Each August, I share Our Curriculum Choices for the school year ahead.
It’s always a nice feeling to have a plan in place. All the curricula picked out. All the ducks in a row.
In reality, though, plans change. Ducks get up and walk around. And you know what?
That’s okay.
2020.
What. A. Year.
And we’re not even three-quarters of the way through it yet!
Even though I can’t seem to keep track of what day it is right now, I’m at least aware that it’s August. And August in our homeschool means it’s time to finalize and share our curriculum plans for the year ahead.
I’m so glad I found The Story of the World (SotW) curriculum for history! So far we’ve used and loved Volumes 1 through 3, and I just finished planning Volume 4 for the upcoming school year.
I’ve already talked about how we customize SotW in our homeschool. In this post, I’ll show you how I tackle planning it.
2020 has been quite a doozy so far, hasn’t it?
Most of us are still reeling from the unexpected spin COVID-19 put on the last few months of this school year. And just when we thought things were looking up, we find ourselves in the midst of another set of trials and civil unrest.
It seems like a lifetime ago that I was planning out our curricula and wondering what the year would bring. I definitely didn’t expect all this!
I can’t believe it’s August again!
That means it’s time to share our homeschool plans for the year ahead. (If you’re curious about what we’ve used in the past, check out this post which has links to all the previous years.)
We’re really in the thick of it now. I’ll be homeschooling my fifth and second grade boys and their three year old sister (whose unreliable, dwindling naps should make for a crazy-making an interesting year).
We love The Story of the World history curriculum.
(And, given that I loathed history when I was a kid, it’s no small potatoes for me to say that I love a history curriculum!)
After using Tapestry of Grace Primer for my oldest son’s first and second grade years, we started Volume 1 of The Story of the World and haven’t looked back.
In the first post in this series, I focused on subjects that are going well. I do love it when a plan comes together!
But that was the easy part. Now we come to the part that can get discouraging really fast if we’re not careful…
A lot of homeschool bloggers like to post their yearly curriculum choices (like I’ve been doing in this series) for their readers. Over the years, I’ve found it incredibly helpful to see what other families are using.
But sometimes these “what we’re using this year” lists give the impression that choosing curriculum for the year is a once-and-done kind of thing.
Totally not the case!
Homeschooling is more than a method of education – it’s a lifestyle.
So it’s not surprising that there’s overlap with other areas of life when it comes to the best tools to use for the job. For example, when it comes to digital tools, I’ve found that all kinds of non-school-related apps have helped our homeschool.
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If you haven’t done so yet, read the first post in this series here and check out Our Curriculum Choices – Year 1, Year 2, Year 3 and Year 4.
If you’ve been following this series of posts, we’ve now caught up to real time. I wrote about the first four years retroactively because I started this blog just before we began our fifth year of homeschooling.
Since I can’t summarize a year that hasn’t happened yet, this snapshot will be a look at how our year has started so far. Later this school year I hope to post about lessons learned during Year 5… but I have to learn them first, so stay tuned.
