Homeschool curriculum is increasingly easy to find these days, and you can spend as little or as much as you want on it. When I homeschooled my son, I got lucky because the college I graduated from was purging older books from their library and acquiring new ones, so we went and loaded up on everything they had that I knew he would be taking in high school. These student and teacher textbooks were an amazing blessing and kept us from having to buy anything.
While we were at the library, I renewed my library card and was able to check out student and teacher textbooks for any class he wanted to take that we didn’t have books for. I think they let me check these out for eight weeks at a time because I was using them to homeschool, and I could renew the checkout two more times (or more if nobody had put a reserve on them.) I also made use of online resources like Khan Academy (https://www.khanacademy.org), Easy Peasy (https://allinonehomeschool.com), and anything else I could find. These two online resources are amazing. If you haven’t used them in your homeschool, please check them out.
Now that I’m homeschooling my granddaughter, I decided to at least start her out on a homeschool curriculum that we had to purchase because while I can teach ABCs and 123s, things have changed a lot through the years, and kids are learning more things at younger ages. I looked through several homeschool curricula before finally settling on The Good and the Beautiful. It is a nondenominational Christian course that is pretty in-depth, but super easy to teach. They have the books that you can purchase, and some of them you can even download for FREE. That’s right. FREE. You can check them out here: https://www.goodandbeautiful.com . There are also dozens of reviews on YouTube you can watch.
The Good and the Beautiful has a preschool course available, but because we had already been working with Tootie, we just started with the Kindergarten Prep book. There are 30 lessons in the book, and absolutely anybody can teach them. Everything is there for you; from what to say to how to teach it to songs, videos, and letter tiles you can use on their website. Tootie zoomed right on through this one, so we moved on to the next book.
The Level K Language Arts is amazing. Each morning, we spend 10 minutes or so going through the Reading Booster A cards and/or the Reading Booster A set of books. The Course Book contains 120 lessons covering Writing, Art, Literature, Geography, Grammar and Punctuation, and Poetry Memorization and Appreciation. We jump into the Course Book after we’ve finished with the Booster cards and books. Again, anyone can teach these lessons.
The Math K Course Book and the math manipulatives box work together to increase math comprehension. The Course Book contains 120 lessons that are divided into three sections. Like the Language Arts, the lessons are easy to teach and well laid out so you know exactly what to say and how to teach it. Numbers, shapes, addition, subtraction, patterns, time, counting money, etc., etc., it’s all here in this book. I don’t plan to finish this book this year, so we’ll pick up where we left off in the fall and then move on to Math 1.
Tootie is a science fanatic, so to satisfy her need to see how things work, we got the Science for Little Hearts and Hands. It consists of 30 lessons, and each lesson either has a video to watch or a story to read. She has learned about trees, making syrup, mushrooms, different plants, insects, bugs, and more. We have supplemented these lessons with other science experiment boxes and books, and she gets excited when it’s time to conduct experiments.
I’ve also used little workbooks I picked up at the Dollar store or the bookstore, and ordered one or two from Amazon for additional math practice, but The Good and the Beautiful has been the main curriculum. If you are on the fence about homeschooling or thinking that you wouldn’t be able to teach your child, you can. While we chose to try this curriculum that we had to buy, there’s nothing out there that says you have to do that. Make use of the local library, join in with any homeschool groups that might be in your area, and make use of free online resources like the ones mentioned above. There are also a lot of businesses that have special days where homeschool kids can get in free or at a reduced rate, and some bookstores will give a discount to teachers, including homeschool teachers, if you carry in your proof of registration with either the local school or Christian homeschool umbrella.
Another good thing about this curriculum is that when it’s time for Blue to start Pre-K in the fall, we don’t have to buy the books again. I was able to download the books to my computer so I can print out any pages that Tootie needs to write on so the books still look new for her brother.
What about you? What homeschool curriculum are you using?