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Are you still planning your homeschool year? After 25 years of homeschooling and using numerous resources, I am convinced that The Peaceful Press is the best resource for developing thinking, caring children.
We've chosen literature that develops compassion, poetry, and art that stir up a love for beauty, and we've combined it with simple-to-follow parent plans. We know you have many choices, and it's hard to decide what is best for your family, but we are confident that our resources will give your children a great education while building family connection and avoiding burnout.
Decide a focus. Do you want to study world history? Are your children younger than 6? Do your children write and read? Knowing where you are and what you want to learn can help you decide where to start. You can use the free planning sheets as a prompt for developing a focus for the year.
Choose a core curriculum. Use The Peaceful Preschool or Nourishing Nature Kindergarten with any children five or under. These resources build important skills for visual sequencing, auditory awareness and motor skills that will help your child develop the foundational skills for academics. For elementary students, start with The Playful Pioneers, followed by The Kind Kingdom and then The Precious People. The exception to this would be if you are in a co-op such as Classical Conversations that uses a particular history cycle.
Choose a math curriculum. We love Right Start Math for the early years and Teaching Textbooks, Math U See or CTC Math for later years.
Choose a grammar or phonics curriculum. With Charlotte Mason style language arts the focus is on building communication skills through reading and writing from great literature. This means that you can let go of busywork, and just focus on reading the recommended books from your Peaceful Press resource and then talking or writing about them.
We teach them to read and spell through multi sensory learning resources from All About Reading. Beginning in 3rd or 4th grade we recommend adding some writing instruction through Institute For Excellence in Writing so that our children learn how to structure an essay.
We add in a year or two of grammar, Fix-It Grammar from I.E.W. is a favorite. Our children learn to be good communicators mainly through the books they read and the writing that they do based on those books, and this sets them up for college success without overwhelming our early years of homeschooling with busy work.
Enjoy a peaceful year! Because the art, poetry, handcrafts, and practical skill-building is all included in the Peaceful Press resources, you can simply enjoy easy daily lesson plans and quality time with your children. I've graduated five students from my homeschool and two from college, with one scoring in the top percentile on the ASVAB for military entrance.
I know this method works to help children develop thinking skills and heart, you can have peace of mind knowing that this will prepare your children for upper-level learning as well.