Favorite Homeschool Resources 2024-2025
When I was homeschooling, I loved reading books and blog articles detailing other homeschooling families’ curriculum choices. It was especially fascinating to see how different families’ personalities manifested themselves in their curriculum choices and to get a feel for the wide of range of possibilities that are open to homeschoolers. In that spirit, here’s what I did last year with Jack and Luke, who were in 4th and 6th grade:
We started our school day with morning time and almost always watched World Watch together while we ate breakfast. (I had a subscription to this ten-minute news show for kids). Some days all we did for morning time was watch our news show, but sometimes we practiced Bible memory verses, poetry memory, hymns, and folk songs at this time. Sometimes we looked at art or listened to classical music. For our eight years of homeschooling, morning time was the anchor of our day, and my best morning time inspiration came from Ambleside Online.
Next we usually did the subjects that I read out loud to the boys, which we called couch subjects. While I read out loud, the boys often played with legos or colored. For these subjects I more or less followed the history, Bible, and literature plans from Sonlight. (I greatly simplified these plans and never completed an entire year of plans from Sonlight!) Last year we did Sonlight Year F, which focuses on the Eastern Hemisphere. I usually read a Bible story (I love The Child’s Story Bible by Catherine Vos from Banner of Truth Press), some poems, a passage from our history or geography book, and a chapter from a novel.
After Christmas, we pivoted from our Eastern Hemisphere studies to spend some time learning about California in preparation for our spring break trip. We read The Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Balloon Boy of San Francisco, Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain, and The Best Coast.
For math, our goal was to do a math lesson every day. Luke used Fourth Grade Math with Confidence, which I like because it incorporates games and manipulatives, as well as independent practice and review, and the teacher’s guide is open and go. Jack used a self-paced online program for prealgebra this year called ThinkWell Math.
For science, we did a lesson from No Sweat Nature Study a few times a month. These are online lessons about plants and animals. While the kids follow along with the lesson, they complete a notebook page with drawings and notes. I would often watch the videos with the boys and make a notebook page in my nature journal with them. The boys also had a subscription to Mark Rober’s Crunch Lab boxes, which come once a month in the mail and teach engineering concepts through fun kits. Jack and Luke also loved doing science kits.
For language arts, the boys had a writing class once a week with our friend Sally Ewan, and they wrote one paper a week for her. They also worked through spelling workbooks, and when we were on breaks from writing class, we used a grammar workbook called First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind.
For independent reading, I mostly just supplied them with books that they could read in their free time. Sonlight is a great source of independent reading books, and I also love to read booklists, some of which I’ll link below.
To try to keep us on track, I had clipboards for Jack and Luke, and each day I would write a list for them with the things they needed to do for that day including their instrument practice, so they would know when they could be done with school. I would often let the boys play Nintendo Switch for 30 minutes once they had finished their lists, and this was a very powerful motivator.
For the last few years, we were part of a co-op that met the first two Fridays of the month. The boys loved it, and they got to do classes like gym, art, geography, and strategy games. For the first few years that we homeschooled, we didn’t belong to a co-op and that was great too. Co-ops are nice but not essential.
What is essential is having friends who also homeschool. Some of our best group learning experiences have been little classes put together by homeschool friends. For six weeks in the fall, the boys took a class about the voting process with a few other families that was taught by my friend’s mother-in-law who also happens to be an amazing AP American History teacher. Our voting class in the fall inspired a caroling class taught by the same friend who happens to be a professional singer. The kids learned about the history of the carols, practiced the songs together, and shared their music at a nursing home, our local Chik-Fil-A, and door-to-door in our friend’s neighborhood.
Looking back at my camera roll, our most epic field trip was our backpacking road trip down the California coast for spring break. But some of the biggest smiles are the pictures from an afternoon excursion to a friend’s farm where we got to bottle feed her baby goats.
After homeschooling for eight years, we felt that our family was ready for a new experience. For the 2025-2026 school year, the boys are attending our local Christian school. They seem to really enjoy learning in a classroom from their excellent, caring teachers, and I am enjoying supporting their learning as their mom and cheerleader and not as their primary teacher, at least for this year. I still find myself strategizing about how to expand their reading life and teach them more things. My favorite unschooling technique, strewing, comes in handy here.
Regardless of the educational arrangement your family finds itself in, the essence of parenting is teaching. I’m so thankful for our years of homeschooling and especially for the bond that all four of my kids formed with each other at home. Charlotte Mason said that the true mark of an educated person is not how much they know, but how much they care about, and this thought inspires me both in my mothering and in my own attempts to be a lifelong learner.
Favorite Booklists:
The Gospel Coalition Classical Christian School Reading List
