Hi!
The good news and the bad news about homeschooling is much the same… you have SO much flexibility to decide what you want do and what to cover!!
In today’s email I want to talk about that feeling of overwhelm we all can get as we try to figure out what to teach our kids. First, we have to decide what basic subjects we want to cover (or not). Perhaps you’re teaching your kids to read and do simple arithmetic… or perhaps your kids want to dive deep into science or history. Maybe you want your kids to become bilingual by the end of this homeschool journey, so you want to sneak in some language learning from an early age… There are just SO many possibilities, that in itself can paralyze us, right?
And the thing is, just when you have one grade slightly figured out the kids are older and have different needs (and interests!).
Deep breath! The planning portion of homeschooling is challenging, but the good news is that we have time on our side. We have months if not years to get our kids ready for life on their own!
You may have seen these already, but I have a couple of free planners. One is for planning out your year and one is for daily and weekly planning.
- Free Homeschool Planning Pages – Planning out Your Year
- Homeschool Goal Setting – Free Printable
- Free Homeschool Planner and Discovery Journal (100+ pages with all kinds of different options for planning your homeschool day/week and checklists for the kids
- Free Calendar-based Homeschool Planner – Right now I have the Spring 2024 Homeschool Planner out. I’ll be updating this planner in the summer and you’ll see a post to that new freebie when I got that polished up.
Plus, here’s the Free Homeschool Supplies and Science Supply List Printable if that’s helpful.
I also wanted to make sure you saw the free curriculum resource guides.
Creating Your Own Homeschool Curriculum: These are some resources I made that might be helpful as you create your own homeschool plans. They include some of the units, topics & homeschool curriculums we used along the way.
These are somewhere between 30 and 50 pages and are FREE to download. In the spring 2023, I updated the K-1, 2-3 and 6-8 resource guides. I plan to update the others soon. 🙂
- Creating a Homeschool Curriculum: Kindergarten – Grade 1 (free 30-page pdf)
These are some of the subjects, units and topics we covered along the way. Sometimes it’s just helpful to get a glimpse into another family’s homeschool journey. Don’t feel intimidated by these. I have three kids and therefore I went through each of these grades three times! Not only that, but we did science and history together pretty much up to high school (and a few units we even did together when my oldest was IN high school)… so when I suggest that you can do a particular unit in 3rd grade, it’s quite possible that I also had a 1st grader and a 5th grader doing it too! (You get the idea.)
Another popular resources is this free printable Homeschool Science Unit Checklist for Elementary and Middle School . It shares many of the science topics we wanted to cover from K-8. Many of the topics we reviewed a number of times (going deeper as the kids got older).
We also have a free printable history checklist for homeschoolers. These are some of the history and social studies topics/units we covered along our homeschool journey. It also includes some of the historical skills I wanted the kids to learn (using primary sources, writing history essays, etc.) and some of the history teaching ideas that I tried to sprinkle into our homeschooling to add some variety and spice.
By social studies, I mean some of the skills/knowledge I wanted the kids to have that aren’t history topics per se. This includes things like geography, reading maps, geographic features (like peninsula, butte, lagoon, etc.), world facts (country sizes, longest river, tallest mountains etc.), world populations, deserts of the world, civics & U.S. government, world governments & society (democracy, republic, socialism, communism),
Hope these are helpful. In the next email I talk a little more about the resources we have on the blog. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of free printables that I’ve shared as I’ve homeschooled my kids… from math and grammar to history and science printables (not to mention German and Spanish worksheets too!).
I’ll be emailing again tomorrow! (ie. Click on the link for Welcome Email #3 below for more!)
Happy Homeschooling!
~Liesl
P.S. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email! (ie. You can email me here!)
P.P.S This is the 2nd of 5 emails in this series. After that emails will come periodically (every week or two … or three… if things get really busy for me! You know how homeschool life goes!!) (ie. Click on Welcome Email #3 below!!)
Here are the links in the Welcome Letter Series again:
