you have any questions on anything I’ve mentioned here or on any resources, add them in the comments and I’ll answer you back! What are your curriculum picks for this year?

Want to read this later? Download as a PDF!

6 thoughts on “Our Homeschool Curriculum Picks for 2022-2023”

  1. I love this list of curriculum. I have a history curriculum I’ll be utilizing for the first time HS mama. But I just found out about Homeschool In the Woods from this blog which seems pretty interesting and something that I’d love to use either as a supplement/future curriculum for history! Either way, I can’t wait to check their website further, and sample the resources!

    1. Awesome! I’m glad you found it useful. I really do love Home School in the Woods and sometimes make it the curriculum itself OR I’ll do what you said and make it a supplement. They’re really my #1 favorite history resource! If you have any questions about homeschooling, let me know! You can email me [email protected].

  2. Dennalee Folks

    I’m just starting out on my homeschooling journey and I appreciate all the wonderful curriculum suggestions. There are so many resources available and it can be overwhelming so I am very thankful for all of this information. I look forward to reading your other blog posts as well. 🙂

    1. Thank you so much Dennalee! I completely agree – it really can be overwhelming. Even for those who have homeschooled for a long time find it indecisive at times because of the shiny object syndrome! And that’s still me. I try to pump the brakes on always trying new curriculum though and just stick with what’s working. But there are so many resources available, it can be difficult to gauge which ones would be a good fit. Check out the learning styles information I have – https://www.homeschoolandhumor.com/learning-styles and through that, you’ll be able to see which kinds of curriculum to look for depending on your child’s learning style. Once I realized this, I found it a lot easier to choose curriculum based on my child’s needs versus my shiny wants! 🙂 Thanks for being here!

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