Our 6th Grade Homeschool Curriculum

Last year was our first year homeschooling… we didn’t really have a specific plan. We used a little of this, and a little of that, and spent the year falling in love with learning again. I’m happy to say my kiddo is gladly reading books again, and asks questions and researches for the answer in all areas of her life. She participates in big juicy conversations and  all this makes me very happy! At the end of last year, she expressed concerns about “not learning anything”, which is silly because all you have to do is ask her a question and you’ll see how much she has learned. Through conversations I’ve sussed out she’s wanting a little more clarity to our learning, and I’m cool with that.

We are relaxed eclectic homeschoolers so our 6th grade homeschool curriculum is still a bit of this and a bit of that, but this time we know the resources (at least an outline) we’re going to be using. I talked about being planning rebels, and how we need plenty of space in the details. I think this plan gives us that. (And we are flexible, and will continue to evaluate as the year goes on, changing things if they need to be tweaked.) Our curriculum choices have been joint decisions, based on things we want to learn, and curriculum that best suits Hanna’s learning style. We came to these decisions through many conversations, and testing out samples to see if they would be a good fit. So here it is!

Our 6th Grade Homeschool Curriculum (2017-2018)

Math: 

This year we will be using Teaching Textbooks (6) as our homeschool math curriculum and Prodigy for fun and extra practice. (There is a group buy FB group that makes a year of Prodigy super affordable.)

Science: 

My kiddo is a huge fan of science, so we have a lot of resources available for this year.

Middle School Chemistry
Mystery Science
Tinker Crate
501 Science Experiments
50 Women in Science (part of morning basket)
Movies, documentaries, biographies, and anything else we find. 🙂

Language Arts: 

We are diving into the Brave Writer Lifestyle this year. We are really excited about it.

Writer’s Jungle: This is our writing curriculum.
Poetry Tea Time: Poetry
Free Write: Our weekly writing time, and every 8 weeks we will choose one piece of writing to work on editing and revising.

Arrows: This is the grammar, reading, and comprehension piece of our language arts. We will be reading the following books this year as part of our homeschool english curriculum along with the corresponding Arrow:

A Long Walk to Water  ~ Arrow
Bud, Not Buddy ~ Arrow 
Carry On Mr. Bowditch ~ Arrow
Hatchet ~ Arrow
Homer Price ~ Arrow
The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe ~ Arrow
The One and Only Ivan ~ Arrow
Out of My Mind ~ Arrow
The Birchbark House ~ Arrow
The Green Ember ~ Arrow
The Secret Garden ~ Arrow

Personal Reading: Hanna will continue to read whatever books she wants. 🙂

Social Studies: 

This year we’ve decided to focus on Asia for our social studies. Our plan is to dig into the culture of each of the countries in Asia to learn more about life in these countries. We will include books, documentaries, movies, cookbooks, websites, maps, first hand connections we have, and any other resources we can find to help us accomplish this goal.

History: 

This year we are working our way through the Joy Hakim series A History of Us.  These books are engaging and interesting, and we’ll be using them as part of our morning basket. I imagine we’ll get sparks from them, and there will be pieces we want to dig deeper into, we’ll do that as well. 🙂

Music: 

Hanna continues to learn to play the guitar. We will be starting guitar lessons in the fall.

We are also going to be learning more about and listening to music from the countries we study in Asia as well.

Art: 

This year we are focusing on Art appreciation. Our goal is to learn to look at art with open eyes and hearts and to appreciate the beauty. We will be borrowing works of art from the library so we can study them and enjoy them. We are also using the Art Fraud Detective books (they are so fun, and encourage close observation), and Discovering Great Artists for hands on art projects. Hanna has decided she’d like to learn Calligraphy, so we will be learning how to do that together. 🙂 We will also be sewing, knitting, and crafting as projects arise and watching documentaries about art and artists.

Physical Education:

Hanna has moved up to level 3 in gymnastics and will continue to spend time at the gym, as well as on the trampoline, roller skating, swimming, and at the rec center with our homeschool group. The goal is at least 30 minutes of activity each day.

Life Sciences:

We believe learning the skills of life are just as important as math or science. We will be cooking in our homeschool quite a bit this year. We have plans to cook at least monthly meals from the Asian countries we’re studying.  Hanna continues to work on her knife skills, and has plans to throw a dinner party for her friends and family this year. We do thematic cooking lessons that incorporate math, science, nutrition, geography, and culture with the help of our Raddish Kids box, (use coupon code x3wpfq to save $10 on your first order) which we’ve been getting for over 6 months now and absolutely LOVE!

Hanna also participates in the meal planning, budgeting, shopping and comparison shopping for our weekly groceries, as well as cooking at least some of our weekly meals.

She continues to work on sewing projects, and is working on creating items to sell at the farmer’s market, or even renting a booth at a local Makers space. She is very interested in starting a business. We will continue to investigate the steps to achieving this goal this year.

There you have it! Our 6th grade homeschool curriculum for this year. I’d love to hear your thoughts, and what you’ve got planned or did for your 6th grade homeschool year. This year feels a bit bigger, going into middle school and all. It’s nice to be able to connect with other homeschooling moms with kids this age. I created a private facebook group for secular, relaxed eclectic moms with older kids so I’d have some people similar to me to talk to. 😉 We’d love to have you. Click here to join.