It is that time of year again, where I start to buy Curriculum to carry us through next year. I also sometimes make decisions to switch things up. Now that I am working part time I have decided to make things run a little smoother. The changes we have made really have made a difference this past week.

The biggest change I made for both the kids was to change our History/Geography, Science and art program around. I stumbled across Layers of Learning. They have a curriculum that you can use with K – 12. It goes by year. Each year has several units. We started with Year 1 Unit 1. You can download the first unit for free. Honestly I was blown away by it and fell in love with this curriculum as soon as I started paging through it.

Layers of Learning works on History, Geography, Science, and Art. I absolutely love it because of the fact that is really hands on. You have this wonderful guide that you can use. It has links in there as well. You also have a library list for each unit. It is suggested each unit takes two weeks. I think it is going to take us a little longer….However, I LOVE LOVE that in the units have many hands on learning activities. I also like that each book is broken down per grade level. It’s nice being able to use this with both the kids at the same time as it really is a time saver for me.

Another thing that I am adding in is more Life Skills for my son. For math we have been working on Menu Math. We are coming to end for that and will start Grocery Store Math. For writing I have purchased two binders: Life Skills Reading and Writing Binder 1 and 2. Some of the things we will be working on reading the newspaper, schedules, websites, and emails. I know there is a ton more in these two binders. I also picked up a Conversation Skills curriculum that works on things such as greetings and gets more complex. Then I also picked up 5 W’s Fiction and Non Fiction Reading Binder, this works on comprehension as well as Critical Thinking.

For my daughter I ordered the next level of Math. We are still using Math Lessons For A Living Education. She has been in love with the Critical Thinking Detective and we have done both books already. So I have ordered her Critical Thinking Detective Vocabulary Book 1. She is really excited about this one. Another big change I made to her grammar and writing was that I purchased Write Shop Junior. She knows her grammar but still has trouble with punctuation and run on sentences. The girl loves to write. So I started at a level I thought would boost her confidence. So she is really liking it.

Now onto our extra electives:

Mondays both the kids will be working on Snap Circuits. We just bought two new kits lights and motion. My daughter also just got Snapino’s, which is a codable set. If your not familiar with either I highly recommend checking them out. They will add both learning and fun to your homeschool.

Cooking – Nothing really changed with my son. He is just going to pick out the things that he wants to learn to make, mostly his favorites. For my daughter I did purchase a year subscription to Raddish Kids. Each month the kids get a patch, 3 recipes, a utensil, and then some other things as well. One thing I really liked about it is you could extend your learning on these kits in your homeschool. There are little snippets at the Raddish Website.

My son really wanted to learn about music. He said he would like to learn from the 50s on up. He doesn’t really care for classical music. So I started to search the web to see what I could find. I did hit the jackpot on a website I found. The website is called Teach Rock, and it covers the beginning of rock to modern times. Best of all it was free. My son and I both looked it over and he is really excited and interested to start this.

My daughter has been wanting to learn Italian too. We have been working on Spanish but it really has been a chore to keep her interest. So I decided to buy a year subscription to Mango Languages. The reason I did this was if she got bored of Italian then she had many other languages to choose from.

As you can see I pretty much shook up our curriculum. I tailored it more towards there needs and some of it, I tailored to their wants. Of course things could change at any time again. I think we have really found what works for us, as well as adjusted our interests a bit more. My oldest is in that transition stage so I thought Life Skills was more fitting for his needs as well.

Did you find anything new and interesting for curriculum that you are using? I am always interested in hearing what works and what doesn’t? There is so much out there to use!

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