I am sharing my Curriculum Picks For the 2023-2024 School Year for grades 5, 6, and 8. I have just three children in elementary school this year, can you believe that? My youngest is fully disabled and at a PreSchool level (see how we home-educate our disabled children HERE), and my oldest child (who is still in school) will be entering 9th grade, so I will have a separate article outlining our high school curriculum choices for my daughter. She is choosing different resources than my son did for high school, more than four years ago. She loves creative writing and animals, so we are focusing on those throughout high school.

Grab the free Homeschool Portfolio PDF to track your child’s school work throughout the year and have a record for easy reference when needed!

Elementary Curriculum Picks For the 2023-2024 School Year

MATH – Math Lessons for a Living Education from MasterBooks for my children in grades 5 & 6. Homestead Science with Applied Math for my child in 8th grade – this is a new resource for us, and we chose it because of this child’s desire to be very hands-on and learn through doing rather than reading. He will be using Understanding Mathematics: From Counting to Calculus as needed. Note: I am hoping to focus on Applied Math rather than Academic Math for all of my children going forward. This article explains what I mean HERE. This makes sense for our family since we are living and working on a farm, and none of my children have an interest in attending college (they much prefer planning to go straight to work in their career of choice, none of which requires a college degree).

LANGUAGE ARTS (reading, spelling, grammar, writing) – Language Lessons for a Living Education from MasterBooks

SCIENCE – Farm Life + various textbooks and living books that are always made available to my children. My child in 8th grade will be using Homestead Science, which focuses on Agricultural science.

This year, we are also doing an amazingly fun unit study of the solar system & space to start our homeschool year. More info on that can be found HERE.

HISTORY – Continuing with Tapestry of Grace, we are in Year 3.

I have very slowly read through years 1, 2, and 3 over several years – I believe we first started in 2015. We take 1-3 years to do each “year” of ToG. We completed year 1 in 1 year for the 2015-2016 school year and thoroughly enjoyed it more than any other year of history, but as I added in more levels of books to read, I have had to give us a lot more time to read through them all, resulting in us taking 2-3 years for each “year” of ToG.
I just ordered books from multiple levels and read them all to my children, from elementary to high school. As an adult and teacher/mom, I enjoy children’s books and upper-level books. Note: I have chosen to avoid most of the Rhetoric level books because the content is too explicit and mature for our taste.

SOCIAL STUDIES – books from ToG

HEALTH – Trim Healthy You curriculum from Trim Healthy Mama

MUSIC – Piano lessons/practice

ART – Bob Ross, other DVD lessons, and Draw Write Now books.

To be honest, we have been using the above curriculum for elementary grades for the last several years with very few changes.

We love MasterBooks for math and language arts.
We love Tapestry of Grace for history and social studies.
We love real-life and hands-on experiences for science, along with a ton of various science textbooks.

We are excited about the solar system and space resources that we are adding this year. I like switching things up by providing many books and activities to study a specific subject every so often.

Farm life provides so many opportunities for science studies. Animals, plants, and more are explored on a daily/seasonal basis!

Here are our curriculum choices and resources from previous years that you may find helpful.

Grades K5, 1, 3, 4

Grade 8

Grades 2, 3, 5, 6, 10