*NEW* SECULAR Homeschool Curriculum//NOT The Good The Beautiful//Homeschool mom 

We are also a Christian family who choose to do secular homeschooling! We are wrapping up fourth grade and we used Oak Meadow (secular) and Lightning Literature. I loved Lightning Literature for reading comprehension! This is what we used it for mostly! Their composition isn’t strong but the comprehension and grammar are great and the books were enjoyed by my son. The poetry components in fourth grade were his favorite. It is secular as far as I’ve seen! We ordered fifth grade for our 22-23 school year! If you try it out, let us know what you thought of it. I hope to have an in-depth look through of all the curriculum we used this year. Also, if you want something that isn’t a curriculum for reading comprehension you can try Evan Moor’s reading workbook! Hope this helps!

Yay! Love finding other secular homeschoolers on the YT :-)

Hi from Missouri, next door! I’ve never heard of that Language Arts curriculum, I’m definitely going to have to check it out. It also breaks my heart that The Good and The Beautiful is such a pretty curriculum. Homeschool families want secular curriculum that is pretty! 🦋

I would read the book "The Knowledge Gap". It specifically addresses reading comprehension several times in the book and makes recommendations for curriculum and methods to help reading comprehension. Also talks about the big "don't do this!" When it comes to teaching reading comprehension.

if you want secular then id go with bookshark or possibly try teachers pay teachers

I will have a fourth grader next year and it will be our 3rd year using lightening literature. My son loves it, the book list is amazing and he likes every book we have read. We just got grade 4 in the mail last week and he already wants to start. I do no use the writing composition. I add growing with grammar, soaring with spelling and winning with writing from Jack Kris publishing. Next year I plan on starting IEW along with lightning lit 5. I saw your last video about TGTB and thought “good luck girl”. But didn’t want to discourage you. Project Happy Home has great reviews of lightening lit, I think you will love it.

So grateful to have found this! Two years after you posted this and there still isn't a secular program that is all inclusive and affordable as TG&TB. Thank You for this. Any updates??

I have recently discovered English Lessons Through Literature and we are loving it! No one ever talks about it for some reason. One of those hidden gems in my opinion

I just recently found your channel and feel your pain with the secular curriculum! I'm going to apologize now for my very long-winded response! As for lightning literature, I've seen a lot of secular homeschooling mamas using it and loving it and they haven't mentioned to me anything overly religious or "non-secular". Our family hasn't used it, we use a mix of Michael Clay Thompson and Build Your Library instead which are also secular, but quite expensive compared to Lightning Literature. You mentioned being Montessori. At least for our family, I've found that taking curriculum and working it into Montessori practices is most beneficial. For instance, we use manuals from Montessori RD that cover from Toddler through to around 6th grade. They are extremely helpful in showing ways to introduce concepts to children in the "Montessori Way". We take that and then for instance in math, instead of teaching the lesson the way the math curriculum we've chosen teaches it, rather we refer back to the manuals and present the topic that way and then use the practice problems from the math curriculum, as just that, practice. We allow them to use the Montessori materials we've presented the subjects with (ex: the multiplication beadboard, when doing multiplication problems from their math workbooks). While independence in subjects such as mental math is important, for youngins it'll usually come naturally later on with enough practice. Montessori RD has manuals for Math, Language Arts, Science, and History/Geography/Cultural Studies and most manuals cost $20-$30 with just a few costing a bit more. Hope this is helpful, so sorry again for the very long-winded response!

Hello! So glad I found your channel! The struggle to find engaging secular curriculum is real! We do use TGATB science units and I find it relatively simple to remove the religious elements. I use them more as a spine and add extra books and activities, I so feel that is plenty even if I remove the religious parts of the text. We do not use the math or LA, because the student reads more of the text directly and so it is harder to skip over the religious text.

We used LL for 1st and 4th grade this year and liked them. And are using them next year, too. Project Happy Home has done pretty detailed flip throughs on her channel. It is secular. I find the writing component to be weak but we like everything else.

What a sweet video! I so appreciate your positive attitude. It is definitely a lot harder to find pretty secular curriculum! We do use TGATB for math and I’ve found the religious references to be minimal. My daughter wanted to use it for LA however, and although I did allow her to (I try to ge their buy-in for school, especially this kid who has learning differences), we skipped the first like three lessons because they were pretty religion heavy. 😐 As a Christian family who prefers secular materials, I am curious about your why. I totally get that there are haters on both sides, so it can be difficult to share about it honestly, but if you felt comfortable talking about it in a future video, I’m sure you’d find many of us are like minded!

Just found your channel and can relate to a lot of what you are saying. We are also a Christian homeschooling family that prefers secular curriculum as well. We tried TGATB LA this year for my 9 year old and it got the job done, but really struggled with some of the content and lack of diversity. We too are switching to Lightning Literature in the fall. I did a full review and flip through on my channel if you want to see the inside. Best wishes!

Thanks for saying it! And yes, JoCo has been crazy hot the past few days here. I’m just now exploring different curriculum so this is great info. I’ll be back for more definitely. 💛Raye

We are using Lightning Lit Grade 3 and it is completely secular and great for reading comprehension! Also there are a few videos on RU-vid of flip throughs that show you exactly what is included in them! I highly highly recommend it though. We have absolutely loved it.

We used Lightning Literature last year and my daughter hated it and I have to admit I ended up loathing it as well. It seemed like such a beautiful curriculum and it is… BUT the book selection was more misses than hits. Coming from doing Five in a Row where we fell in love with many of the book selections, Lightning Lit books fell very flat. The writing assignments were incredibly frustrating as they required so much of my own made in the spot examples to show her what she needed to do. There are zero templates or written examples to show the child what you’re asking them to do for all writing assignments. The grammar skipped around so much… like 20 lessons in they would circle back to a sentence diagramming concept neither of us remembered how to do but there was no specific lesson reference to go back to for easily finding the original instructions. Can you tell it was incredibly frustrating? It looks beautiful but had major flaws. My kid will NEVER let me try it again… she would shut down and we’d get nowhere with it if I tried it again.

I found another resource yesterday, under the home - I've downloaded the art and music curriculum. It's free so you can check out what they offer they also offer poetry. I might use some of it next year we're almost done with fables from Core Knowledge. Have you checked out Evan-Moor workbooks? Obviously not an entire program but they seem really good. We're only on level 1. I'm planning to use Evan Moor Skill Sharpener Reading and Spell & Write level 2 next school year.

LOVE LOVE LOVE lighting literature! You can always used teachers guides and sometimes all the readers and teacher guides on Facebook!

We have used lightning literature grade one through three and I would say it is mostly secular and the only instances of religion or religious context would be some of the poems in the Random House book of poetry that you use. We actually just switched from this curriculum to a different one through Jack Chris publishing, don’t mind the typos, one of the names of the curriculum is growing with grammar. Lightning literature is excellent for a child to learn reading comprehension, the reading comprehension questions in the teacher manual are excellent. We moved on just because my children find some of the literature choices not to their flavor so we are pulling back away from having a literature heavy language arts curriculum to one that focuses on skills and then pulling books from reading lists from places like torchlight and build your library which we use for our history. The only strong downside of lightning literature is the composition, and getting winning with writing was actually one of the reasons why we pulled completely away and switched over to JacKris

Project Happy Home did several flip through of the Lightening Literature. I will be using it next year.

Also I forgot to mention I use “flash kids reading for the gifted student” for his reading comprehension and he absolutely loves it! Also if I feel he needs more attention to a particular subject I buy “Kumon workbooks” I have all of the 3rd grade ones. And he will do some pages as needed. I hope this helps you 😊

I haven’t tried Lightning Literature, but it has been on my radar the last month or two. I believe it is secular. I was planning to get it with our charter and we can only get secular curriculum. It looks great. We already have a writing program and I was looking at other grammar programs, so we are likely not going to get it after all. I found literature guides in Rainbow Resources called Great Works-an instructional guide for literature, so I think we may do that with a few books. We also do Writeshop (which includes a bit of grammar), spelling from Evan Moor and Beowulf Grammar from Guest Hollow.

I have heard wonderful things about Lightening Literature, the only downside I’ve heard is the composition might be lacking. As far as I am aware it is completely secular and we are considering it for next year. We have been just using Novel studies from TpT for this past year and have been looking for something more in depth. I do wish there was something that was laid out as beautifully as TGTB but secular. It just isn’t out there that I have found, maybe one day though.

We just started using lightning literature for my kids and they are loving it so far. It is a secular curriculum. I highly recommend it for literature. You just might have to get an extra writing curriculum. There are composition prompts, but it doesn’t teach how to write.

We are leaning this direction also! From what I can tell it is secular. There are some Facebook groups where I’ve seen the teacher guides and readers used so that’s an option.

We just left TGTB LA because I felt it wasn’t strong in any one LA aspect. I plan to use LL in the fall, but because my rising third grader didn’t get much writing experience with TGTB, we just started Essentials in Writing to give him a good foundation before we begin LL. This summer we are also going to try some Brave Writer Dart units. ✨

We are starting Lightning Literature in the fall. For math we're using Singapore Dimensions Math and loving it! Oh, and we're also in Kansas. Hi!

I hope you’re doing well. Would love if you’re able to come back to YT! ❤❤

You may like Memoria press's story time treasures or literature guides. They are secular and really fantastic.

There are other momma's on here that have done reviews on Lightening Literature. You can type whatever curriculum you want to know about in the search bar too and it will bring up a bunch of videos. The only one that doesn't have a lot of videos is Build Your Library.

Just wanted to say you made me stop and think about this topic. Just found you. Thanks your kind words.

I have level 5, it's secular. I only use it for the reading. Occasionally I'll have my daughter do one of the grammar pages as a brain stretch, but skip them for the most part. The composition feels like an afterthought. The end of book discussions are worth getting the teacher's manual for if nothing else.

It’s super hard to find secular curriculum and secular you tube content. I have a lot of religious curriculum I wanted to modify. It’s so much work. Please do make more videos about what you’ve found. We also need to focus on reading comprehension for my rising 4th grader. She had a severe language and reading delay. So she’s not at 4th grade level, but I can use some ideas and just get the level she needs.

We have used some of the younger grades and then some of grade 7 and 8 in LL. From everything I have seen it is secular. I do have a review of one of the younger guides on my channel if that is of interest :-)

Core knowledge is free to download and so is fishtank curriculum and engageNY. All free to download. If you need help there are videos on RU-vid.

Late response, but Homeschool Happy hour has some indepth videos on Lightening literature

Blossom and root is all secular and wonderful!

Lightning lit. Is great for reading comprehension but not very good for writing. It does not provide enough explicit writing instruction. Iew is better for writing or writing by number.

We are using Lightning Literature grades 1 and 3 this year and will be continuing with 2 and 4 next year. I'm very happy with it. We do not use the composition component. Tanya at Project Happy Home has really great reviews for all the elementary levels.

I believe it is secular as others have said.

I imagine it would be very hard to make make TGAB secular. Why would you try ? I am not secular and I know of several secular LA programs just off the top of my head.

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Have you heard of Grammar Galaxy? It's not as literature based, but it's supposed to be a comprehensive curriculum.

Tu Maestra 0 seconds ago Have you looked into moving beyond the page? They are secular. Please check it out . They are a great curriculum. I did not like Lightning literature Because it was not as amazing as described in my opinion.