We did it! We made it through our first year of homeschooling! Right now we are taking a “break” and doing a pirate unit full of fun, games, crafts, and books. We have planned to start our next year’s curriculum the first week of August along with our STEAM coop. In the meantime, I’ve been deep into planning our this coming year. We are entering new territory as I am officially adding in Quentin to the mix. That means we will have a child in 2nd grade and a child in PreK. Quentin’s PreK curriculum will be much lighter than Arthur’s 2nd grade curriculum, but I want to make sure that I have resources for both.
As a reminder, we are a pretty eclectic household with a strong literature base. My criteria when looking for curriculum:
secular
rigorous
wide world perspective
not necessarily all-in-one
at least some physical items, not all online
cheap (not necessarily the cheapest, but not expensive)
Let’s take a look at what I’ve bought for curriculum for next year!
Arthur - 2nd Grade
Math
We will be continuing with Singapore Math Common Core Edition as our base curriculum. Arthur will be starting with 3A and will probably push through 3B, 4A, and 4B by the end of the school year. Beyond the basic text, we will be supplementing with Khan Academy, lots of math games, and random workbooks and packets. I’m really excited to dive into Primarily Logic and Logic Countdown.
Target dollar spot workbooks
Language Arts
I bought Blossom & Root’s 2nd Grade Language Arts curriculum for our base. The theme is Fantastic Journeys and Perilous Quests. I was very excited about the read aloud list, but we did make a few substitutions. We have read a few of the selections, and I added some more to our big list.
Sarah Journey’s West by Nikki Shannon Smith (this is actually a book we won from the library and will use for our U.S. History curriculum)
In addition to our big read alouds and projects,
Visual Guide to Second Guide (grabbed at Half Price Books)
10 Minutes a Day Spelling Grade 2 (grabbed at Half Price Books)
Journeys Grade 2 (grabbed at Half Price Books)
Social Studies
It’s not pictured as it’s in ebook form, but we are using Pandia Press’s History Quest Middle Times as our base. I really enjoyed their Ancient Times and thankfully the Middle Times volume was just released this summer. Hopefully, Blossom & Root’s A River of Voices Volume 2 will release soon. We’ll fit that in sometime later this fall or winter. The above books (except DK History, that’s new) were all ones that we bought last year and will continue to use.
I also grabbed this collection of Map Skills books to work through. Arthur will start on Grade 1 and just work through the first couple. I imagine Quentin will also get into the Grade 1 book at some point this year.
Science
Our science will be a collection of unit studies correlated to our coop themes. Some of these texts are carry overs from last year. And some I ended up buying new this year.
Primarily Quentin will be using Blossom & Root’s Early Years Vol. 2 curriculum. This includes early literacy and math, art and music exposure, and kitchen and nature explorations. We will be adding a ton of activity books I had laying around and a few new titles.
Scissor Skills
Lots of back issues of High Five magazine
BrainQuest K (we are also using BrainQuest PreK but I didn’t include it in the photo)
