2024-2025 School Year Summary (6th, 4th, 3rd grade + K5)

Byemily

This post shares a summary of our homeschool year for five children ages 3-12, including curriculum used, books read, and other activities completed. Encouragement for homeschooling moms that a simple homeschool is, in fact, enough!

Every spring the end of the school year seems to take me by surprise. Wow, are we here already? Did we actually make it? Why are my kids so old now? Why am I so old now?

However unexpected, the fact remains that we are firmly in the month of May and another school year has flown by. I would like to say that this one was more chaotic than most because we moved to a new home in November, but the truth of the matter is that every single year of homeschooling prior to 2023 we either had a new baby in the family, or I was pregnant or nursing – all of which results in a respectable amount of chaos.

Several years ago I realized that if I am waiting for the “perfect” year of homeschooling to come along, and pinning my hopes of my children’s education on this ideal year – when everyone is healthy and no major events interrupt and Mom is well-rested and the kids have great attitudes and life feels easy – well, I will be waiting forever. It’s not going to happen!

We have to figure out how to keep on and keep learning even in the hard years, because they are much more common than the easy ones. This is one reason why I love looking for ways to simplify our homeschool – because when it’s simple, we can keep going even during house moves and new babies and pre-teen hormones and many other curve balls that inevitably come flying our way.

So – on to the summary of our homeschool year! I’ll share what each child did individually, as well as what we did as a whole family.

Summary of Our Homeschool Year by Grade

6th Grade (age 11-12)

This year, he finished:

  • 2/3 of The Good and The Beautiful Math 5 (we’ll be doing a little more over the summer, and if you’re wondering why he’s a year “behind” in his math, it’s a long story but has to do with switching curriculum last year and trying to make sure we didn’t have too many gaps between the different methods)
  • The Good and The Beautiful Handwriting Book 5
  • The Story of the World Volume 4 (he read it on his own because some of the content was too mature for our younger kids to listen to)
  • Typing lessons through Touch Type Read and Spell (if you’re looking for a fantastic typing program, you can get 10% off this one with my code EROKSER)
  • reading 6 chapter books on his own
  • weekly oral and written narrations
  • weekly speech therapy and 2 sessions of a social skills group class
middle school boy holding a lego set

4th Grade (age 9-10)

This year, he finished:

  • 2/3 of The Good and The Beautiful Math 4 (we’ll be doing a little more over the summer)
  • The Good and The Beautiful Handwriting Book 4
  • Typing lessons through Touch Type Read and Spell
  • reading 8 chapter books on his own
  • weekly oral and written narrations
homeschool boy buried in sand at the beach

3rd Grade (age 8-9)

This year, he finished:

  • 2/3 of The Good and The Beautiful Math 3 (we’ll be doing a little more over the summer)
  • The Good and The Beautiful Handwriting Book 3
  • Typing lessons through Touch Type Read and Spell
  • reading 6 short chapter books on his own
  • weekly oral narrations
homeschool boy on a rock near Lake Superior

Kindergarten (age 5-6)

This year, she finished:

homeschool girl at a playground

Books Read All Together (ages 3-39)

This year we read and discussed:

five homeschool children standing at the beach on the shores of Lake Michigan

Additionally…

  • the three older boys completed another year of piano lessons, 3 piano competitions, and 1 recital
  • Middle Brother and Little Brother played in a winter basketball league and a spring soccer league
  • the four older kids completed one semester of homeschool choir
  • the four older kids were enrolled in a charter school program that required 3 rounds of testing in math and reading
  • we took a road trip to St. Louis, Missouri, and visited the science museum there
  • we took a road trip to Ohio and visited the Ark Encounter in Kentucky
  • we went to the library 1-2x a month and the zoo 5x
  • we sang hymns together at the piano 3x a week
  • we finished our fourth year of Classical Conversations!

Conclusion

If you haven’t done it before, the simple activity of writing down everything you did throughout the year is immensely gratifying. Hopefully you jotted some notes somewhere throughout the year (otherwise I would never remember which books we read), but seeing it all compiled into one list reassures me that we have, in fact, done quite a bit this year!

I’d encourage you to try making your own Summary of Our Homeschool Year – perhaps next year, if it’s too late for this one – and just watch how the little moments, the small daily efforts, are slowly multiplied over the course of a year.

However, we must remember that most of the true learning – that which happens in our child’s heart and soul – cannot be seen, quantified, or measured.

We can provide the feast, as Charlotte Mason says, and we can train good habits and offer up our unceasing prayers, but beyond that we must wait in hope, believing in a future unseen harvest.

Example: we read an awful lot of wonderful literature in our homeschool this year. Do I know exactly what these stories have done in my children’s hearts? No, I do not. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps one story changed their life forever. More likely it is somewhere in the middle.

However, I believe these books are working for good, I know that I did my part, and I am content to wait and watch for growth to come in its time.

The homeschoolers, like the just, shall live by faith.

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