I use Hillsdale free online courses I love them. They had a section on children's literature that I thought was so helpful. Great on your son for pushing ahead.
Our current favorite resources are World Watch News, Writings from the Wild letter, MEL Science and Math boxes, September Co Character Building Cards, The Patriots Almanac, A year of poetry teatime letter, and TGATB Science unit studies.
New homeschool mom here 🥰 I love this video and all the resources you’ve shared! We just started kindergarten in Nov. 2022. So far we have Good and The Beautiful Handwriting & Language Arts; and More than Words Living Faith Bible Curriculum. Math worksheets from Teachers Pay Teachers, and other random activities. I also have a 3 year old son with Down Syndrome and am currently using the See and Learn Speech Sounds. It’s a start and the mindset to unschool myself is challenging. Trying to find our own groove! Thanks for all your insight, it’s helpful 💛
So especially if you are doing British history, you should definitely check out Horrible Histories. They are rather focused on the silly and gross parts of history, but they are so very good for catching the kids' attention. They are books and movies :)
Another great resource for geography is GeoToys. They are based in WI and made in USA. The GeoPuzzles and GeoBingo games are colorful and sturdy. They shipped fast despite being the week of Christmas (last minute decision lol) and we could not be happier with them. Our introduction to them was a secondhand US History GeoPuzzle (I don't think they make it anymore) and I'm really hoping they do more like that for other parts of the world in the future. Definitely worth a look imo! Edit: typo lol Edit 2: Booooooo, they don't actually make all their stuff here and I question whether or not the stuff still labelled as such is really made here. Oh well. Anyway, I went and ordered the other GeoBingo and both sets of GeoCards. One of the GeoCards sets was damaged. I emailed them and they're sending us a new set. Gold star for customer service!
I love duolingo. At least one of the story lines went outside of our family values and what we were willing to introduce to our young kids. We might let them do duolingo when they are older and have already learned the birds and the bees.
You are a wealth of information! I was homeschooled K-12 and I’m now homeschooling my kids and Istill have loads to learn about homeschooling. Thank you!
Hi I am looking for a great Bible curriculum for next year I will have a first grader and a 4th grader. Anyone love a Bible curriculum for the younger ages?
Such great resources. Kidnuz podcast is a great resource news with a pop quiz at the end. I loved the idea of Knowledge Crate but I haven't even touched the Winter box yet so sad. I would love your opinions on the Gentle Feast. We get a new DK book every quarter such vibrant colors and full of information.
My kids and I have been enjoying Worldle and Statele. They are like geography versions of the Wordle game everyone was playing last year. They have multiple rounds you can play for the state or country each day. My kids practice map reading by finding the country (if you guess wrong it tells you which direction to look [1000mi NE]), it's neighbors, capital, flag, population, and currency or language.
Careful with Duolingo, it is fun and engaging but I had a practice story once that introduced an lgbt couple. Two females were dating and one woman was introducing another woman to her mother. It’s under Duolingo stories- set 1, “a very big family”. Just thought I’d mention that because it’s definitely something I would like to know if my children were using the app.
We have been loving listening to Lamplighter Theater as we dive back in after the holidays and some sickness. We also love the Writings in the Wild letters, Beautiful feet US geography including our map work. I forgot I had purchased those maps you showed and love that you use them so much! Love the timelines for each individual child...do you also have a large timeline somewhere in your school room ?
Postal History Foundation...they have free, fun stamp learning sets by history science, event etc. We love adding those into whatever we are doing. The kids especially love seeing all the old stamps
Ooo...I will have to check out the knowledge crate. 😊 You don't even need a teacher i.d. for thriftbooks. You just need to email them a receipt of your current curriculum.
We took a break to do a unit study, but we will be working back into it for the rest of the year. We definitely don't use all of the suggested subjects, but it's a great core!
We use The Good and The Beautiful for Language Arts, Science, Math and handwriting. I still haven't found a History I like. Our children are almost 5 and 6.5 years old. We like playing Osmos for fun and work on spelling, math and critical thinking skills. We read "How Great is Our God." By Louie Giglio for our devotional together.
World Watch News is a daily favorite that my boys don't let me forget. Right now one of my favorite resources is CLE math. It's very spiral, straightforward, not teacher intensive, and uses "light units", a set of 10 booklets or so per level. Kids really appreciate the accomplishment of finishing each book.
The Indonesian Way is a great foreign language resource for a language with way more speakers than its number of students would warrant. It's normally about 6 college credits in terms of how much it covers. The nice part is the audio-ehanced ebook element.
That's awesome! A prof. of Indonesian at the U of Hawaii has written a lot of audio-enhanced resources, at least through the upper intermediate level. I believe his resources are used for the 7th-12th college credits of study there. If it's a good fit, there's more is what I'm thinking
I was just talking about implementing a timeline into our history studies. Thanks for posting! Also, do you follow a certain cycle for history? One more question, do you have a link to the weekly checklist that your kids mark off?
We spent the last 2 years on early Modern and then modern times and jumped back to Middle Ages this year. My kids aren’t super into ancient times so we don’t do that as often. The cycle 1 of AGF that we are using this year has one day of ancient history included with 3 days of Middle Ages up to the reformation. I really like how she incorporates a little ancient with modern so you don’t have to spend several years on ancient alone! I don’t have a link for that yet, but there will be one in an upcoming video specifically about our binders.
So much good info!! Thanks so much for sharing. I love the wipe off maps and timeline books. I’m planning on getting those when we buy new curriculum ❤
Thanks so much for sharing! I bought the History Timeline notebooks after seeing them in your previous video. Each of our 5 kids has their own color as well and we all love it. They particularly like the “My History” section where they have a timeline of their life events.
Wow tons of fantastic resources! So many out there and it's cool to see some live and in action and hear from other homeschooling parents what recourses they like best and why. I was never a big history buff and always struggled with that subject but the interactive resources you shared make me want to check out these and learn again for myself along with my kids! Adored the fascinating history book you shared and the map placements in particular, but so many great ideas overall. Thanks for putting this video together.
I haven’t really used much as far as curriculum for most of my kids… We have mostly just worked together on learning the letters and then the sounds and then starting with beginner reader books. I did use The Good and the Beautiful’s PreSchool and PreK curriculum with my youngest and now we are just kind of working on reading beginner books.
I don't know if you've heard of the Christian Light learning to read program (CLE) but it is a solid program. It worked well for my four children who all had differences in their style of learning. One of my sons, who is now 21, feels it is the best curriculum for teaching a child how to read. I'm not sure how he's come to that conclusion but anytime he heard of someone struggling to read, he says they needed the CLE learning to read curriculum 🤭😀. It seems to work well for all learners but I suppose there could be some who might not benefit from it. I did have to cut down on some of the workload, some minor tweaks, depending on the child. And I don't think we ever fully completed the whole course. By the time we were nearing the end, they were reading so well I just dropped it.
