Curriculum & Resources We Use Again and Again in Our Homeschool | Timeless Homeschool Resources

Hey everybody, welcome to the Wild Outway. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be resources that we return to over and over again in our homeschool. Today's video is a part of a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rooted in Rest and myself. Our goal with the homeschool show and tell was to really just showcase that there's not one specific way to homeschool and that we can all do it differently and still do it well. So I will make sure to link the playlist in the description so you can check out other people's curriculum and resources that are like wins that they keep returning to over and over again in their homeschool. Now, in case you are new here, primarily the way that we homeschool is by using amazing resources. So I'm talking books, games, subscriptions, experiments, that kind of thing. We don't use a lot of curriculum per se. While I do have a few to show you, the majority of what I have is like those resources that I find us reaching for over and over again. Okay, to start with, the thing that I basically start every single homeschool year off with, the resource that we come back to over and over and over again, is my ultimate guide to year-by-year learning. This has a list of like subjects and skills and concepts for each and every grade level. It has books for every grade. It has games for every grade. This is what I reference each and every homeschool year before I even start planning. Because I use books, games, and resources more than curriculum, this is the thing that I use the most frequently. If you are just looking for something that is going to help you plan and kind of know where you should be or where your kids should be each year, then the thing that I would use would be the home learning year-by-year book. Before I created this one, this is the one I reached for frequently. You really can't go wrong with either of these. I feel like, realistically, one needs to be in your homeschool library, for sure. In addition to that, again, because I like using books and games and resources and YouTube videos and all of those things, I really, really love our language arts and mathematics for everyday learning. Both of these list out different language arts and different math concepts and skills that you would like to cover over the course of homeschooling. And it lists books and games and YouTube videos for each and every one of those, as well as a ton of different hands-on ways to teach those concepts and resources. This is what I reference the most in our homeschool when I am ready to teach a new concept in either math or language arts or I'm presenting something to Emily or I'm looking for some sort of hands-on activity that we can do to kind of reinforce those concepts. So those are like my three go-tos that I find myself reaching for over and over and over. Now let's talk about reference books or reference resource-type books. The ones that I find that we reach for a lot when we're talking about different concepts or different things are these Usborne Internet Link ones. We have the Science, the Geography, and the World History. I find that these three have a lot of different like they cover a very vast array of things. Between these three, I feel like we can get just about any information we want. Like between this and Google, we're good. I mean, there's other things that I like for us to have, but I definitely feel like those three are like the basics. Then I've really, really enjoyed us having these Complete Middle School Study Guide books. It's been really great to be able to reference these. If there is a math topic or concept that needs further explanation, or if there's like maybe something in English, or if we're talking about a different topic or subject from American history, or world history, or science. I will say, while I obviously like having the Complete set, I have not found us needing or referencing the Computer Science and Coding one nearly as frequently as the others. So if you were only going to get a few, then I would maybe leave that one off. I would definitely get the Math, English, Science, and then World History. And then if you're obviously not in America, you might not want American History. If you are in America, you probably do want that one, but we definitely get the Math and English for sure. It's been nice to have that reference. Especially if you're already gonna get the Usborne Science, World History, and Geography, then you could probably just add the Middle School Math and English. And between those five, you would have a little bit of everything that you needed. We also really, really enjoy the Julia Rothman books. They're absolutely gorgeous. I find myself reaching for them a lot if we're doing nature study, or if we're looking for ideas of something to paint, and art, they're just so pretty. And the information is really, really good. So we have five or six of these at this point. We have the Nature, and the Food, and Farm, and Ocean, and Wildlife. These are fantastic. I mean, again, keep in mind that we're talking about reference books, not something that we're going to use to teach, per se. We're referencing them. All right, a few things for quick wins. I love a quick win. Something small that we can take with us, that we can learn something about really, really quickly, and we come back to it over, and over, and over. The first one is the Professor Noggin's Decks. We love these. I don't keep the boxes. I keep all of them in these little containers. I absolutely adore that they come in tons of different topics, that each card has an easy section and a hard section, that it's trivia questions that feel like a game, because you get to roll a dice and ask the questions. I have a soft spot in my heart for these, because Professor Noggin is literally the game that made Emily want to learn how to read. Like, she would want to play these trivia games so bad, but when it was just her and I, and she wasn't reading yet, she couldn't play, because I couldn't read the questions, because the answers are on the back. I mean, I could have, but I was being completely honest and saying, like, I can't, the answers are right there. And she, like, was determined. Like, I'm going to learn how to read, because I want to play this game. That's how badly she wanted to be able to do this. We love them so much that we own, I believe, every one. Like, literally, I have two full briefcases of them, which means we have at least 32 of them, because there are 16 in each of those. We love them. We come back to them all the time. There is almost always a deck somewhere, like, around our dining room table, because we use them at dinnertime. There's almost always one in the car. We take them on the go. They fit in with our unit studies. We're always doing them as a family, as part of our homeschool. It just, they fit so well, and we've come back to them year after year. What's even more amazing is I just told you that this game is what taught Emily, or what made her want to learn how to read. So she was doing them at four, like four and five. She's now 13, almost 14, and still enjoys them just as much. So, like, the longevity of them is amazing. Along that same lines are the Discovery decks. Love these. We've been using them in our homeschool for about three years now, since I created them. They are the perfect quick win addition to our homeschool. There are so many different topics. Also can take them on the go, can use them in basket time, can use them just when I need a five minute break. They're perfect for meals, for like, hey, here's the question, learn this, whatever. They're amazing. They work really good for resets too, like if we need a reset from each other. Each topic has 20 different questions with QR codes to a YouTube video that answers that question. They're perfect for interest led learning, and they have been instrumental in our homeschool. Like, absolutely love them. Probably our best selling product as well, because everybody loves them that much. So I did tell you guys that books were like a huge part of our homeschool, and it's the one thing we return to over and over and over again. And because of that, a lot of the curriculum that we use is literature based in one way or the other. One series of books that we absolutely love in our homeschool is the Who Was, What Was, and Where Is books. We absolutely adore these. We love them so much. I created mini units to go along with many of them, mini units to go along with a lot of them. I think at this point, we have over 200 different mini units, maybe even pushing close to three now between all three of the series. We love these. We've been doing these books and the mini units to go along with them for years. I really like being able to tie them into whatever topics we're already learning about and adding an extra history or geography component. For example, when we did Egyptian Heroes and Myths, we added in King Tut and the Great Pyramids, and it was just an extra geography and history extension to a lesson in a mini unit, or in a unit study we were already doing. So they work great for that. You can also bundle them together and do an entire study on landmarks or on famous women from history or explorers or whatever your kids are interested in, which is fantastic because there are so many of them that you can do that. And then with the mini units, you can extend the learning. So that makes these amazing, and we've come back to them forever. We were flipping through Emily's book of them because we keep an ongoing book in my office, and she was laughing because some of her first ones, because you always draw the historical picture of the person, they're like, she was probably four or five when we started them. I was obviously reading them aloud. She couldn't read them yet, but she was quite enamored at her drawing skills from when we first began versus some of the more recent ones that she's done. We've been doing them for years. These have definitely been a staple in our homeschool. The thing we come back to over and over and over again. And then along those same lines, like I said, because we do love literature in our homeschool, the thing that we return to over and over again are novel studies. So we have a bunch of these that we keep coming back to over and over again. We also really love our year-long novel studies. It's probably the thing that we've stuck with the most in our homeschool. We've done Passport to Adventures, which is Magic Treehouse books, Passport to More, which is the Merlin Mission books, Wizards and Wands, which was based on Harry Potter, Greeks, Heroes and Myths, which was based on Percy Jackson, the Egyptian Heroes and Myths based on King Chronicles. We're now getting ready to start Norse Heroes and Myths, which is based on Magnus Chase. These are things we have been doing since Emily was in like first grade. Book series based curriculum. And we absolutely love it. And there are so many different ones to choose from now. Like I said, there's like three mythology-based ones, Magic Treehouse. We have the novel studies. We have the who, what, where books. Like all of those are literature-based curriculum or studies or whatever you want to call them. And that has been the one like reoccurring staple that we have been using in our homeschool for years, like since the very beginning. Because I know you guys really, really love curriculum and you wanna know what curriculum we've come back to over and over and over again, I am going to share a little bit. The only curriculum outside of Waldock Way products that we have used repeated like more than one year, I'm talking like two to three years, was teaching textbooks when Emily was younger. So she used that for math for, I believe, four years. We did math three, four, five, and six. So three to four years, because I'm not sure how, anyway. We completed four different years worth of teaching textbooks. So that was a win. That was something that we kept coming back to over and over and over. And then now it has been Denison math. We transitioned to Denison math. She's done pre-algebra last year, algebra one this year. And I can already tell you that we will be sticking with geometry, algebra two, and trigonometry. I'm pretty sure that's the plan for the future. So this is one we will continue to return to over and over and over again. It's pricey, you guys. That's the one thing y'all keep telling me. And you're like, it's kind of pricey. It has been worth every penny in our homeschool. So that's my personal opinion on that. The other one that we have done multiple years and I foresee us doing for even a third year is Fix It Grammar. Emily has really been enjoying this. In addition to this, the thing that we did years previously that she's asked to maybe look at again is Editor-in-Chief. I think that's by Critical Thinking Company. Pretty sure. We've done three levels of Editor-in-Chief in the past and there's one more level. So she wants to look at the next Fix It Grammar and the next Editor-in-Chief and either pick one or possibly do both and go back and forth. She just likes the editing component of both of them. Like the being able to fix the mistakes, that component is something that she really likes. So they're both things that we keep coming back to over and over again. So again, we've used at least two years and would return to it again because we enjoy it that much. Now let's talk about subscriptions. Because again, I told you that there's like three main components in our homeschool books, games and hands-on resources. Those are the things that we pretty much use on an ongoing basis. So I pulled a few subscriptions that we have been subscribed to for multiple years. I mean like three plus years because we change our subscriptions out frequently. We try to only do two to three at a time, but these are ones that we keep coming back to over and over and over again. I have four different subscription letters. The first one is Writings from the Wild. This is a subscription letter from an animal's point of view. You get one each month from a different animal. Emily has absolutely loved these. In fact, almost anytime I'm trying to, sorry, do away with some of them, I'll cancel this one and she'll immediately be like, can we please get it back quickly? The other one that I have is Letters from Afar. This is a letter from a different place each month, like around the world. So here's Machu Picchu. The person who writes these is Isabella. And then it always has like a little field notes and map. And then we have two that are technically from the same creator, but one is Heritage Letter and one is American Heritage Adventure. So the American Heritage Adventure is from Lizzie and she visits different places throughout America, like historical sites, national parks, significant places. And she also always sends you a postcard that you could send to somebody else. And then the Heritage Letter is a letter written from somebody that is of significant historical American history. So, and it's written like as if that person wrote it to you. So this is Bass Reeves and it is from his hand written to you. And then you also normally get a picture of them and kind of like a little timeline of their life. So that is the four subscription letters that like I said, we keep coming back to over and over and over again. We may let one go for a few months and normally we're starting it right back up. All right, same thing with the boxes I'm gonna show you. Again, these are some that we might let go for a little bit, but they keep coming back over and over and over again. Mel Science, we love their chemistry boxes. They have been a staple for years. Same thing with their physics boxes. This one has our address on the front, sorry. With their physics boxes, they have come and gone for years in our homeschool. The Hack Pack is a newer edition. I think this has only been out a year, but we have gotten Crunch Labs, which is from the same maker for two, almost three years now. And the Hack Pack is just kind of like a step up for a little bit older. It's a little bit more advanced. Both of these are huge wins that I can see us coming back to over and over and over again. And even when we upgraded to the Hack Pack, we still get the Crunch Labs because Kevin and Emily enjoy both of them. And then same thing with the Eureka Crate. I mean, Kiwi Co. in itself has a ton of really great subscription boxes, but of all of them, the Tinker Crate when Emily was younger and then the Eureka Crate when she got a little bit older have been the two that we've subscribed to for the longest and received the most boxes of because they are hands down the favorite. So they're the ones that kind of stay on our shelf on repeat. So there you have it. Those are the resources in our homeschool that we come back to over and over again. They're kind of the timeless things that are always on our shelves and they ensure that we're going to enjoy whatever it is we're learning about. I would love it if you would leave your top favorite resources that you find yourself gravitating to over and over and over again down in the comments so we can all check them out.