Our 2020 Homeschool Curriculum – See What Resources We are Using

I decided to share with you all what resources we are using this ear for our girls in terms of homeschooling material. Above is an image of the new items I bought this year. There are still plenty of items I have left over still that I plan to use this year as well. My kids are 9 and 12 this year. The items listed below are not limited to what we use. Often, we use additional tools and resources through out the year as well. You  should check out my list of popular homeschool curriculum here for additional ideas.

This year we are trying a new curriculum for math and my husband picked out Math U See. So far the girls are really liking it and taking to it nicely. Each lesson teaches using  videos, manipulatives, and other resources. We like that it comes with the manipulatives that are basically the blocks to help show visualization of the numbers.  There are videos, books, and teachers manual.

For language arts this year I found a new book to try. It’s called Vocabulary Workshop. These books have passages to read along with boldface words that will be the vocabulary and spelling words. The next few pages describe the words (which vocab was something I needed this year that spelling books we had been using lacked) and then have pages using synonyms, antonyms, fill in the blanks, verbs, nouns, etc. I find it to be pretty nice and my favorite to use so far for this age.

This year I was happy to try something new for my youngest since she hates writing. She’s big into video games and such so I spotted these Minecraft Language Arts booklets that I thought she would like. Sure enough, so far she has not complained once about writing! I’m happy about that. Defiantly find what your child likes and roll with that to help make your teaching days a bit easier!

We still use my ever faithful Evan Moor Books that I love so much. The daily 6 traits and the read and understand are great to use. It has a great mix of everything in my opinion.

I wanted to try something new this year. So for science I decided to find some topics I thought the girls would enjoy and got a few books. I spotted these 100 Questions About Books online and thought how neat these looked. We read them together, and then we research on more topics and learn more about certain topics that bring us interest. The girls now get to research and write papers about the chosen topic as well. We found out that our girls loved this independent work and how fascinating it could be! I also have other books and resources I’ve accumulated over the years that we go back and use as well. We use our microscope at times as well as watch educational documentaries too.

I’ve also been mixing in art with these lessons. Having them create different projects like stained glass butterflies, paper mache spiders, and more!

For history I wanted to try new books as well. I went with the Mark Twain books for my oldest to see how those are. History is a subject that I have a hard time finding resources I like to use. For my youngest I am using 180 Days of Social Studies. First time using both this year. I thought they would be better then they are. I definitely need to support it with additional content I have to research to find to use (like videos and printables).