Our 2025 homeschooling recap

Wishing you well for 2026! Our 2025 included adding a new baby to the crew (we’re all obsessed; you should totally have another baby!), and, correspondingly, I wrote zero posts this year (one of the many balls to have been dropped). Here’s a brief recap of our homeschooling this year.

Logistically, Oz took on most of the work involving focus and brain-power, and I’ve focused on baby Max. The kids (4 and 6) spend about 2 hours a day being actively “taught” stuff, and spend a further 1-2 hours doing self-initiated “learning” activities such as reading and writing. The rest of the time they’re playing or out and about.

There were many days/weeks/months that felt a bit unsatisfying for us, but such is the nature of babies and small children, and it turns out we that did a lot more than we’d realized, even when life felt pretty disorganized a lot of the time.

Math

A good day in our house involves about an hour of Beast Academy. Failing that, we’ll do some Matific, failing that we’ll take a deep breath. Our eldest has spent a bit of time using Synthesis Tutor, Monster Math, and Prime Climb, mainly when she was feeling unmotivated and benefitted from some variety.

We also started a weekly “Maths Club” with a few other kids where we practice cat herding and do some cool math stuff - thanks Oz! I’ll aim to write a post about this, because we believe it’s a very valuable experience.

Science

The kids have enjoyed Biochemistry Literacy for Kids - and unexpected interest that we’ll pursue for as long as they’re interested. The teacher is impressively respectful of kids’ intelligence.

Oz also somewhat surprisingly1 stumbled upon learning the periodic table of elements with them, reading aloud the cute and engaging Periodic Table Book by Shiho Pate, doing the Eurographics periodic table puzzle, and watching Periodic Videos and Cody’s Lab on YouTube. All very engaging activities that I recommend for your budding scientists!

I also did some kitchen chemistry experiments until it got too hard with a baby, and I plan to do a lot more this coming year… I plan to write about our mead making shortly!

ELA

“English” for us has mainly meant reading, which we encourage by decorating the house with books, supplemented with read-alouds at bedtime / when I nursed the bebe.

Read aloud books you may like:

• Clockwork (by Philip Pullman)

• The Firework Maker’s daughter (by Philip Pullman)

• The Odyssey (Mary Pope Osborne’s adaptation)

• Passage from Question 7 (by Richard Flanagan)

• Marie Curie’s Search for Radium

• Biographies of Haber and Bosch (from Heroes of Progress)

• Archimedes and the Door of Science

• Adam’s Atomic Atomic adventures

6 year old’s reading list has included:

• Harry Potter

• Nancy Drew

• Coraline

• Wizard of Oz

• How to Train Your Dragon book series

• Wild Robot series

• Roald Dahl books

• Peter Pan

• Non-Fiction & History:

  • Graphic novel biography of Anne Frank

  • Savage Stone Age

  • So You Think You’ve Got It Bad series

  • Horrible Histories series

  • Boy of the Painted Cave

  • Vincent Shadow: Toy Inventor

  • What prehistoric people did all day

  • Sapiens graphic history

  • Let’s Read and Find Out book on rock collecting

  • Read and Find Out books (miscellaneous science)

They’ve been doing a Latin course via Zoom that’s based on Minimus. We probably wouldn’t have embarked on Latin if it weren’t for the awesome teacher offering it. Our 4 year old is still a little young to be truly engaged by the medium.

The Latin teacher has them do “copy work”, which ticks our handwriting box nicely given that neither of us are very enthusiastic about its explicit instruction. They’ve also been naturally motivated to improve their handwriting by the feedback provided by their penpal :). Lined pages have been useful for this. I flirted with the idea of purchasing a handwriting book based on recommendations in The Well Trained Mind (below), but decided against it because it filled me with dread.

The kids both love typing out stories, aided by some time spent doing Typing Land. We leave them to self-initiate here, lest it become demotivating.

For vocabulary, we liked “Big Words for Little Kids”, a systematic etymology-based vocabulary program, as well edclub.com, which includes spelling, vocabulary, and typing. We also love crosswords.

I have loosely started following history and language arts approach laid out in The Well-trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. For example, I started First Language Lessons to teach grammar. If you’re looking for a grammar book, I can recommend it if for no other reason that it’s comprehensive. It’s very repetitive and pretty dry, so we skim through it. But I’m enjoying it because I didn’t learn grammar at school and want to know what I’ve been missing all this time.

History

History doesn’t feel like a priority subject for us, but it’s been a nice activity for me to to do with the kids while I’ve had a baby in tow. I’ve been reading Story of the World (another Well Trained Mind book) and will probably continue following their suggested curriculum because I’m not motivated enough to search for others, and it’s been good enough. It has a Judeo-Christian bias.

They’re also doing a Zoom class with their Latin teacher based on Exploring the World through Story, mainly because they enjoy the experience.

I’ll also put in a plug for the documentary Tudor Monastery Farm, where historians and archaeologists are filmed living the life of Tudor farmers. Needless to say it’s inspired me to make feather paintbrushes, rugs and candles out of reeds, and limestone/wood ash flooring in the new year!

Coding

Some CodeMonkey, Scratch, and Tynker. Oz has also been doing some Tinkercad and 3D printing.

….

That’s roughly it. It only took me two hours to write this, along with 14 interruptions and nursing a baby to sleep! Hope to put some more energy into writing in 2026! And modernize our AI-generated image :)