As promised I am going to update you on what curriculum I’ve chosen for my 8th and 10th graders. Down the line, once we get the books and begin using them I will try to stay on top of posting what works or doesn’t. Before I begin listing the materials I want to say how good our God is. Yes, this world has gone crazy and things are a mess, but He has been providing for my family during it all. If you read my last post, you know my situation. With prayer and discussion we opted to go ahead as systems normal, even though they are not. That means I filed for homeschool and began purchasing curriculum. Now comes lesson planning once everything comes in. Please, if you are new to homeschooling in PA, go through my posts and visit my printables and resources pages to help you navigate the law and be compliant with it. It’s not that hard to follow, it just sounds difficult. I was once a new homeschooling mother also. (this is our 4th year!)

On to the choices I’ve made this year, with some input from the teenagers.

• Math 8th : We stuck with Master Books Principles of Mathematics (Book 2) for my 8th grader. She completed book 1 in 7th grade with a B average. It is a pre-algebra course. Math is difficult for her but Master Books seems to work well for now. I only needed the workbook (called Teacher’s Guide) because I have the text leftover from when her brother took the course. There are just 2 books for you to buy per student. If you have 2 doing the same, you could potentially only buy one text and 2 workbooks. The workbook contains all the assignments, quizzes, tests and answer key.
• Math 10th : For my son’s 10th grade year we are sticking with CTCMath because last year when we switched mid-year, the deal I purchased gets us through another school-year. Also, he liked the style better than the textbook he was using for Algebra 1. He completed Algebra 1 with a B average between both curriculum’s. Before CTCMath, he was averaging a C, which was under his own expectations and caused him a lot of needless frustration. He will work through Geometry and as this is our first full year with CTCMath we will see if the program is year long, if not, he can utilize any of the lessons and go back and review Algebra 1 concepts.
• History 8th and 10th : I loved Christian Liberty’s Streams of Civilization (vol 2) that we completed last year. We learned so much. Instead of doing another year of world history by going back to volume 1, I opted for studying United States history. We chose Master Books American History. There is a textbook and a teacher’s guide (workbook). Because we do our classes together, I only buy one text and 2 workbooks. This is a 1 year high school credit course rated for 9th-12th grades. I feel as though my 8th grader will be fine as she completed a 10th history course last year with an A average. The course says it’s 4 days of reading/assignment sheets and every Friday is project day. There will be 2 essays for the year, one for each semester. The essays are what they will work on every Friday. They should be 5 pages long according to the description. They recently updated this course so if you want the latest version you will need to get it directly from Master Books as Christian Book Distributors did not have the revised edition. Because the course description says it will be 35-45 minutes a day and I prefer high school level courses be longer we will supplement as needed. We can take extra time to study different parts of history. I purchased a book on the battle at Gettysburg, for example, so that we can include some PA history. The idea of shorter lessons is to allow for further study and possible trips, but this year field trips will be more difficult.
• Science 8th an 10th : This year we stuck with Master Books for science, though I wasn’t impressed with the Applied Engineering course they did last year. My kids enjoyed it but it wasn’t challenging enough from my perspective, especially for a high school rated course (grade levels 7-9). Science was a hard one to choose because they have different interests from each other and of me. Together they agreed on General Science 1. A high school rated 1 year credit course. (grades 7-12) They will be learning about weather, astronomy, minerals and the ocean. This course is likely to be very similar to their very first year of homeschool when we chose a general science course from Christian Light. There are 4 texts and the workbook for this course. This is noted as an Earth science course.
• English 8th and 10th : English is another difficult one to choose. Because my son is in 10th grade, I prefer longer class times and challenging coursework and for English I would like a comprehensive course, but nothing has everything I want. Last year I pieced a course together. They did an introductory literature course alongside of a Grammar/composition course. It was sufficient though maybe not as much writing as I would have liked. This year is another piece together, but the main focus on literature and writing papers. They have done grammar work for 3 years in a row and have a very good foundation and will review as needed. I decided to change gears from learning parts of speech and and formal grammar to let’s just get some writing work done and learn how to write good essays. The Literature course textbook is from Abeka bought through Christian Liberty, utilizing their design for the course rather than the multitude of books (at quite the expense) from Abeka. This is the same system we used last year. Themes in Literature is the text using Christian Liberty’s teacher notes/key, tests and supplemental book. This is a course rated for 9th grade and the previous was for 8th. I also bought them workbooks for non-fiction writing (by Evan-Moor publisher) and a book on writing a research paper. I have no doubt the literature course is a full year course as we weren’t even able to complete the other Abeka literature book, because, we only worked on literature 2 days a week as to focus on grammar skills. There is also a possibility of a classic book reading/study that will be incorporated. This year is a lot of reading and writing!
• Bible 8th and 10th : I may have gotten a little carried away with Bible this year trying to piece together a course instead of buying a ready made year long course. Last year we used a Master Books course using Answer’s in Genesis materials. It was a high school credit course. It was challenging and at times boring, if I’m being honest. It had a lot of solid information but the 2 books overlapped each other and it often felt as though we had just read that same topic. It was designed as an apologetics course, defending your faith to a secular world. This year I decided we are going to go back to studying the Bible as we did the 2 previous years. Positive Action for Christ has a great apologetics series and we already completed 2 of the books and so I ordered the 3rd in the series for this year and possibly will purchase the 4th at a later date in the year. They call this a discipleship series. I highly recommend it. Begin with Milk, move on to Meat, than Bread, and finally Fish. That will not last a full school year and I am thinking of beginning it as soon as it comes instead of our official school start date in August (though since I turned in my paperwork any work we do now counts as school). I also purchased Memoria Press’s Acts of the Apostles course. This will be our first time using Memoria Press. I’ve been interested in their materials for some time but unsure how this will work for my children. Then I also bought Christian Liberty’s Studying God’s Word Book F – I Samuel – Malachi. I’m excited for us just to study God’s word and there are literally hundreds of options out there or just read the Bible.
• Electives : These have not been completely decided on yet. I know for certain we will be delving back into learning German. My son started that in 8th grade. My son wants to continue on with computer programming languages while my daughter want to continue with cooking. They also will do some sort of PE/Health. This may not give us a spot for Art this year but still working on that. Neither child has much interest in Music and we did cover that for 2 years. My daughter will need Music sometime in her secondary schooling in order to fulfill law requirements. She wants to learn the flute, of which we don’t own. However, we do own a clarinet that nobody plays anymore.

This may not have helped all of you, but I hope to review these course choices through the school year. Once I receive everything, I will go through the materials and develop a lesson plan and flexible schedule. I like to start with a schedule so we have a place to start, but it often changes as we go along.

Because the world is in chaos, my laptop also decided it needed to permanently no longer boot into windows 10. Between my husband and myself, to no avail, were we able to recover it (we are both fairly computer literate). It’s possible the hard drive failed as there have been constant issues with the machine for almost 2 years. Luckily, knowing there was an issue I never could sort out, I had backed up everything and started using Google Drive to store all my important homeschool documents, like grades. I highly suggest you always have a back up. I also have an external physical drive. Technology can be a great asset when it works for you and not against you. For now, we have replaced the hard drive from an older laptop that failed for some other unknown reason and after an entire day of re-installing Windows 10 and the multitude of updates, it’s back up and running with a much smaller hard drive, but functioning, until another machine is able to be purchased.

God is taking care of us. He will take care of you too when you put your trust in him. We have hope because of the shedding of blood on the cross and subsequent resurrection by our Lord Jesus Christ.

John 3:16 ” For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”