 Hey everybody, welcome to The Waldeck Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be how to homeschool without a curriculum. I know, that sounds completely nuts. And there was a time when I thought it was nuts too. But people are always very surprised when they ask me, what do you use for language arts or what do you use for math or what curriculum do you use? And typically my answer is none. We use very little to none formal curriculum in our homeschool. We used to, we did for a very long time in the very beginning because I didn't know any better. And I thought that's what you were supposed to do. And the more that I realized I wanted an interest-led homeschool, the more I realized that I wanted Emily to be able to lead is when I realized that curriculum wasn't going to align with what I wanted for our homeschool. Because curriculum boxed us in, formal curriculum anyway. Formal curriculum boxed us in. It felt like a checklist that we had to get through every day. We were dredging through it. We were getting through it. We were checking the check boxes. But we weren't having fun. I wasn't fueling Emily's fire for learning and I wasn't really excited. She wasn't excited. And it just kind of felt like we were doing the must-dos but we weren't doing any of the could-dos or the fun things. And so that's when I finally broke out of the box because I realized that what I wanted for our homeschool was for Emily to love it. I wanted to be able to follow her interest and her passions. I wanted her to be able to lead us down those fantastic rabbit trails. And I really wanted to do it together. And most formal curriculums just didn't give me the ability to do that. And so instead we ditched them and we started kind of doing our own thing. And I know you're probably thinking I can't ditch the homeschool curriculum. I need it. But I'm gonna show you what we do instead in case you like me are ready to break free out of the box. So the first thing that I did was I created skill checklist by grade level. So what I do every year, and you can watch a plan with me video where I physically do that in this video. But what I do is I go through those skill checklist and I pick things that I want to focus on that year for math, for language arts. And then I pick whatever topics Emily's interested in. So for example, over the summer it was ocean. Her next big interest has been Greek mythology so that's something that I'm working on for her right now. And that's just kind of what I do. I pick math topics and I pick language arts topics and then I pick a big topic and then I find resources that will help me teach those concepts even if it's not a curriculum. Sometimes I can create a study for her which I've done in the past and I will continue to do as she gets older. And then other times I just use really, really great fun resources that we all enjoy. So I'm gonna share some of those resources with you today starting with the ones that would work kind of for everything and then I'm gonna break it down my subject. So first, if you have younger kids, like I'm talking preschool through fifth grade and you're wanting something that would give you a little bit of a basic guide for all of the subjects, I really suggest these, what your insert grade here needs to know. So this is what your fourth grader needs to know. We used this last year. They have them from preschool up to fifth grade and these have a little bit of everything. So this one has literature, math, history, science and the arts and I believe all of them have something to that. I think some of the younger ones have more like phonics and they do literature but they all cover the majority of the grade levels and the majority of the topics. So that if you're just looking for one thing, you just need one thing to hold your hand so you can break outside of the box and you have younger kids like elementary. This would be my one thing suggestion. Get this book, it's mainly just a big book of read aloud. You can read this whole book and essentially follow all of the rabbit trails that your kids wanna go down and you are now homeschooling without a curriculum but you still have this holding your hand and you're gonna cover the majority of what needs to be covered that year. So that is my suggestion if you have younger kids. If you have older kids like middle school, these books would be my suggestion. These are the complete middle school study guide. So they have the English and language arts. They have the science, math, American history, world history and then computer coding. So that one you could just get whichever ones you need. So maybe you're only gonna break out of the box for one thing, maybe world history. So you get the world history one or you can get all of them. And what's great about this is it's mostly read aloud but there's also Check Your Knowledge built into these books. So there's the Check Your Knowledge questions and then on the next page, there's the Check Your Knowledge Answers. So you can break through your formal curriculum while still having that checks and balance knowing that you're covering what you wanna cover and there's some little quizzes built in so it might still give you peace of mind. So this is a great thing for middle schoolers. Now I don't have them to show because I don't have a high schooler yet but the Big Fat Notebook which is the same series also carries books like this for high schoolers. So if you have an older kid, those would be great if you're looking for something that's not formal curriculum for high schoolers. So those are my kind of suggestions if you're just looking for something overall, something that's gonna cover a little bit of everything. And now we're gonna break down into individual things. So we're gonna start with language arts. So my language arts top resources for teaching without a curriculum, if I don't knock everything over here, are going to be, first up, we have Story Cubes. Absolutely love these. There are tons of Story Cubes. Target carries some of the dollars, spot it back to school. These happen to be all of the Rory Story Cubes. You can find them anywhere. You can make your own. You can buy blank cubes and draw on them, whatever it takes. They're just really fun for writing prompts, story starters, imaginative, creative writing. They're just a really great resource for that. So I absolutely love them. Another language arts must have for us is Mad Libs. Literally there are tons of these. You could find one on any topic that you're studying. This is just the generic one, but let's say you're studying sharks. There's a shark one. Let's say you're studying world history. There's a world history one. So there's tons of these for you to choose from. And then we also really love the Usborne writing books. This is Write Your Own Storybook. They have Write Your Own Poems, Write Your Own Comics, Write Your Own Magazine. Tons of different ways to get writing in that's really, really fun and interactive because it kind of walks the children through different things that they can do. And then obviously any kind of games are our favorite. The game that I picked to show you guys is Word on the Street because this is a spelling and vocabulary game kind of to one, you have to come up with a word that meets the category and then you have to spell it. So we love all kinds of games, but this is one of our favorites because like I said, it works on multiple different language arts skills at the same time. And then obviously we really, really still love mail time. We love sitting down together on Mondays reading the mail that comes in for us and then writing mail back. That's a great way for us to kind of experience writing a friendly letter or writing a sympathy letter or a thank you card. It's a great way to practice some of our language arts skills as well as also just practice being a really awesome human being. And then last would be our journaling. So that's something else that we do once a week. We sit down and do it together. We really, really love it. It's been a great way to again, practice writing, practice spelling. And it's also making a really great memory. So I absolutely love this for language arts as well. And then for math, the first thing I have is living books. So any math book is amazing. Some of our favorites are the Brian Cleary books. They're hilarious. It's math is category, categorical. And then we also really love the circumference books as well. That's a whole series about different kinds of math topics, but they really help bring math to life, especially if you have a kid who maybe has a hard time understanding mathematical concepts. It's a great tool to read the book and kind of see them brought to life. And that is Emily. And so we absolutely love that. We also really like the Mathological Liar. These are like, they're kind of like a game, but it's cases that you use and you have to use math to solve the case to figure out who's innocent and who's guilty. This is the fourth grade one. Emily and Kevin did this in last year. We already bought the fifth grade one because they loved it so much. This has been used in our homeschool for years. It's like I said, a great way to sneak in some math. It's great in a morning basket or a bedtime basket or to sit around the table and do a lunch together. But it's just a really great way to practice some of those math skills. And because you can buy them by grade level, it's kind of focusing on skills that are better for that age. So you don't have your 12 year old doing addition and subtraction. So that's very, very helpful because as she's gotten older and her math skills have gotten more complex, so have those Mathological Liar decks. Okay, and then obviously for math, I'm gonna say games. Our favorite math games are ones that use all four operations now that Emily's a little bit older and there's not a ton of those out there. So our top three math games that use all four operations are AdsMundi, Prime Climb, and then one of our newest favorites is Target. So those are our top three math picks and next we're going to talk about geography. So again, I could not talk about geography without talking about games. One of our favorite geography games is Scramble the States. If you're looking for something U.S. geography based and then one of our favorite world games is Flag Frenzy. This is all world flags. This is a really fun game. It's like spotted but with flags. And then of course one of our favorite subscriptions, which is Universal Yums. So we get this box once a month, we sit down, we use a map, we find where it's out on the map, we eat all of the different snacks, we listen to a music playlist, we do the trivia. That in itself is a super fun family night that we spend diving into geography and it honestly doesn't even feel like school. We're just having a fun family night together. So that is a win in my book. Next, we have Science. Again, we have two of our favorite subscriptions. The first one is Mel Science. Now we have the Mel Chemistry and the Mel Physics that we get from them. We love them both a ton. Like they're both really, really great science subscriptions. Emily has done them with Kevin for the past two years and they look forward to them coming in the Mel every month. Again, they're both amazing. And then we also really love all of the Kiwi Lines. Emily recently upgraded because her and Kevin were ready for something more. From the Tinker Crate, which has been a long time favorite of theirs, to the Eureka Crate. So they're trying something a little more complex this year but it's still kind of the same concept. It's still that physics building, tinkering. So they're really excited to do this. And then of course, again, games because games go with everything for us. Some of our favorite science games are by Genius Games. That's the maker of this, which is Periodic. They have a ton of really, really great science games. Viralence, which has to do with viruses, ions, compounds. There's just like a ton of really great, they have Cytosis, which is like cells. So anything that you wanna learn in science, they probably have a really awesome game for it. So that is one of our top science picks. We have almost all of them and they're really fun to play. And then let's talk about history. First up for history, we have some of our absolute favorite, which are the Who Was Books, or as Emily refers to them, the Big Headed Books. These, hands down, are one of the most used resources in our home school for history. As far as not doing any kind of curriculum, we absolutely love them. I love that you can deep dive into a person. I love pairing our unit studies with them so that we can dive even further into them. It just makes them so much fun. And I really like that there's normally one that will go along with anything that we're studying or learning about or that Emily's interested in, and that she can be interested in just randomly pick one and we can pick it up and read it. And it doesn't ever feel like we're missing something or like they have to be read in a certain order. So that is really fun for us. One of my top history games is Professor Noggin. I love that the Professor Noggin decks have easy and hard questions. I also love that there's so many different topics. So as far as history goes, this one is ancient. There's Civil War, there's American Revolution, there's explorers, there's tons of different historical decks that you could pick to go, like I said, with something that you're studying or just to explore a different time period. Maybe you haven't studied medieval and you wanna see how much does your kid know? Play the medieval Professor Noggin's and just see, like let's play easy and then let's see if we can work up to hard. And you can learn so much just by playing that one game. It's really kind of crazy. And then the last thing I have for history is kind of a new thing to us. We've been trying it out over the summer and so far we've really, really liked it and I can already tell that it's gonna become a staple in our home school. And that is the history unboxed subscription. We are doing the ancients right now. And so this specific box is ancient Egypt, but they're so much fun. They come with like a little pamphlet where you can read through it and learn more about that time period or that civilization or whatever that specific box is about. And then they have two to three hands-on projects for you to do that have to do with that. So we've done some pottery, we've done some cuneiform, we've done stamp making. And so far it's been really fun for us to again all sit down as a family and read and do these projects together. And it doesn't feel like school, which I really, really love about this. I love that we can use fun hands-on things that don't feel boring and mundane and drag us down. And it doesn't feel like we're just checking that checkbox off again, right? We're not just checking it to be checking it. The last thing I wanna show you in case it's a staple in your home school is some logic or critical thinking. So some of my favorite things for that are obviously the easy one, which would be puzzles. I mean, you can get puzzles from anywhere, any kind of puzzles you want. They're great for logic and critical thinking skills. We also love the Mindbenders from the Critical Thinking Company. These spot the differences, masterpiece mysteries are fantastic. And then obviously we have some games. So some of our top favorites are Spot It, the Mental Blocks, and pretty much anything by ThinkFun, but specifically Cat Crimes is one of Emily's top picks. So those are my top resources for how to home school without a formal curriculum. If you want even more ideas how to home school without a curriculum, I'm gonna leave a link in the description box. You're gonna wanna check it out because I have a list that's gonna get you started how to home school without a curriculum and you're not gonna wanna miss it.