Using Fun-Schooling Books to Develop a Complete Curriculum

I would like to share with you how I am using the Fun-Schooling books by Sarah Janisse Brown to create a complete curriculum for my 5th grade (working at a 3-5th grade level) son. 

I first purchased the Do-It-Yourself Curriculum Fun-Schooling with Minecraft journal. Then I just took each section and figured out what I wanted to use to cover it. My son needs a little more structure with his learning so not everything is just him choosing what he wants to use. I let him choose topics and extra books but the core is chosen by me. Then, we added in items to cover Math and Language Arts. 

Here is a list of what we do:

For the Geography pages we use: The Children's Atlas of God's World and The Not-For-Parents Travel Book

For the Design Your Own Animal pages we use: Nat Geo Wild Animal Atlas

For Reading Time and Core Subject Pages, he has decided to study Chemistry and Middle Ages: Amish Pathway readers, The Story of the World Vol. 2 (we also do the color pages associated with this book), Usborne Look Inside a Castle, Fizz, Bubble & Flash, God's Design For Chemistry and Ecology: Properties of Atoms and Molecules, Usborne Medieval World. We are also reading Robin Hood and The Knights of the Round Table. 

News, Movie Time and Nature Study are not planned out I  just help him find good quality things to cover these areas that we find online or outside! Some we like are the Wordup! DVD, Drive Through History and Horrible History.

For the Math Time pages we will use the Bedtime Math App. because we have a separate Math program

For the Copywork pages, I decided to use Draw-Write-Now and let him choose which book he wanted to use.  

For Listening Time we are going through the Usborne Famous Composers Reference Book. (It has QR links to listen to music from the composers!)

Then for the Vocabulary pages we are using English from the Roots Up Vol. 1. We write the word root at the top of the page and I let him select from the included words which ones he wants to write down and define. 

For our remaining subjects we use the following:

     Math: Comic Book Math and Learn Math Fast Books

     Spelling/Phonics: Explode the Code and Teach Your Child 100 Words to Read, Write,Spell and Draw

     Thinking Skills: Thinking Skills from plainandnotsoplain.com

     Grammar: we are reading Simply Grammar, Usborne Illustrated Grammar and Punctuation and we use the Mad Libs Game. 

I hope this helps give you an idea of what we are doing in our homeschool using the Fun-Schooling books. In my next post I will show you how we break it down during the week.