We made it to the final day of sharing all our curriculum for the 2024-2025 school year! Today I’m sharing all our subjects of Bible, History, and Science that we like to do all together as a family!
If you missed it, you can still see all our core curriculum for individual grades next year here: 1st (& Preschool), 3rd, and 5th grade.
At the end of this post I’ll give you an idea of when we add these subjects in our schedule. 😊
Bible and Morning Time
God’s Plan in Scripture by Ascension Press
This year we are using God’s Plan in Scripture as our Bible study. I love that I can use this one study (teacher’s guide and storybook) with ALL of my kids. They have different level workbooks to go with certain ages/grades. My 1st grader will be using the Beginner Workbook (for grades K-2.) My 3rd and 5th grader will both be using the Intermediate Workbook (for grades 3-5.) *They also offer an Advanced Workbook (for grades 6+).
The teachers guide offers opening prayers, scripture references, activity suggestions, and even fun snack ideas. For each lesson you read the biblical story together and complete the workbook pages or add an extra hands-on activity.
Each workbook is designed to help children process and retain what they have learned and gives fun activities including coloring pages, sorting activities, crosswords, decoding messages, map searches, Bible searches and more.
This study is only 24 weeks long, so we will probably only do it together once or twice per week to spread it through the school year. You know me though and I will be adding in art projects and other books on particular Biblical stories.
Every morning during breakfast we like to read one devotional page from one of these books by Luigi Giglio: How Great is Our God, Indescribable, and the Wonder of Creation. Each book has 100 devotions about God & Science and my kids love them. Each page begins with a bible verse and discusses a scientific topic associated with it, then connects it to God. Space, animals, weather, plants, oceans, geology, human body, etc. are just a few of the broad topics it covers. We will read through one whole book (one page each day) and then continue with the next. They can be read in any order.
Connoisseur Kids: Etiquette, Manners, and Living Well for Parents and Their Little Ones by Jennifer L. Scott is a great book we will be reading through altogether to learn about a wide range of topics such as communication, table manners, tidiness, thinking of others, grooming, and health. It offers a playful take on teaching these topics with suggestions of activities, learning games, fill-in-the-blanks, recipes, songs, and more to help implement them. Just flipping through this book, I’m really excited to read it to my kids and do some of the simple activities together. We will read a short section of this during breakfast each day as well.
On This Day by DK is another great book we love to read each morning. Each day we read one page that is full of important people, facts, inventions, events, etc. that took place on that day throughout history. It has been fun to learn about different history tidbits and has led to some great rabbit trails or interest-led learning.
History– California History
This past school year we did a full year studying the 50 states (blog post HERE), but there was one state we left for the very end and it will be our full year study this year- California!
For history, nature, geography, art, and the basis for science, we are studying California history this coming school year!
For the first time in our homeschool, we are also splitting grades for history instead of doing everything all together. My older 2 (3rd and 5th grade) are going to be studying all about our home state with Around California with Children’s Books by Beautiful Feet Books. While this curriculum does incorporate a lot of picture books, it is geared towards intermediate grades (4th-6th), so also uses a lot of great chapter books. You can use these books as a read aloud for the whole family, but I’m going to have my older 2 read them together, independently, or follow along with an audiobook. My 1st grader will be doing his own thing with me, reading through a lot of fun biographies; you can read all about it HERE. He is always welcome to join us for our California history lessons if he wants, but it isn’t required since he will cover this when he is older.
We are so excited to learn about the history of California and can’t wait for all the amazing field trips! Around California with Children’s Books will guide us in reading great books, discussion questions, notebooking, nature study, and history all about California. We will learn all about the origin of the state with the natives, to the missions, transcontinental railroad, Gold Rush, all the way to Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. This course fulfills the California history requirement for 4th/ 5th grade. You can get the entire California History pack, but I usually just purchase the teacher’s guide and get all of the books from our local library.
For our notebooking, I grabbed these composition notebooks by Schoolnest (wide-ruled for my 3rd grader, college ruled for my 5th grader.) The notebooks have a space at the top for them to draw or add a picture about what they learned, and then lined spaces on the bottom to write. The California History guide offers drawings of the people and nature topics they will be learning about in the back of the book, and they can choose to cut and paste these to the top of their notebook page as well. I also grabbed THESE California stickers they can use to decorate the front of their notebooks on the first day of school.
For more information on notebooking and how we do it for different grade levels, check out THIS post.
We will also be doing a more in-depth study of the California Missions when we get to those lessons in the guide. I will have each of my kids choose a mission to study, complete a full report project, and hopefully a field trip to visit it. We have lots of books on each of the missions available at our local library and I also grabbed THIS printable pack of games we can play as we learn about all the missions.
We started our study learning all about the state facts and the geography. Check out this blog post for all the fun activities, printables, and projects we did: California History Activities.
We LOVED the book Only in America by Heather Alexander for our 50 states study this past year, so I was so excited to see the same author also wrote Only in California. This book is so fun sharing about all the popular foods, attractions, major cities, wildlife, and wonders of California. It has given me a lot of great ideas for field trips and festivals to visit that I haven’t even been to before.
Science- Marine Biology & Geology
I usually start each year by choosing our history topic and then base our science off of that if possible. Since we are studying California History next year, I decided to study Marine Biology/Ocean (Pacific Ocean) and Geology for science. We will be doing one unit in the fall (ocean) and one unit in the spring (geology.)
For both of these subjects we are using the science units from The Good and the Beautiful. I love that these units are simple, offer beautiful pictures, activities, and a student workbook. TGTB science units are geared for grades 3-8, so while my younger son in 1st grade will definitely be joining in our lessons and projects for fun, he does not need to complete a student notebook. I will be adding in a lot of picture books and other fun projects on particular topics too.
Marine Biology (Fall)
The Good and the Beautiful Marine Biology Science Unit is also available as a FREE pdf!
Geology (Spring)
I always love to have a great encyclopedia alongside our science units, so we can look up real life pictures, get more information, and compare other things that are related. It is nice to have on hand so I don’t always have to go to the library to get more nonfiction books.
For Marine Biology we have DK Visual Encyclopedia Ocean and DK Smithsonian The Rocks & Gem Book for Geology.
This is a great STEM kit from National Geographic to add to your Geology unit study that includes fun projects that go along with many of the lessons!
Foreign Language– Spanish
This spring we started using this Spanish program from Homeschool Languages and love it! It is so fun and interactive, with lots of games, videos, songs and stories to leam how to speak words and phrases in Spanish. They also offer other foreign language curriculums to choose from: French, Portuguese, Italian, and German.
We have the physical box for Spanish 1 and I highly recommend it! It comes with everything you need, beautifully made, and ready to use!We will continue it next school year. Each lesson is fairly short just 15 min. full of hands-on games, activities, music, art appreciation, and more. We try to do 2 lessons per week and review/practice on the days in between.
*You can try the first 10 lessons for FREE to see if it is a good fit for your family! Use this LINK!
That is everything! We are really excited for all the great books with history, fun projects with science, learning more Spanish, and doing a Bible study all together again.
We like to complete our core work (math, language arts) in the mornings and try to be done by lunch. Then we would spend an hour on our history or science subjects in the afternoon. We do history 2-3 days per week and science 1-2 days per week. *This year we did history Monday-Wednesday, took Thursday’s off for co-op and did one lesson of science on Friday’s.
I hope you all enjoyed following along this week as I shared all our curriculum for next school year. We are super excited with all the great things we are going to be learning!
If you need help finding curriculum/resources for your family or help with scheduling and planning your school year, join me over on my Instagram Subscription! I offer lots of one-on-one help/coaching there plus lots of other behind the scenes examples of our homeschool. It only costs $5 per month and you can join or cancel at any time.
I hope you have a great rest of your week!
– Lindsay
Family Study Recap:
Bible- God’s Plan In Scripture
History- Beautiful Feet Books Around California in Children’s Books
Science- The Good and the Beautiful Marine Biology, Geology
Foreign Language- Homeschool Languages Spanish
To see the Family Studies we completed last year, check out THIS post!
Thank you so much! Your posts are always so so helpful!! xoxo Katie
We loved the Chickie and Roo study as well for nature study in CA!
Hi Lindsay! I know this post is now a year old, but I’m curious how you decided to implement these subjects within your rhythm for the year? Did you make a follow up post on that? I was also considering breaking up our family studies (science/social studies) into 6 week blocks where we just focus on one at a time to simplify our weekly focus (mostly for myself!). Just curious if you tried that and/or how that worked for you. Thanks so much, and thank you for such detailed information! You have been making homeschool planning much easier for me in the last couple of years and I really appreciate it. ❤️
We weren’t able to break it up as much as I would have liked to make sure we covered everything in the school year. I am definitely planning our curriculum for next year to do 6 week blocks! This year we did history 2-3 days per week (usually Monday-Wednesday.) We did our Bible study once a week on Thursdays and then did Science once a week on Fridays. We did Marine Biology in the fall and did Geology in the spring.
Did you end up liking this bible study? It seems great to do with various ages, and thorough, but did you fit it all in during bible and breakfast or was it a lot? Did your kids break off to do the workbook pages during their own time? I’m trying to find a good/engaging fit for K and 6th grade. We do like the short devotionals (like indescribable) but sometimes I don’t feel like it’s enough, to just do those. I was thinking of short devotionals/prayer/mix of the etiquette book you have here and then their own time with Jesus, but I am not sure what to do for the non reading K student. Maybe the GPS curriculum above would cover it all for me. Thoughts?! Were your kids bored?
We really enjoyed it! We only did one lesson each week throughout the school year and it took maybe 30 minutes to complete, so just once a week we worked on it. It was really nice to all learn together but then have age-appropriate workbook pages for each of my kids’ different age/grade levels.