The roundup for my fifth grader, Graham, this year is pretty similar to last year! Below are our Fifth Grade Homeschool Curriculum choices. You may have seen the general curriculum posts from that time; rather than separating them by child, I did all core subject summaries here, and all elective subject summaries here.

My younger son is in kindergarten this fall, and his curriculum picks are detailed here. My second, Emmaline, is entering third grade-you can view those curriculum picks, here!

Fifth Grade Homeschool Curriculum

Last year, when my son Graham was in fourth grade, he grew a lot and I really started to see him more as a pre-teen! This is such a bittersweet feeling that I know all parents experience. He has grown and changed in so many ways, and it’s incredible to watch him soar. At the same time, there are traditions, and sweet parts of our homeschool day that I am so thankful to say, he still enjoys. One of these is read-alouds! Below are some of the things he’ll be doing in Language Arts this year. (Note: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for supporting my small business!)

Fifth Grade Language Arts Curriculum

Treehouse Schoolhouse Book Studies + independent reading: I am a broken record at this point, raving about the Treehouse Schoolhouse book studies, but we truly love them. We will read these as a family this year, and I will have Graham doing more advanced work to piggyback off the themes of those books. There are a few that mesh well with our history themes this year–Number The Stars, which we will read while covering World War II, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which we will read while covering the Great Depression. (You can grab 10% off your cart shopping with this link, or the code at the end of this post!)

Graham has always been a voracious reader, so he will also do a lot of independent reading. I love the booklists from Read Aloud Revival, and to be honest I often look up past Newberry award winners, to share more vintage titles with him!

Graham will continue on with IEW this year, and will also do creative writing with his sister and me. Last year, we managed to experiment with 21 different creative writing projects!

As we go through the writing projects again this year, I will up the ante for him, and change my rubrics to be more rigorous. Writing is such an important skill, and I always want to make sure he is practicing many different forms! IEW provides a great structure and layout for nonfiction writing. Our creative writing projects range from interview essays and restaurant reviews to historical fiction narratives and creative point-of-view essays!

Something new I am adding in this year, is copywork! I grabbed these Scripture copywork books from The Daily Grace Co. this year, because both of my older two need to work on handwriting neatness. Graham does not typically need a ton of practice with spelling, but he does need to slow down a bit. 🙂

Fifth Grade Math Curriculum

As with my other two, Graham will be doing Singapore Math again this year. We started homeschooling when he was in second grade, so this will be year four! I like Singapore a lot. He’ll also do a basic math fact practice page each day (typically long division, or even just multi-digit multiplication workbooks for extra practice) because I have found that maintaining these basic skills as you advance into harder math, is helpful.

I also try to incorporate math in a practical sense whenever possible. Graham has been money-minded, and great at saving, since he was a young boy. He loves to set goals, and do extra chores and jobs to achieve them. For his ninth birthday last year, he asked for a debit card! 🙂 There are always opportunities to teach kids practical concepts in real time – make sure you take those opportunities!

Last year during our homeschooling, I heard quite a bit of “...but when am I going to use this in real life?!” I try to keep my brain perked towards those moments whenever I can. We did angles and measurement last year in Singapore 4th grade math, and that has come up organically when he has wanted to do woodworking in the garage with Papa!

Fifth Grade Science Curriculum

This year we will depart from some of the heavier science topics of the past few years (Anatomy was last year–that got pretty in-depth!) and do Zoology! I love that this coordinated with our Co-Op science class in this way, this year, because this is also the first year my younger son, Beau, will be “formally” homeschooled. We use the Apologia curriculum, which tends to be pretty dense and packed with detail. Some of it is over their head, but we read through it anyway, discuss a lot, and do supplemental activities or experiments.

I also bought the Zoology Notebooking Journal this year, so I am excited to try it out. I will have Graham and Emmaline (3rd grade) trade off who completes each page.

Along with the theme, I hope to visit our local zoos several times this year!

Fifth Grade History Curriculum

As you may have read in my kindergarten and third grade curriculum posts, we are continuing with Story of the World this year. We are on Volume 4 this year, for our fourth year of homeschooling!

Graham definitely gets the most out of our history studies, but the other two glean quite a bit as well. I am excited to use our timeline books this year, because in previous years I have only had them paste in figures. I had the best intentions, but sometimes I bite off more than I can chew. 🙂

This year, I hope to be able to have my kids write little bullet point summaries of each historical event we paste in, in their own words. I think this will help make the events memorable and better retained. I downloaded these free, colored timeline events from modern history, and then I printed them at home on this sticker paper!

Here is a shot of my timeline book. The first few years, I scaffolded the project significantly, and had the kids just copy my tiny summaries. This year, I will have them write their own.

The great thing about Story of the World is that there are four volumes, and we will cycle through continually as the years pass! This year I am hoping to print off a few special pictures to include, in addition to what we cover in the history book, including:

• Photos of all four grandparents, and our two living great-grandparents, pasted in the years they were born. This will help give my kids memorable “markers” in time, as another way to remember context for certain decades.
• Photos of famous artists we’ve studied, like Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock & Norman Rockwell. I think it helps kids see historical context for when certain art was created.
• Photos of fictional characters from historical narratives we’ve read. These include characters like American Girls Felicity & Addy, Caddie Woodlawn, and Colin & Mary from The Secret Garden. Even though these are fictional characters, their stories are enjoyed and knowing their place in time is memorable for my kids. Stories–even fictional ones–often give such great detail, they are very effective in helping kids understand time.

Fifth Grade Spanish Curriculum

Graham is the strongest Spanish speaker of my kids, for two reasons. One, he was our first, and my husband and I spoke Spanish to him in our home! (I was a Spanish Immersion teacher before having kids; you can read more about my Spanish background, here). My husband was born and raised in Central America, and it was a high priority for both of us that our kids know Spanish. The second reason that Graham is our strongest in Spanish is because he did Spanish Immersion for kindergarten, at the school where I used to teach!

With that said, we have tried many methods over the years in homeschooling to maintain his Spanish, and it has been a lot harder than I thought. While my husband and I are both capable of speaking in Spanish with him all day, the addition of more children and the absence of any family or friends who exclusively speak Spanish (and not English) made the task of maintaining an immersive home difficult. The constant code-switching is mentally taxing, and when we began to homeschool four years ago, it was almost out of the question.

All that to say: after several years of different methods, I decided to mainstream my approach this year and try an all-inclusive type curriculum. I got the Llamitas Spanish Level 3 for Graham this year, since he already has a strong background in Spanish.

I first found Llamitas Spanish years ago, when I was searching for freebies to try out with my littles! She has an entire freebie library filled with sample lessons, games, music playlists and even a gift guide! Her resources are gorgeous, and I cannot wait to see how we like the open-and-go type curriculum this year.

Other Fifth Grade Homeschool Curriculum

Typing.com: We love this simple website for typing practice. Graham usually prefers to type his final essays now, rather than handwriting them, and that is fine with me! I pay $5/month to not have ads on their screen while they practice, which is totally worth it to me.

Bible/Theology: Graham has been reading through the Bible on his own since last fall, using The Bible Recap reading plan. I use this with my kids in whole-group as well, which I blogged about here. I also love The Biggest Story Bible Storybook and The Ology.

Art History: You may have read about some of our Art History adventures here, and how I first discovered the amazing Ambleside Online. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a Charlotte-Mason style curriculum online, completely free. I used AO as a launching pad to do our own picture studies.

This year we will cover the following artists, 10 new and 10 review:

• Andy Warhol (review)
• Hokusai
• Norman Rockwell (review)
• Emily Carr
• Bob Ross
• Claude Monet (review)
• Gyotaku
• Michelangelo (review)
• John James Audubon
• Georges Seurat (review)
• Alma Thomas
• Piet Mondrian
• Auguste Renoir (review)
• Mary Cassat
• Eric Carle
• Salvador Dali (review)
• Jackson Pollock (review)
• Vincent Van Gogh (review)
• Georgia O’Keefe
• Pablo Picasso (Review)

Music: for music this summer, on a whim I tried out the Simply Piano app! I kept getting Instagram ads and it piqued my interest. The monthly fee was pretty cheap, so I told my older two they needed to try it. It went way better than I expected. It was truly the surprise of my summer. I went ahead and purchase a year-long subscription to build our skills, so piano lessons will be our music this year! The experience deserves a blogpost and review of its own, so I will be releasing that soon.

I think that about covers it! I am excited to start the school year in just a few short weeks. Summer has been amazing, but we could really use the structure. 🙂

With love,

Cait

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