Summer is here and another year of homeschool is in the books! I can’t believe we’ve been homeschooling for three years now. Every year is a learning experience (especially for me). This year we tried out some new curriculum and made some switches mid year, so I wanted to give a full breakdown of everything we stuck with and what we changed up. Here we go!

Kindergarten

Math

My Kindergartener completed The Good and the Beautiful Level K Math this year. He loved it and breezed through it! I felt like it was very easy for him to pick up on, but having gone through Levels K-2 with my oldest, I know that the concepts and the workload will get harder. If you have a child that is really strong in math, I think this is a great curriculum. Both of my boys will be switching to something new next year and I’ll explain more on the “why” below.

Language Arts

This year, we started Level 1 of All About Reading. This was my first time using this curriculum and I love the gentle approach to reading. I ended up taking each lesson and spreading out the activities throughout the week. Because of this, we’re only halfway done with Level 1. My son needs a slower approach to reading, so we’re going to just pick up where we left off next year and then continue on to Level 2 when we finsh!

My Kindergartener also completed Explode the Code books A,B,C and Explode the Code: 1 this year. These were great reading/phonics practice for him and he loved them! He was also able to do them independently, which I loved.

For Handwriting, we used The Good and The Beautiful Handwriting Level K. My son enjoyed the drawing/coloring portions of the handwriting books and each page was short and easy to complete!

Extras

My son also really loved playing on Khan Academy Kids while I was teaching his brother. It’s a free app that has games and videos for reading, letters, math, and logic. He also really loves playing Prodigy Math and Night Zookeeper!

2nd Grade

Math

We wrapped up our third year of using The Good and The Beautiful Math! My son completed level 2. I’ve always loved how easy this curriculum is to use. It’s truly open and go and I love the illustrations, games, and stories. This year, math got a little more challenging though. My son began expressing frustration with how long the lessons took and often told me the pages felt overwhelming. I agree that I felt all of those frustrations too. I have loved TGTB math and the spiral approach, but at times I felt like it didn’t teach certain math skills very well so I do a lot of explaining on the side. So, that’s why next year we’ll be trying out something new. This will be the first time we haven’t used TGTB for math, so I’m a little nervous…but I’m excited to share more about what we chose!

Language ARts

This was our first mid year curriculum switch! We started the year off with The Good and The Beautiful Level 2. We only did about 20 lessons, before I knew we needed a switch. We’ve used TGTB Language Arts since Kindergarten with my oldest and he’s become a really strong reader from it. I didn’t think we needed the phonics practice anymore, so we changed course and decided to try out Brave Writer Darts.

Brave Writer wasn’t an easy transition. It’s a little confusing once you start out. I watched LOTS of videos before diving in and decided we just needed to try it out for a month to get the hang of it. We tried out the Sidekicks Dart first and ended up loving it!

What I love about Brave Writer is that learning is very organic. Kids learn language arts concepts through passages in books they read. There’s no workbook to complete or checklist of things that need to be learned. Instead, each week there’s a new passage from a book they’re reading with grammar, punctuation, literary devices, and spelling that can be discussed within that passage (but you get to pick and choose what your child is ready to learn about). I admit, sometimes I worry about not having any worksheets…but I honestly think this style of learning works! My son has enjoyed this so much more than traditional workbook style learning.

I think Brave Writer is great for kids who have already learned how to read and want to learn through literature!

Darts we completed this year:

• Sidekicks by Dan Santant
• Big Foot Little Foot by Ellen Potter
• Heartwood Hotel: The Greatest Gift by Kallie George
• The Very, Very Far North by Dan Bar-el
• Odder by Katherine Applegate

Each book took us about a month to complete. After we finished a book, I’d have my son write about the book and tell me what he liked about it in his Schoolnest reading journal .

We still continued to use TGTB’s Level 2 readers ( Molly and the Falcon, Wesley and the Wolves, and the Third Nature Reader) for our nightly readings and their Booster Games on the app. I love how the readers in second grade have the parent read one section and the child read their own section. I plan to keep on using these in the future!

Brave Writer provides spelling practice, but I prefer using Evan Moore Building Spelling Skills workbooks for spelling, because they provide more repetition. For handwriting we used TGTB Handwriting Level 2. We’ve loved their handwriting books!

Family Subjects (History, Science, Bible, Writing)

This year we used Peaceful Press’ Playful Pioneers as our spine. I talked previously about this curriculum in posts. It covers bible, art, history, science, and a family read aloud.

We spent the year reading through The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This was hands down my FAVORITE part of our school year. Cozying up to read these books in the morning before starting school will be some of my favorite homeschool memories. I’m truly amazed at how much we learned through these stories. What I love about this curriculum is that all the history and science is tied in with the book. We learned about so many animals, historical events and figures, and we got to learn what it was like to live back in the pioneer days.

Did I love every Little House book? No. But I will say we learned something from all of them!

I’ve noted before, but I’ll say it again…this curriculum can feel like a lot. We didn’t do everything (and I don’t think you need to)! Some weeks we’d skip the extras (copywork, poetry, baking, or the hands-on activities). Life gets busy and when it does we do everything we can and call it good. We made it our own and I feel like it worked really well for our family.

My only con with this curriculum is that I wished there was a little more science (but I think that can be easily supplemented)! I also wanted more time to dive into subjects that interested my kids, so some weeks we’d add on a few more days to cover a subject and learn some more about it. Other than that, I can’t recommend this curriculum enough!

Spoiler: Next year we’ll be using another curriculum from the Peaceful Press for family studies.

We also tried out Brave Writer’s Jot it Down writing curriculum this year. This is a gentle writing program designed for younger grades (K-2). Kids focus on the act of verbally retelling and constructing ideas, instead of focusing on the physical writing. There are 10 writing projects. Things like retelling fairytales, making photo journals, an art scavenger hunts, mini animal books, posters and more. We didn’t get around to completing them all, but the projects we did we really enjoyed! Some of our favorite projects though were the fairytale retellings and the animal books.

Next year, we plan to try out Partnership Writing!

Field Trips

We had so many fun field trips this year! I truly think this is what will make learning stick. Here’s a few things we did this year.

For fun:

• The apple orchard
• Local Dairy Farm
• Georgia Aquarium

Plays:

• Anne Frank Play
• String Quartet Presentation
• World Music Discovery Concert

History Field Trips:

• Lexington County Museum
• Historic Camden (Civil War site)
• Colonial Days Presentation

Extras

The boys also joined an art co-op this year that met once a week. They loved it and I loved that they could go learn about art with a real art teacher (because that’s one skill I’m definitely lacking in). It’s a blessing that our community has resources like this for homeschool kids. We can’t wait to do it again next year!

We also had a new member join our family…. Petunia (formerly known as Peter). We did not expect to get a rabbit this year, but when we found out a rabbit had gotten loose in our neighborhood and needed a home we glady took it in.

This rabbit has given us a run for our money. It ran away after we had it for a week and was gone for 3 weeks. We thought it was gone forever, but it found a way to live in the wild and survive. Someone spotted it and returned it home to us. We were all happy to have it back home! We then found out our rabbit is actually a girl and not a boy. Haha. So, we’re still getting used to calling *her* Petunia (not Peter). We’ve learned more in the past month than we thought we ever would about rabbits. But she’s been a great addition to our family and a great pet! She even loves to join us for school time.

We’re looking forward to a fun summer break and can’t wait to share our homeschool plans for the 2026-27 homeschool year soon!