This is part 3 in my homeschooling series. (Click for part 1 and part 2)
I’ve had many questions about the curriculum I chose for this academic year. This is not a post about the details of all the curriculum I use. If you take the names from this post and google them, you will find a plethora of information about each curriculum online. Here, my only aim is to share with you what we are using this year and why.
At the outset, I must tell you that many of the curricula and resources you’ll find in this post are coming from a Christian worldview because that is my worldview. Also, some of my curricula is from the USA. I have been able to browse through these books (that my friends use) and see them first hand before buying them. I chose to buy used books on Amazon.com because you can get them in good condition and less than half the price of new books.
The only problem in using curriculum from the USA is the trouble of shipping the books to India. This was our first time and a sweet friend very kindly offered to bring our books along when she visited last month, which was a huge blessing!
Please don’t feel that if you need to have books from the US in order to homeschool. You could very easily visit your local book store (or Amazon India) and buy the CBSE/ICSE/Cambridge books for your specific grade. At some point I do plan to buy CBSE/ICSE books to teach Indian History and Geography to my children.
So let’s move on to what you’re actually here for! Our curriculum choices for the academic year 2024-25 :
Grade 4 Curriculum Choices
Math – Saxon 5/4
Saxon is a math curriculum in which students learn incrementally, one lesson at a time, using knowledge acquired in previous lessons as a foundation.
This is our first year doing Saxon. It was recommended to me by a friend who used these with both her kids for many years. My study of the books coupled with my friend’s experience led me to conclude that Saxon would lay a good Math foundation for my kids. I also felt like Saxon is around the same level as our Indian Math which would be helpful if they have to move back to our Indian curriculum at a later stage.
In the short time we’ve been using Saxon, we’ve enjoyed it. Not that it’s easy. It’s hard. It’s time consuming. But I can see that my daughter likes doing it even though it takes time. The problems are not direct which encourages her to think critically. I like that Saxon introduces concepts in small pieces every day and always goes back to revising concepts already learned as well.
The Math Kit for grade 4 includes a textbook, tests and worksheets book, and a solution manual.
I bought these used from Amazon.com and will use them again for my younger one when she gets to fourth grade.
History/Bible/Literature from Sonlight
When I came across the Sonlight curriculum and saw all of the rich literature included, I knew my book-loving daughter would absolutely love it. After using it I think it’s safe to say I was right!
This curriculum is based on reading real books and discussing them together. There is something called The Instructor’s Guide, which includes a daily schedule for each week of the school year. Each week also includes complete, ready-to-use daily lesson plans with engaging activities, discussion questions, and teaching tips for the entire school year. Before you purchase their curriculum you can choose if you’d like to do the subjects 4 or 5 days a week. We chose 4-days a week and here is a sneak peak of our instructor guide.
You can download a free sample of the curriculum and Instructor’s Guide for the level of your choice here.
History (Intro to World History, Level B, Year 1 of 2)
Sonlight’s Level B homeschool program is the first half of a two-year overview of world history, beginning with Creation and continuing through the Fall of Rome.
I must say that the way we are learning History this year is unlike anything we’ve done before. For one, there are no workbooks as such. You could use the discussion questions included in the Instructor Guides as written work if you wanted to get in some writing. But I figured since we are doing a lot of writing in all the other subjects, we can leave it out for history this year.
Secondly, we are using a whole lot of wonderful living books to read through history. My kids are loving the realistically portrayed pictures in the Usborne Book of World History. We’ve also begun reading A Child’s History of the World (V.M Hillyer), and are looking forward to reading all these other books as part of our history curriculum this year:
- The Usborne Time Traveller
- Tut’s Mummy Lost and Found
- George Mueller (Christian Heroes Then and Now)
- Catching their Talk in a Box
The Instructor Guide tells us what page numbers we need to read in each book on a given day. It also provides notes and discussion questions for us to go through after reading the pages for the day.
Bible
For Bible we are following Sonlight’s schedule of the wonderful book ‘The Ology’ by Marty Machowski. This is a beautifully illustrated beginner’s theology book that helps children of all ages understand who God is. The author uses creative examples, analogies and illustrations to make difficult yet important theology concepts easier for children to understand. My husband does this with both the girls every morning before leaving for work. We already had this book and so it was an easy choice.
The Sonlight Instructor guide also includes weekly scripture memory and prayer points for people around the world.
Literature
Sonlight uses classic books and engaging stories as the centerpiece for learning. You are meant to read the chapters specified for the day in the Instructor Guide and discuss the questions provided. To be honest, my daughter hates to stop after two chapters and begs me to let her get ahead in her reading! I get her to write down the questions and answers in her Literature notebook. She also has a small Vocabulary book where we write down any new words (and their meanings) we come across. Literature is something my daughter enjoys. She loves books and these subjects almost feel like they are not really part of school! 🙂
It’s been 3 weeks since we began our school year and she’s already finished two books and is beginning her third one. I’m excited for her to read the other living books recommended for grade 4. (See their list of grade 4 readers here.) The Sonlight website is great and has all the information, but if you have any questions, please reach out to me!
Read-Alouds
As a parent, my favorite part of my day is when I’m reading aloud to my kids, and my kids love reading together too. There’s something special about snuggling up with a good book and learning together.
Sonlight adds a special emphasis on read-alouds as part of their literature-based curriculum. Their list of carefully crafted books are meant to be read by parents to their children – creating shared experiences that strengthen family bonds and spark engaging discussions. We usually do our read alouds snuggled on the couch after lunch. 🙂 Right now we are reading EB White’s Charlotte’s Web together. (Click here for a list of the other read-alouds for this year.)
(Sonlight provides all their readers and read-alouds for purchase on their site. However, I decided to only buy the instructor guides from their site this time. I used their book list to purchase the same books in India either in paperback or Kindle format. There were 2 reasons I did it this way. One was to save the cost of shipping all the books from US to India. Secondly, since Sonlight relies heavily on books rather than text books, the number of books you read in a year is huge and requires a whole lot of space which many of us living in Mumbai flats don’t have! For this I find e-books to be useful. Aside to this, we can always borrow these books our friends who may have them already.)
English Grammar – Rod and Staff
This curriculum was also introduced to me by the same friend mentioned previously. Rod & Staff Building Christian English curriculum is not the fanciest curriculum on the market, but I think it does a thorough job of teaching Grammar so kids can apply it well in their speech and writing.
This English program is a rigorous traditional English program that uses “old school” methods such as diagramming and writing to teach grammar concepts. It covers English grammar usage and structure as well as writing. The company that publishes these books is Mennonite, and hence there are a lot of scripture and religious themed sentences in them. There is a good mix of oral review and written work and tests are mixed in as a way to measure retention. The teacher manual offers enough information and prompting that even a parent without any teaching experience can follow the program.
The Grade 4 set includes a teacher’s manual, student book, Worksheets, and Test booklet. You only really need the teacher’s manual, student’s book and a notebook to teach this curriculum.
I ordered this set also used on Amazon.com and Thriftbooks in the US.
Science – Apologia and Abeka
I have always wanted to use the Apologia Young Explorer’s Series even since I saw them! These are different from other Science books because, while science textbooks tend to cover many topics of science every year, each Apologia book focuses on a narrow area of science, so there is more in-depth coverage. The author writes in a conversational, personal style which makes it truly engaging for the kids. In addition, each textbook is designed to be used with students from kindergarten through sixth grade. So this is great for someone like me who has kids in first and fourth grade as we can do the books together.
The titles in the series are:
- Exploring Creation with Astronomy (our read for this year)
- Exploring Creation with Botany
- Exploring Creation with Human Anatomy and Physiology
- Exploring Creation with Chemistry and Physics
- Exploring Creation with Earth Science
- Exploring Creation with Zoology 1 – (birds, bats, flying reptiles, and insects), second edition
- Exploring Creation with Zoology 2 – (only creatures that live in water)
- Exploring Creation with Zoology 3 – (various orders of land animals including reptiles, amphibians, spiders, insects, worms, gastropods, and dinosaurs)
These books are nicely printed with full-color illustrations and are permeated with a Christian worldview.
A friend who was leaving the country gave me her Abeka Science books so we’ve been alternating between this and Apologia. The Grade 4 Science book is Understanding God’s World and is like a general science textbook covering many topics, also with a Christian worldview.
Hindi
Our aim for Hindi is for the girls to learn to speak, read, and write it. For now, I have outsourced this to a teacher who teaches the girls and few of their friends together. Both girls are at different levels and have classes on Zoom twice a week.
Typing
We plan to do typing lessons once a week. Typing Club is a free online course to help with this. For ad-free lessons you can get the paid version.
Art/Craft
My kids draw every single day, but as part of ‘school’ we do Art/Craft once a week. We use a mix of ideas and do something different every day. Our favorites are –
Drawing and Painting – Easy Peasy Homeschool
For craft we sometimes do some craft boxes that we have at home like bracelet making, card making, origami animals, or some random craft we found on Pinterest or Instagram.
Grade 1 Curriculum Choices
Math – The Good and the Beautiful
The Good and the Beautiful provides free curriculum for Math and Language Arts for grades K to 7. These are in PDF form. So all we did was downloaded the PDF and got it printed and spiral-bound like this.
They have a math box with manipulatives for each grade which we can buy from their site. However they also give you instructions to make your own math box. I chose to do this to avoid extra things to ship from the US.
I like this Math curriculum as an introduction to Math for little ones. The pages are colorful, interesting and introduce math in a fun and engaging way. It’s a great starting curriculum for Math. We used this for my younger one last year in Kindergarten too. My favorite part is that it requires no preparation or lesson planning at all. We just need to open the book and follow the instructions.
Maybe from grade 2 or 3 onwards I will move to Saxon for Math. But for now we are enjoying this curriculum.
Language Arts – The Good and the Beautiful
Language Arts may sound new to you since we don’t use this term in India. The Language Arts course includes reading, phonics. writing, spelling, literature, grammar & punctuation, geography, and art. This book is also available as a free PDF that we printed and spiral bound. Like the Math, there is no prep needed ahead of time. A list of items you may need for activities is given before every lesson. They are mostly everyday use household items you will have lying around your house.
Handwriting and Copywork
It is important at this stage for my six year old to be able to print words well. She still struggles with some mirror image issues for writing letters. Copywork helps with this. Copywork is about observation skills and working on perfecting handwriting. It encourages her to carefully observe the passage she is copying and take her time to copy each letter to the best of her ability. It begins with simple letter tracing and then progresses to writing out more complex passages. Right now she uses this Print Handwriting Workbook from our shop and also a 4 lined notebook where I give her sentences to copy.
These are the only main subjects my younger one does. Aside to this we do a lot of reading together, which includes me reading to her, and her reading to me for practice. You can get Usborne readers or Bob Books that are great for reading practice for different levels. She also joins us when I read History and Science with my older one. We sometimes use some additional free worksheets/lessons I find online for science. I plan to formally start science with her next year in Grade 2.
Hindi
My younger one learns hindi from the same teacher as my older daughter. She has learned the alphabets and is moving on to small words. We have hindi classes twice a week.
Bible – Sonlight
As mentioned earlier, we are doing ‘The Theology’ by Marty Machowski with both the girls together.
Art/Craft
Both girls do the same art/craft activities together once a week.
The girls are also learning to play the Piano. We want to get them to do some sports as well so we are looking into that. We try our best to incorporate family field trips on a regular basis. Last year we had the opportunity to visit the Planetarium, Flamingo Sanctuary, Kidzania, the Zoo, watch a live musical, do some farming etc. Meeting up with friends is also something we are intentional about. I’m so grateful for this privilege to homeschool my girls. I pray that I will always choose connection over curriculum!
If you have any questions please shoot me a message on Instagram or send an email to contact@boredandbusymama.com
