5th-grade homeschool curriculum picks for active learners

It’s the time of year when homeschoolers start looking at homeschool curriculum.  All of the conventions are going on, all the sales are going on, and the giant curriculum catalogs are coming in the mail.  This year I’m feeling fairly prepared because I’ve got all of my 5th-grade homeschool curriculum picked out already.  I know it’s a shock to me as well.

Future Ticia 2024, I’m updating this with my new logo and all that stuff, and generally cleaning the post up, and will be adding input from time to time.

It’s also a bit of an odd year because my kids are now ALL learning the same materials.  Last year Princess started math with her brothers but was still a bit behind her brother’s for reading.  This year, she’s essentially caught up, so there will be no breakdown of different grade levels.  They will all for all intents and purposes be completing 5th grade materials.

One final caveat:  My kids are active learners and we like our hands-on learning.  So, that influences what I pick for our curriculum.

(There are affiliate links)

Organization

We will continue to use Illuminations* to organize us.  I’m planning next year to have them take a bit more control of their schedules and start to plan out extra subjects each week.  I also want to look into the supplementary materials Illuminations has and dig in further.

I don’t know if the company even still has Illuminations. It’s a shame, it was a decent product.

Reading

I’m super excited because this year we’ll be done with All About Reading* (which I love, but I just can’t manage the lessons AND all the extra stuff I wanted to do), and using the reading guides from Illuminations.  I can’t wait to try them out.

Future Ticia 2024 says, that didn’t last long and we switched to picking from the 5th grade books made into movies.

Reading list (amazon affiliate links): CHILDREN OF HISTORY – LATER TIMES (A.D. 1000 to 1910), Courage and Conviction, Explorers Who Got Lost, Good Queen Bess, Mosque, Pedro’s Journal, Peter the Great, Seesaw Girl, The Siege: Under Attack in Renaissance Europe (wouldn’t let me link to it), Sundiata: Lion King of Mali *

*Caveat, this is assuming I can find copies of all these books, and I will undoubtedly grab more books as I see them and we will continue our book and a movie series because my kids LOVE it.

Math

Future Ticia 2024 is amused at how much I’ve changed in how I write these posts. That link should not have gone to a category, it should have gone to a post, but I digress, back to our 5th-grade homeschool curriculum picks.

We’ll probably be continuing with Math U See again.  It seems to work well for the kids, though I think Princess struggles with it from time to time.  We’ve also been enjoying Life of Fred* for a fun bit of silly math to review older materials.  This past year we’ve worked through the first couple of books fairly quickly.

Writing

We’ll be continuing on with our applied grammar and our Wright-minded writing curriculum.

Both of them have been working well for us, so I’m going to keep with them.  My big plans of forcing more writing fell to the side, because I didn’t have a good plan.  Now I’ve worked out a better plan and am being more structured in what I’m doing.  Progress, slow but sure progress.

Sadly, both of those companies are now out of business, that is the problem with using smaller homeschool curriculum companies.

History

I’m super excited to be starting Mystery of History 3 (MOH3*), and I’ve got most of the stuff I need.  I’ve been slowly gathering the materials as my local Mardel had 40% sales and as Bright Ideas Press had sales.  I’ve got almost everything I want, I’m just missing the reproducible forms and then I’ll have it all.  You know curriculum is like Pokemon, gotta get them all.

Geography

I’m loving the Adventurous Mailbox, so that’s going to be our spine, and we’ll go from there.  I’m still trying to figure out a good US geography, and haven’t found a single one I like yet.  So, we’ll continue to muster along with our checking out all the books on that state as we study different states.  It’s not super methodical to my mind, and driving me a bit batty.

Future Ticia 2024 says, another out of business curriculum. That geography heading is now linking to our geography plans we changed to.

Science

After a dose of double science last year this coming year we’ll be slightly more sane and only covering one science.  It was Princess’ turn to pick and she wants to cover CKE Biology*, I tried to convince her of a few others, but she was adamant.  It’ll be a good review year for us because we covered many of those topics in considerably more depth earlier, but I don’t think my kids remember it all that well, the boys having been 5 for some of it and tackling touch topics for others of it.

We’re starting to look into computer programming for my kids, and they keep pegging away at keyboarding skills, but it’s slow going.  Any suggestions for computer programming for kids?

Fine Arts

We are going to continue to work through all of the projects from the art classes we’ve been taking, those have been popular with all of the kids (as long as I allow them latitude in what they make).  I’m also hopefully going to pull in some great artwork from the time period like we did in the iconoclast controversy.

For music, the kids have been bugging me to start back up with our Zeezok music, and I want to get some focused music appreciation from SQUILT* going.

After several updates and random inserts, I think I finally have everything written about.