1st Grade Curriculum Choices

Because let’s face it all homeschoolers love to see what everyone else is using for their school year.  It’s part of our curiosity or what have you……… Hi! Future Ticia 2024 here, and I’m updating this post, so it’s a bit more useful, and I’m also updating with things we changed to when my plans weren’t working. That happens, and it is useful for you to know when it happened. Sometimes our homeschool curriculum doesn’t work, and that is certainly what happened with our 1st grade homeschool curriculum.

Oh my goodness, past Ticia, what were you thinking with this gigantic wall of text? That is insane! Sigh. I’m about to add a ton of pictures in here.

And there will now be affiliate links.

Generally organizing 1st-grade

I’ll admit we didn’t have a super strict 1st grade homeschool schedule. My daughter is technically kindergarten or preschool (depending if you want to go with the Texas cut-off or some state that has a December cut-off for starting school, so we planned some classes to be done together, and some on their own.

Reading was completely individual. I’ll talk more on that in the Reading section.

Math, the boys were together (I have twin boys, for anyone who doesn’t know), and The Artist formerly known as Princess was on her own, but quickly caught up.

Everything else was taught together, and we had an unofficial history co-op with a friend. I miss that friend, she moved to another state, and it’s hard to homeschool together when you’re in different states.

But, I digress. Getting back on track.

I eventually did find a 20-minute homeschool schedule worked best for us.

The Three R’s: Reading, Writing, and Math

This was one of our areas that changed a lot. I’ll admit, we never really found an official writing curriculum I liked, and I relied a lot on my “I taught for a few years,” and memory of writing assignments I had in elementary school. I’ll tell you my kids all did just fine in their college writing classes, and frequently were more prepared than their fellow students. Just to reassure anyone who is feeling like a terrible parent. Back to Past Ticia 2011.

I was going to separate out what the boys are doing and what Princess is doing, but let’s face it.  She insists she’s 6 whenever it’s convenient for her, so she’s doing mostly the same things.  She’s just a couple of months behind in math, and she does less of the writing than they do.  She does more tracing.  That’s the main difference.

Bob Books– I know last year I said we’d be using Sing, Spell, Read, Write this year too, but as I got further into it I ran into the problem that the readers that came with it are just way too long for my kids right now.  One of the beginning first-grade readers is 50 pages long for one story.  So, we’re going to be using Bob books for now, I’m curious to see if All About Spelling gets their other reading levels out soon because that might be the answer…..  We’ll see.

Future Ticia 2024, despite hearing from many people the wonders of Bob Books and how it worked for their kids. It did not work for my kids. Part of the way through 1st grade, like in October, All About Reading 1 was released. That was a life-changer.

GET ALL ABOUT READING! Seriously.

All About Spelling– I think this combined with Bob Books and the various other readers I have will be quite enough to get them spelling.  It’s a lot like Open Court Phonics which I used when teaching and I loved that.  We’re part of the way through book 1, in case you can’t tell I don’t really worry about finishing things according to any sort of school year.  At some point soon I’ll have a post up about different ways to practice spelling.  I’m still thinking through that.

Future Ticia 2024 says I never wrote that post, I still should. I think for some kids, All About Spelling would be enough for learning to read, for my boys, who struggled at first, it was not.

First Language Lessons– grammar, copywork, memorization, all of it in one book?  Awesome!  It’s a fairly gentle introduction to the material, so I think this will be a good fit for us.

Future Ticia 2024 adds, this is back when I was super intrigued by Classical style of homeschooling, and it was not a good fit for us.

I didn’t figure it out until later, like after elementary school, but I would recommend Writeshop for elementary.

Math U See Alpha– I wrote a detailed review of Math U See last year, and the boys continue to love it.  Princess is struggling with it, and I think it’s mostly maturity, not academics that is her problem, so I’m trying to figure out how to balance all of that.

Future Ticia 2024, I took her much slower through Alpha, and she eventually caught up with them, in the next year.

1st-grade Science

Apologia Swimming Creatures of the Fifth Day– All ocean animals all the time.  My kids are so excited!  I didn’t know how many of their favorite animals were ocean animals until we started this study.  We’ve done a couple of chapters, and we’re probably going to repeat the ones we’ve already done.  We’d be going through it a lot faster if I hadn’t cough cough misplaced my book cough cough.  That’s what happens when you haul it around everywhere.  I think it’s in a suitcase somewhere……..  Which one is the question.  I’d guess we’ll finish this mid-way through the year and just move on to land animals.

All of our Swimming Creatures lessons are together on this page. I also included some earth science lessons about how water acts, since it affects ocean animals so much.

Future Ticia 2024, later I started using the Swimming Creatures junior notebooking journal, and I would recommend those. I tried lapbooking with my kids for this year and it was not a hit, but they did like the Junior noteboking journals. I like that it has space to record what you did for experiments, and space for “notes,” as much as a 1st grader is taking notes.

If your kid is more advanced in writing than mine were at this point, it is a good introduction to note-taking.

1st Grade History choices

Future Ticia, in Kindergarten we started with Mystery of History 1, Ancient History, and I had planned to continue that, but my friend asked if we wanted to do history together, and she was going to do US history since Mystery of History 4 wasn’t out yet. We jumped forward a thousand or so years in history, and this is one of the curricula that changed several times throughout the year.

Time Travelers Colonial Life– This is part one of a six-part seven-part series on American history that we’ll be doing with another family.  I’m really looking forward to history with this family.  It’s going to be very interactive, the only downside is it will be a lot of printing.  A LOT.

Future Ticia 2024, we ended up not finishing this series long-term because it wasn’t a good fit. I still like it as a curriculum, and have used different parts of it (those file folder games are AMAZING!). We switched to All American History volume 1 and used a now-defunct All American History junior notebooking pages and adaptation (less pages to read, and a few other changes).

Okay, that’s it. That was our 1st grade curriculum picks. I’ve now spent over an hour updating this post, and at some point I still want to come back and add in the activities we did in that grade that don’t have a specific home. Though, I may not do that. I don’t know.