Our Large Family Homeschool Curriculum

Hi, my name is Sherry, the creator of the blog, ourlifehomeschooling.com. If you're new to my channel, I am married to my high school sweetheart, Nelson, for over 22 years. We have nine children, one on the way. I am a former public school teacher turned homeschool mom. Today, I'm gonna be sharing our large family homeschool curriculum. We have a very wide age span. This year, we have a 12th grader, ninth grader, eighth, sixth, fourth, second kindergarten, and two preschoolers. So as you can imagine, that's a pretty wide gap, and I'm going to be talking today about how we make that work in our home. From the get-go, I just want to say that, for the most part, our family has stayed with the same curriculum from the very beginning. I'm not opposed to switching out a curriculum if it's not working for the family, or if it's not meeting the individual needs of a child, but I have just found so many benefits of staying with the same curriculum as much as possible. The first benefit is what I like to call the trickle-down effect. When you start a new curriculum with your first child, it takes probably like a year till you become familiar with it, till you kind of get the rhythm of how it's supposed to flow and how to manage the daily lessons, and then after that, it's much easier to teach again all of the kids that are younger, that are watching the older kids learn their studies. They are there for the songs. They hear the songs over and over again. They watch them do the online activities. They watch them do their math, and they just, when it comes time for them to start school, they have so much less to learn. There's so much less of a learning curve for them because they're familiar with the curriculum, the layout, what's expected. When you stick with the same curriculum, it really trickles down to your younger kids, which means that it's much less work for them and much less work for you as a mom because the curriculum and the way of doing things, the style is just so familiar to everyone. I also wanna say something about outsourcing. Just because you are homeschooling your kids, that does not mean that you have to teach every subject to every child, that you have to do everything. You are able to decide what is taught, when it is taught, and by whom it is taught, but you don't have to teach everything. You can outsource things to co-ops, to online programs, to other teachers. Our kids get art, PE, music, and just a lot of random elective type classes from our co-op. We also outsource music lessons. Our kids have been involved in sports and in different clubs, so you don't need to feel as the homeschool parent that you are responsible for teaching everything. You just get to decide what they're learning, when they're learning it, and who is teaching it. Before I dive into the specific curriculum choices that we have used over the years, I wanna say that for a lot of these, I'm going to give the company that I use, but I'm not gonna go a whole lot deeper. If you head over to the blog, I have links for all these resources. I also have links to other posts that I have written that do go into more detail and explain how I use this curriculum or how we teach this in our home. For example, if you're wondering how I teach a child to read, I'll show you the curriculum that I use in this video, but I have several blog posts that I have gone into a lot more detail explaining specifically how I do that. Let's get started. The general curriculum that I use for all of our kids from kindergarten through high school is Ambleside Online. This is a free resource. It is a Charlotte Mason philosophy of education, which is originally based on a classical education, which if you are unfamiliar with that, it emphasizes short lessons, living books, knowledge of God through the Bible, history learned chronologically, science learned through a study of relationships, narration, copywork. There's so much more, and I think you really have to have just a basic understanding of the Charlotte Mason style of learning to use the website and to use their resources. Now, I wanna say, first of all, that Ambleside Online is not what I would consider to be a perfect curriculum for a large family. I did not pick this curriculum because we had a large family, and I thought this would work well for us. This is what I picked in the very beginning because I felt like it was the best thing out there. I loved this curriculum. I compared it to so many other things that were available at the time. To me, this is the cream of the crop, and it still is. So it's not specifically great for large families. It's just what I have used from the beginning, and then I made it adapt and work to fit our large family. Ambleside Online is an exhaustive resource. Even if you had only one child, there's no way that you could do everything that they have suggested. And so a lot of people are overwhelmed by Ambleside Online. I look at it as a feast, and I pick and choose the things that I think are best. Now, with our oldest child, maybe our oldest couple, I did do a lot of the suggestions. I probably tried to do more of everything because I was only homeschooling one or two. And in that way, I was able to become familiar with the ones that I really loved and the things that really just weren't as important to me or I didn't enjoy. And so now, with our large family, I still use Ambleside, but I use it very loosely, and I just choose the suggestions that I love the most. And I have had to be very flexible with that because we have such a wide age range and because I'm teaching so many children. So let's start with English. When I think of English, to me, English is literature, writing, spelling, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, poetry. For literature, again, I use Ambleside Online Book Selections for their literature reading. I have books that I assign to them when they're old enough to read on their own throughout the year. And then we are always reading aloud books throughout the year. And during our read aloud time, that's our time to discuss the characters, plot development, all those things that you would discuss in a literature class. For writing, I use a combination of copywork, narration, dictation, and notebooking to teach our kids to write in the elementary years. I have a file that you can download on the blog, which has all of the Ambleside copywork. So these, they have copywork that they do every day based on the books that we are reading, some of the best selections. When they're doing copywork, they're copying the best pieces from great authors. And this really helps them to understand content, style. They learn spelling, vocabulary through doing this. So it's a great all-in-one. Narration is also a very difficult skill. And as I read aloud to them, they begin first by narrating back to me orally, and then eventually, around fourth grade, they start written narration. So we use copywork and narration as our main curriculum for writing in the elementary years. For grammar studies, we begin in fourth grade to start a language program. I use Abeka language for all of my kids. They start this in fourth grade, and here is the next level that comes after that. The thing that I love most about Abeka is that it's something that's very simple. I like the way it's laid out. It progresses through sentences, proper sentences versus fragments, to punctuation, to parts of speech. They have a really useful handbook at the end of each book that has the list of being verbs, helping verbs, subjective and objective pronouns, prepositions. And we memorize this list together as part of our morning time. And it's just a useful tool that you can refer to at any time of the year. But I like how the top of each lesson has the basic new concept. It's really easy for kids to look at it and read it on their own and then do the lesson. Math is a subject that I have switched curriculum over the years. The very first math program I started with was Right Start Math. I love how the kids learn everything from games and manipulatives. It's all centered around the base 10 system. Now, the thing about Right Start Math is that it is very teacher intensive. And so the mom has to do the lesson with the child. This worked really well for me for my first three kids. But once I got to having three kids in school, I realized that I was doing three math lessons a day in addition to all the other homeschooling that was happening in our home, all the other subjects. And it just was not something that was sustainable. I knew that I had to change something. So I, at that point, changed to Singapore Math. And we are still doing Singapore Math today. As soon as a child is able to count to around 20 or more and they have one-to-one correspondence so they're able to point to something and have the right number and count, then they are ready to begin Singapore Math level one. Now, this math workbook is one that they can go through pretty much on their own. But I think the important thing to note is that with Singapore, my kids progress on their own, but they come to me whenever they start a new concept. And I get out, usually, some of the things that I learned from Right Start Math to teach them the lesson. I wanna say to any homeschool moms that are intimidated by math, I think the most intimidating thing is teaching it to your first child. With your first child, you are learning how to teach everything. So I remember with our oldest, he got to certain sections in math and I looked at it and thought, oh boy, I don't remember this. And I had to basically relearn some things and I had to freshen up my memory and understanding of math. However, when I came to our second, third, fifth, seventh, I, it was very fresh and I was able to teach it better each time. So teaching math can be intimidating with your first child, but after that, you really become better at it the more you teach it because it just becomes so familiar to you. So our kids start in kindergarten with primary math level one. And they work through it on their own. I check their work. We only use the workbook for levels one and two. Starting in level three, and this may be third grade, it may not because I have them progress at their own pace. In third grade, we do the textbook and the workbook. For this, I do have the teacher's manual. I find that at this point, I really need a teacher's manual to correct it quickly because the math is just getting harder. However, I don't use the teacher's manual to teach individual lessons. They are able to progress through this on their own, just bringing the book to me, bringing their math to me when they start a new concept and we can go over it at that point. I have them correct their own work and with the idea that they have to correct every one that they got wrong. And if they don't understand why they got it wrong, how they got it wrong, they bring it to me and we go over it together. For history, we use Veritas Press self-paced online history lessons. I cannot say enough about how much I love Veritas Press. This is one subject that we outsource. So the kids log in online every day. They take a lesson a day. These are interactive pre-recorded lessons. They have actors that are on site. There are interactive maps, quizzes, where they can get their grades right away. The thing I love most about Veritas History is that kids learn history chronologically. So Veritas Press has five years of history. The first is creation to ancient Egypt. The second is Old Testament Greece and New Testament Rome. The third one is Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation. The fourth is explorers to the year 1815 and the last year is 1815 to modern times. One of the things that I think is so great about Veritas Press is that they weave biblical history in with world history. It's not two separate entities. They see how they both fit in together. Each year has 32 events or people that they study. They also have a song that they learn that takes you through all those events. So they memorize these 32 events and each of the five years has a different song. So as you can imagine, my younger kids have learned all these songs and when they're ready to start history in second grade, they're already familiar with the songs and they've heard these events. It's something they have a basic foundational understanding of and it's so much easier for them. Each of these cards has just beautiful art from that time period and on the back, they have a description of the main parts of the lesson and then at the bottom, a suggested book list of books that you can read to go along with this time period in history if you would like to. We love Veritas Press. This has been wonderful for me because as much as I love history and I love reading history to my kids, I feel like Veritas Press self-paced history lessons do more than I could do. They do a better job than I could do and it's something that kids can do on their own. So it's a perfect fit for a large family. For our science program, I use some suggestions from Ambleside Online. One that I specifically love is the Burgess Animal Book and they have the Burgess Bird Book. I usually read this to my younger kids. We do about one chapter a week. It takes us probably two years to get through one of these chapter books. Along with it, they like to do the Peterson Field Guide which is just a coloring book that has all the different animals. It has stickers at the very front which they can put next to the animals and they just use colored pencils and there's a short little description that they can read or I can read to them about the specific animal that we're learning. So this is an Ambleside suggestion that I just really love and we've continued to do with our youngest kids for science. For our elementary kids, I have used Apology of Science. This year, we are doing astronomy. They also have notebooks. These notebooks are great. They have copy work. They have coloring pages. They have these really neat mini books. At the end of each chapter, you can make a mini book. They're colorful. I really do like these notebooks that come with the Apology of Science. When I teach science to our kids, I do it in the afternoon during our read-aloud time and it's very short. I just read a couple pages. Sometimes I'll have a child read and then if they would like to do the experiments, they will then go and do the experiments on their own and we'll talk about them. The experiments are not something I'm very intentional about. It's more based on their interest. The one thing I will say about Apologia is that I feel like it is very descriptive. I feel like sometimes it just dives really deep into topics and maybe that's great if you have a child that loves a specific area of science. For us, often I just wanted a general overview. We have done all the elementary years of science through Apologia but if I found something that I love better, I think I would be up for a switch. Just because we've done all this and I think that I would enjoy something that maybe just was a little bit more broad in its study. Now, I have several other examples of more specific links to programs that we use for things like geography, state history and other things like that. You can find those on the blog if you want to find more resources. We also do morning time which I have written extensively about and this covers subjects like poetry, composer study, picture study, memory work, foreign language and more. So for those, you can also find the links and the resources that I use for those if you look at my morning time posts on the blog. I wanna say a little bit about just specific grade levels. For kindergarten, as soon as kids know their letters, we begin putting those sounds together and teaching them how to read. When I teach a child to read, I use Bob Books. These are a set of five different boxes of books. It starts with just short vowels, then long vowels, blends. We usually read one or two books a week and then we move on to the next one if they're ready for it. And this has been something I've used for all my kids. I've taught all my kids to read with Bob Books. I love them. After they finish with Bob Books, we move on to books like The Adventures of Little Bear or Frog and Toad. For teaching kindergarten writing, when they're first learning to write their letters, their capital and small letters, I have used Handwriting Without Tears. This is excellent. I love the way they use finger tracing to teach the capital letters basically in a sequence that makes the most sense for learning for kids that age, learning through straight lines, then short lines, and big curves, small curves. Handwriting Without Tears is an excellent program. After they finish Handwriting Without Tears and they know all their capital and small letters and they can write short words, then I have them do copy work from the Bob Book that we are reading at that time. And in kindergarten, I have them do just one sentence. So I would write the sentence out. So he caught the rooster and put him in his bag and she would copy that out and that would be her copy work for the day. In kindergarten, for math, we use Singapore as I mentioned before. Kindergarten usually takes for our kids about 30 minutes to an hour to get these things done. And to me, this is plenty of time, especially if you consider how they are involved in all of our read aloud time and our morning time throughout the day. But kindergarten can be done in a very short period of time. There's so much you can get done with your child when you're working with them one-on-one. For our high school kids, we have outsourced a lot of their work and this has been just such a lifesaver for me as a mom. We've specifically outsourced writing, higher level math and science. Those are the ones that I specifically look for. We have a local co-op that is a drop-off co-op. So this is a second co-op that our high school kids are involved in. At this co-op, they are taught by outside teachers. They're responsible to them for all of their work. The kids are able to just do some higher level writing, learning how to write a research paper, learning persuasive writing. Of course, some of the higher level sciences, chemistry, biology, math, algebra, geometry. For us, this co-op has been just a lifesaver for teaching our older kids to relieve some of the burden on me. They're also able to take electives. So that's also an option. Now, we still do teach some subjects at home and those would be more like literature and history. I use a lot of Ambleside suggestions. For our middle and high school students, I have really enjoyed this series, the History Lives series. It is a series of five books of church history. It's fictional, but it's obviously based on true stories and the real lives of the people that live during this time. We've also enjoyed Story of the World for middle and high school history programs. Story of the World has four volumes that begin from creation up to modern times as well. I hope this has been helpful to you to just see what another homeschool mom is doing and see how our curriculum works in our large family with such a wide age span of children. I would love to know your thoughts and what curriculum you love and have found to be useful for your family, whatever size you have. Thanks for listening in. Have a great day with your kids.