I’m pretty certain that it was just a few weeks ago that I wrote our homeschool curriculum choices for the 2014-2015 school year.
How is it that the years seem to pass so quickly, but oftentimes, the days drag on?
I’m not sure how that works, but I am certain it’s extremely bittersweet for me to have kiddos that are almost all elementary age.
Long gone are my baby and toddler days. *sniff, sniff*
In this post, I’m sharing the curriculum that I’ll use with my 5th Grader (fifth!!) this year.
I am sure that I will have to tweak these plans a bit, because 5 solid years of homeschooling have proven to me that my plans may be great on paper, but they may not play out well in a daily routine.
So knowing that, I’m willing to adjust as needed.
There has been an enormous amount of thought and prayer poured into these choices. I’ll share in another post how I arrive at my curriculum choices for the year.
In the meantime, here’s what we’re studying and learning!
Browse through all of the homeschool curriculum posts here at Mama’s Learning Corner.
Fifth Grade Homeschool Curriculum Plans
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Before you comment, YES, I am very overwhelmed with teaching 5th grade this year. My 10-year-old is a very bright boy who runs circles around me. I’m not sure we will be able to keep all of these subjects, but we are going to try.
→ Rod & Staff Grade 5 English – Last year was our first run with Rod & Staff, and I could not be more pleased with how much my older two learned! Diagramming, sentence structure, parts of speech, grammar – it’s all covered and covered well.
→ All About Spelling Level 4 – For those of you who are observant, you’ll see that this was also listed in our 2014-2015 plans. A few weeks into the school year, I decided that my son was a very natural speller and didn’t need to continue with a formal spelling program. I wish I had not done this!
Yes, he is a natural speller, but he also likes spelling. He asked me to add it back to the mix this year, so he’ll be going through all of All About Spelling Level 4 and possibly Level 5 if he chooses to do so.
→ Institute for Excellence in Writing – Aside from the occasional pages in Rod & Staff English Grade 4, my son has done very little formal writing. Yes, there have been notebooking pages throughout, but not a lot of instruction in terms of structure and style.
This year, he is working on Student Writing Intensive Level A (Should I have purchased Level B instead? I really have no idea.) and I purchased Teaching Writing: Structure & Style for myself.
I will be the first to admit that I have no idea how to teach formal writing to my children, so I’ve had to purchase some Teacher Materials for me.
Did it hurt to pay those big price tags? Oh, yes. It was painful. But my kiddos deserve an excellent teacher and a superior education.
My other option was to outsource it to a local co-op, but purchasing TWSS was more cost effective in the long run.
→ Handwriting and Copywork – Davis has completed all of the Handwriting Without Tears (very successfully, I might add!), so I am going to pull quotes and passages from our history work for him several days each week.
→ Singapore Math 5A and 5B – Singapore Math is a perfect fit for us. It’s methodical, logical, and truly teaches my kiddos how to think mathematically about a problem.
The Home Instructor’s Guide is crucial to success in teaching my kiddos this method of math. It’s packed with teaching ideas, hands-on activities (math games, etc.), and ways to teach my children how to approach a given math concept.
→ Sonlight Science E – Even though I have pored over the Sonlight catalog every single year we’ve homeschooled, I’ve never used their curriculum. However, this year we finally are!
Sonlight Science E focuses on electricity, magnetism, and astronomy. This is also a subject I have no idea how to teach, nor do I have any interest in it, in all honesty.
Thankfully, my husband is an electrical engineer, and he and Davis will work through the reading together and the experiments.
(I’m doing a happy dance to have this enormous subject off of my shoulders, if you can’t tell!)
Subjects We Will Study Together – Bible and History
I try to combine as many subjects as I can, but I can see that gets a bit more tricky the older my kiddos become.
They are at different learning levels and stages, so what works for one is probably not going to work for another.
However, each year I come back to Tapestry of Grace because we can easily combine levels.
Well, it’s not easy necessarily, but I can combine them.
This year, we are cycling back through Year 1, which covers Creation through Ancient Rome.
Davis is going to work on the Dialectic reading and some of the Upper Grammar projects.
I have searched and searched for a Bible curriculum that is just the right fit for us.
I finally think I have found that in Explorer’s Bible Study!
Again, I’ll write in a later post exactly how we are using this in our homeschool with multiple ages.
I am so thrilled to have discovered it and can’t wait to get started! We are going to be going through Explorer’s Bible Study this year.
I’ll be studying right along with them using my own study guide.
Do you have a fifth grader this year? What curricula did you decide on?
I’ll update the curriculum choices for each of the following grades as I publish them:
♥ 3rd Grade Homeschool Curriculum
♥ 1st Grade Homeschool Curriculum
♥ K4 Early Kindergarten Curriculum
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