Homeschool Curriculum Must Haves For This Year

The school year is more than halfway over, so I’d like to go over some of the homeschool curriculum choices and resources that we have been loving this year and the ones that haven’t worked out.

Being able to reevaluate teaching methods and materials and throw out what isn’t working for your family is one of the best things about homeschooling. I’m constantly evaluating and tweaking what we’re doing to make sure that we’re getting the most benefit out of the resources we’re using.

This school year, we stuck with some favorites, changed things up with how we were approaching math, and added in some new elements that have been great so far.

Whether you’re looking for some recommendations or just want to see what another homeschooling family is using, here is my run down of everything we’ve used this year.

So without further ado, here is the good, the bad, and the ugly of our 2020-2021 homeschool curriculum choices. Don’t worry- it’s mostly just the good!

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Math

From Math Mammoth to Singapore Math

We started the year using a variety of math resources. For a math homeschool curriculum, we were kind of still hanging on to Math Mammoth, which everyone hated.

I know other families who swear by this curriculum, but it just wasn’t working for us. It was boring, repetitive, and not engaging at all.

Years ago, when my oldest was in 1st grade, we used Primary Mathematics (Standards Edition) from Singapore Math. It was a little fast paced for her, and she became frustrated with it. I really liked its approach, though, so I ended up dropping Math Mammoth this year and giving Singapore Math another shot.

Let me start by saying: Singapore Math has been awesome for us this year. It’s fast paced (which is good when your child is ready for it!), encourages mental math, and has a hands-on approach that my kids really thrive on.

There are two things that I have to stress here if you’re thinking about switching to Singapore math:

1. Make sure you go to their website and have your kids do the placement test! The grade levels don’t exactly match up with other programs. For example, multiplication is started in 1st grade in Singapore Math.

If your child is starting second grade, you might assume that you need to go with the Year 2 books. Don’t do that! The website explains everything you need to know about the placement tests, and I can’t stress enough how important it is to do this before purchasing.

2. If your child is anywhere past the Year 3 books, it may be a difficult transition to this new style of teaching. If you’re planning on starting your child at Year 3, you may want to actually start with 2B to teach this new style using math your child already knows.

I did this with my 3rd grader. Even though he knew the material, it took him awhile to grasp the new method.

This has actually been great, since it has reinforced these math concepts for him. If your child is well beyond Year 3, just know that it may take a little time to get used to the way Singapore Math teaches math concepts.

Pro Tip! Singapore Math uses math manipulatives, but they can get expensive! We buy these math cubes and that’s it! You really don’t need counters (use buttons, dried beans, candy….whatever you have on hand), and everything else can be done using everyday things.

So this year we tossed out Math Mammoth and are now very happy with Singapore Math as a curriculum.

Math Prodigy

In addition to Singapore Math, we have been using and absolutely loving Math Prodigy. This online math game has been played daily at our house, and I’ve seen major improvement in each of my kids’ math skills because of it.

If you’re not familiar with Math Prodigy, I’ve sung the praises of it here in my review of online math programs we use. This has been an indispensable part of our homeschool this year.

Mathseeds

Mathseeds is a part of the online learning program Reading Eggs. We have had a subscription to Reading Eggs for awhile now and love it. While my oldest two mostly use Math Prodigy for their online math practice, my youngest two absolutely love Mathseeds.

When starting Mathseeds, kids have the option to take a placement test or start at the very beginning.

My Kindergartener (who is working about 2 grade levels higher in math) took the placement test and is working his way through the learning path. Each lesson starts with an animated lesson and incorporates games and practice to teach each topic. At the end of each short lesson, there is a little quiz (that feels like a game) that must be passed before moving on.

My youngest, who is in Pre-K, started at the beginning. I have done very little actual math instruction with her (she’s 4!), but since she wants to be like her older siblings, she plays Mathseeds too. She is working her way through the program and can now play Math Prodigy like the big kids, which starts at a 1st grade level!

This is amazing because I know that almost everything she knows about math has come from this program. I love that I can let my kids play this while getting high quality math instruction.

If you want to give it a try, you can actually sign up for a 30 day free trial of the program. You will get access to everything, including Reading Eggs, Fast Phonics, Reading Eggs Jr., and Reading Express.

Language Arts

Handwriting Without Tears

For handwriting, we have always used the Handwriting Without Tears workbooks. I love these, and my kids love them too. We usually do a page a day.

My youngest two, who are in Pre-K and Kindergarten are working on print, and my 3rd and 5th graders are doing the cursive program.

Here are the links to each of the books we are using this year:

What I love about these books is that other elements of language arts are worked into the lessons. So while they are refining their handwriting, they are also practicing capitalizing proper nouns, how to spell homophones, and the like.

We will continue to use these each year, and I highly recommend them if you’re looking for an easy and effective way to improve handwriting.

All About Spelling

We started using All About Spelling at the beginning of last school year and have loved it! Dealing with dyslexia in our homeschool, spelling has always been our greatest challenge. Before All About Spelling, I focused on repetition and memorization to teach spelling which was difficult, frustrating, and ineffective. It often ended in tears.

All About Spelling teaches spelling rules in short, buildable lessons. It also incorporates color coded letter tiles to help visual and hands on learners.

Since starting with the program, I’ve seen so much more confidence in my kids’ spelling. This one is a keeper!

>>>Want to see my full review of All About Spelling? Read this post!

All About Homophones

This is another product from All About Learning Press, the company behind All About Spelling. I use this with my older two kids as additional spelling practice. The book is intended for kids from 1st grade to 5th grade. We bought them (one book for each kid) at the beginning of last school year, and I think we will still be working on them for another year or so.

Each page covers a homophone pair. Kids have to choose which homophone is the correct one for each fill in the blank sentence. I get my kids to do a page or two per week, and I will include the homophones from the week in our spelling lessons as review.

Reading Eggs

As I’ve already mentioned, Reading Eggs has been an absolute must have in our homeschool. The program is broken up into sections: Reading Eggs Jr., Reading Eggs, Fast Phonics, Reading Express, and Mathseeds.

In addition to Mathseeds, my youngest two use Reading Eggs and Fast Phonics. Reading Eggs has a learning path, just like in Mathseeds, where kids have short, fun lessons that teach letters, spelling, and reading. Each lesson starts with a short animated lesson which moves on to practice games and an end of lesson quiz.

Fast Phonics is a recent addition to the Reading Eggs program, which focuses only on phonics mastery. It is really great for kids who are just learning to read and need some reinforcement for sounding out words.

My oldest two have completed the Reading Eggs section and now use Reading Express, which is geared toward kids ages 7-13. It’s for kids who have mastered reading and now need to work on reading comprehension.

Even though my oldest are voracious readers, I find this program is a really good challenge for them. They are given a variety of different texts to read and analyze, from poetry and fiction to technical non-fiction passages.

Just like the other Reading Eggs programs I’ve talked about, Reading Express also has a learning path kids follow that gets progressively harder. Kids can take a placement test to make sure the material is at their level.

I can’t say enough good things about this program. I highly recommend you sign up for the 30 day free trial to see what the big deal is. That way, you can see how much a difference the program can make for your child before you decide to sign up for a subscription. We did the free trial and were completely hooked.

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons

Yes, the book has a gimmicky title, but let me tell you something: this book is worth its weight in gold. I have used it to teach all of my kids to read.

My youngest two are working through it right now, and we will continue to use it until they have completed all 100 lessons. Once they are done with it, they’ll be independent readers.

Whenever anyone with young kids asks me what they need to start homeschooling, this is always the first book I recommend.

Computer Science

Coding

This year, I got serious about getting my kids to practice coding on a regular basis. I really want them to have a solid knowledge of coding, since it’s a skill that will only become more important.

We had tried several programs in the past, but they were either too slow paced or too difficult to follow. It’s been really hard to find something that my kids really enjoy.

The best program we’ve found so far has been Hour of Code, which has different projects for kids of different ages and abilities. There are projects using different coding languages, which I’m not sure is helpful or makes things more confusing.

This is definitely something only my older two work on. There are projects geared toward younger kids, but I found that for the most part my younger two were pretty lost.

We’ll be sticking with this unless I find something better since something is better than nothing.

Typing

This year, we started using Typing Club for touch typing practice, and it’s great! It’s a free program that teaches touch typing that even my 4 year old can follow.

No, I don’t think 4 year olds should be learning touch typing. If you have multiple kids, though, you know that the youngest wants to do everything the ‘big kids’ are doing.

Since starting this program, the kids have become much faster with their typing skills.

Each kid can open their own account which keeps track of their progress. You can see which letters they’ve been working on, how many words per minute they are typing, and their accuracy. My kids love challenging each other to see who can get the top typing speed.

Miscelaneous

Another resource we buy every year is the grade level Brain Quest workbooks for my older two and Highlights workbooks for my younger two (they are really great for little kids who want to ‘do school’ with a lot of fun, entertaining activities as well).

We don’t always work through the entire book, but I find them really useful as a supplement to what we are working on.

My kids always finish the science section on their own because it’s everyone’s favorite subject, and I will sometimes assign work from the social studies/geography sections. Other than that, I’ll ask the kids to do a specific page from the book if I see they need to work on something, like how to properly use quotations.

This works for us, and I plan to keep using these each year.

Other Subjects

You might have noticed that I only included the homeschool curriculum resources we’re using for math and language arts. That’s because we don’t use a curriculum for anything else!

Since this is about the curriculum choices for the year, I’ll save how we learn social studies, science, creative writing, art, and French without a set curriculum for another post.

So there it is! That’s my round up of our homeschool curriculum choices for the 2020-21 school year. I hope the information here has been helpful. If it has, please take a minute to pin it for later!

>>>For an updated rundown of our current curriculum, including what we’ve kept and what we’ve changed head over here! Spoiler alert: We found a MUCH better (and free!) program for coding.<<<