My Top Curriculum Choices

While some parents want to purchase a set that has everything that they need to homeschool every subject for the entire year, I like not being bound by boxed curriculum. One of the things I love most about homeschooling so far is the total flexibility in being able to choose the style, materials and resources that will work for you and your children.

While unschooling has worked very well so far, I don’t feel comfortable completely jumping into that river and just going with the flow so I did some research and basic planning while still retaining room for flexibility. Add to this my son’s affair with busywork (aka worksheets) and there was the need to do at least some shopping and downloading for the next school year.

After much researching here are our curriculum picks for next year. I bought materials that I thought were good enough quality and would appeal to Shammy. The rest will be going with the flow, doing lots of reading, learning from life and maybe doing some unit studies, if that goes well we may try our hand at notebooking but only time will tell.

So who were the winners? These were the two items that I felt I just HAD to buy:

Critical Thinking Company’s “Building Thinking Skills“:

This is an award winning complete curriculum that works on vocabulary, reading, writing, math, logic, and figural-spatial skills, as well as visual and auditory processing.  The manipulatives will make it interactive and fun.

 

“Life of Fred ” Elementary Math Series:

Instead of nothing but dry exposition and endless drill exercises, they contain fun stories about Fred Gauss, a child prodigy math genius. During his hilarious adventures, he encounters situations that call for solving math problems. Children actually want to read these books.

While my son has shown that he has a natural aptitude for math and has greatly developed math skills on his own, I chose Life of Fred for it’s humorous narrative format style that will appeal to my reading loving son. While there is a Language Arts version of LoF, I figured that I would try the math first and see how things go.

After lots of research (including browsing all 800 pages of the Rainbow Resource Center catalog), these were the only “must haves” in my mind.

I did purchase some copywork bundles and geography ebooks from the Build Your Bundle sale and I have been building an age appropriate science lab to do weekly experiments, mostly from You Tube and Pinterest.

In a future post, I will show you how you can build your science lab with mostly items from the dollar store.