2025-2026 Planning Post

Every year I enjoy blogging what our plans will be for the upcoming school year. Our umbrella school requires me to turn in plans before August and I love sharing what we do - it comes naturally to blog about it each year! I also love encouraging other homeschool families to find delight in a Charlotte Mason homeschool. If you're curious about our plans from past years, here is a collection of our curriculum!

2024-2025, 2023-2024, 2022-2023, 2021-2022, 2020-2021, 2019-2020, 2018-2019, 2017-2018, 2016-2017

This year we will have 8th grade and 10th grade! We survived our first year of high school! Woo hoo! I found that a practical tip that helped me a lot was to designate a folder to be the "high school folder" for paperwork that I want to keep in one place. That includes his 9th grade transcript/report card, his college credits in American History (see this post to see how we CLEP'd out of history), his BETA club certificate and pin, and the dual enrollment information that I'll need to keep handy for next year, as well as any other paperwork that I feel like we need to keep organized for the future!

Here's what we are putting on the transcript for 10th grade:

Honestly, I have strong feelings about the "credit system" that you can read about in this document. For simplicity and state requirements, I'm making our transcript look like this in order to fit in with what colleges will be looking at. But we all know that time does NOT equal learning!!! Our living books and self-education is the only way to true education!

As I do every year, when planning I'm always looking at the Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, and Knowledge of the Universe. Here's what our family will be doing in each area of education.

Knowledge of God

This year we are going back to the New City Catechism with the 52 week devotional books. In years past we did the student version with the songs and it was a beautiful time watching my children defend their faith when we asked them questions. I'm looking forward to going through this more grown up edition as we continue our growth in Bible and Theology. Both Christian and Eva Mae will also have their daily Bible reading and Christian living book. This year Christian will be reading The Way of the Master and Eva Mae will be reading Target Earth, a retelling of John Bunyan's Holy War. I won't be requiring written narrations from these books but I will be having discussions with them throughout their readings to find out what they've been getting out of the books. Our Bible reading will be planned out month to month according to our church sermon study. 

Knowledge of Man

Language Arts
"English 10" is such a vague statement on our transcript but it's a lot easier to write than to list out all the details that make up a beautiful Charlotte Mason language arts curriculum! We do a lot of our language arts family style when it comes to literature so what is written as English 10 is also 8th grade Language Arts.

This year, our book club is heavy on British Literature. Here are the books we are discussing each month for book club: Canterbury Tales, Otto of the Silver Hand, Frankenstein, Emma, The Importance of Being Earnest, Silas Marner, Black Beauty, Robinson Crusoe. The way it works is that we have a breakdown of a reading assignment each week and students write out a commonplace entry for the readings. We get together after reading the book to discuss the themes, characters, plot, and favorite moments and then have a feast of food that is themed with the book! Check out all our past book club parties here! Even though Eva Mae is not getting "high school credit" for these books, I consider it a great stack of literature that she will enjoy reading in 8th grade. I also require a 5 paragraph book report at the end of some of the books through the year. I'm utilizing Course Hero on a lot of these books and love the way they have created infographics and insights into the literature of some of the classics. If we can get to Shakespeare, I hope to start the year with Merry Wives of Windsor to see the Nashville Shakes performance. And then possibly in the spring semester we will look at Julius Caesar since Nashville Shakes will do a performance of this play in 2026.

Poetry will continue through the Michael Clay Thompson book. We really enjoyed it last year and also have several poetry tea time parties throughout the year!

Grammar, Reading, and Writing will also be studied as Christian goes through an ACT study guide this year. We are using the Peterson's Study Guide and also putting together a study group that meets once a month and will be taking the ACT together on April 11th this year. I really like the modules within the Peterson guide because it explains all the rules of grammar questions and has practice tests as "Knowledge Checks" throughout the guide. I've created a copy for others to download that includes my own schedule and step by step instructions to use the free resource! You can purchase my guide for $5 here (https://kindandcultivated.gumroad.com/l/ACT) I am excited to update at the end of the year with my feedback on this schedule and our first ACT experience! 

History and Civics
Our history focus this year will be on ancient history through Augustus Ceasar's World and American Government. I'm so excited about our American Government course this year as we go through Constitution 101, Bill of Rights Institute, our state Civics curriculum, and David McCullough's 1776. America is turning 250 years old in July 2026! There are going to be so many celebrations which make this the perfect year to focus on American Government and our founding documents!

Plutarch is also considered Civics. We had a wonderful experience with the Simply Charlotte Mason last year, but I'll be taking a different approach this year and we will be using the Anne White guide of Cicero .

We also will be continuing the study through Charlotte Mason's Volume 4 together. We finished Chapter 11 in Part 3 in May. Our reading schedule for the rest of this year will be to take us through Chapter 6 of Book 2, Part 1. To see a sample break down of the readings over several years, click here. I also have a blog page all about Volume 4 here.

Languages
We are continuing Latin this year with Canon Press - It took us several years to completely finish Storybook Latin 1 but we did it! This year we will start Storybook Latin 2, the Bible stories. I love this approach and it's been a great way for us to discuss the English language as well as understand the Latin rules for noun cases and verb conjugations. Eva Mae will be continuing her studies of ASL with some online videos like Bravo! ASL and in person classes with my friend Natalie!

Art and Music
I'm excited about another group we're doing with friends - it's an architecture field trip group! I wrote a guide that uses the Hillyer books on architecture and combined it with some educational YouTube videos and in person field trips! We're actually going to be going through this guide after dinner each week to enjoy it as a family along with Nick! Since our trip to St. Louis this year, Nick has been very interested in architecture history and can't wait to learn more along with us this year as we dive into this subject. 

We will also look at the fine art of John Trumbull and other American Revolutionary painters as part of our study of the 250th anniversary of the United States. Discovery Park of America has a beautiful room dedicated to 12 famous American paintings. I've put these paintings into a printable document and plan to have my kids read some biographical information about him from the book Famous Painters of America. Gilbert Stuart is another painter we will focus on - the book American Pictures and their Painters is a great resource.

Music will continue with our weekly participation in Nashville Notes. I love the opportunities the kids have to join in with other homeschoolers as they practice and perform their instruments. This year, Christian and Eva Mae both plan to join choir in addition to their instrument ensembles. Christian will play piano in jazz band and baritone in select band, Eva Mae will play flute in novice band.

The Nashville Symphony will continue their tradition of having Curb dress rehearsals. What I usually do for composer study is spend 2-3 weeks before the concert learning more about the pieces and composers from the concert program. Last year our Charlotte Mason book club read the PR article "Joy to be Shared" and it made my heart so glad to know we've been doing many similar activities as Beswick did in the PNEU schools. We will most likely study Richard Strauss, Berlioz, and Holst next year and attend the dress rehearsals for these performances.

Our hymn and folk songs will come from the choir repertoire but we will probably also have a few playlists going in the car with some favorites! 

Knowledge of the Universe

Math
We will continue with CTCMath this year. We had a great experience! Eva Mae will do pre-algebra this year and Christian will do geometry. Check out this link for a great discount code to sign up for the program! The reason I like it is because it is web-based. You don't need to download any software to run the computer program. It's also very customizable to create lesson assignments, tests, and quizzes.

Although not completely math, Christian will also be working through a Computer Information Systems course on Modern States in order to take another CLEP test. Since he did US History for me last year I am letting him choose the test this year! He also will be participating in a group video game design club. His friend has organized a schedule and to-do list and given jobs to each member of the club. I'm excited to see what they come up with!

Science
I LOVED the way we did our science last year and I'm continuing the tradition this year. We are doing chemistry with labs in a family style way. The main books we are using are The Disappearing Spoon and Theodore Gray's books. In addition to these living books Christian will also go through the Modern States Chemistry modules to work all the math involved in chemistry. We'll get together with other friends that are also reading the same books so we can discuss the concepts together and do lab experiments for additional learning! I did learn that it's hard to put together a true high school lab assignment in a big group with multiple ages and skill so I'm encouraging families to find their own supplement at home that fits best for their child! I have a free download here with my schedule if you would like to peek at the first semester!

Nature study also fits into science and even with 8th and 10th grade kiddos we are going to continue this habit of observation and learning. I think it's my personal favorite subject of our homeschool. Over the past several years the focus of our nature journaling has also been to create our own "materia medica" - I've written about this practice in our first nature journal post from last school year. This year we will be studying the mimosa tree, crossvine, winged elm, black walnut, henbit and dead nettle, the red bud tree, wisteria, and mulberry. 

Geography
We will circle back to the United States as we focus on America's semiquincentennial. I found a great documentary with Stephen Fry as he travels around the 50 states. I'm hoping we can also do some traveling ourselves this school year!

PE and other electives

Physical education and handicrafts are also considered part of the Knowledge of the Universe. Christian will continue with his fencing lessons and Eva Mae will continue with her musical theater. These aren't your traditional Charlotte Mason subjects, but with my kids growing up and having their own interests I feel that the principles with CM (spreading a feast and letting them choose) still fit in our lifestyle as they pursue their passions.

BETA club is also an addition to our school year, but not that different to how we have lived our lives. The main purpose of BETA club is to show servant leadership. We will be actively involved in volunteering over the course of the school year. I've already set up some times to serve with a non-profit in Nashville this summer and food pantries in the fall. If you're local and would like to serve alongside us please let me know and I'll share the information!

Typing all this out over the past few days has helped bring clarity to our homeschool schedule. The benefit to having kids that are older is that many of these assignments can be done on their own. We have our monthly checklists (like I shared in the science link) and we also have a lot of time together where we read aloud and discuss. In fact, I usually buy 3 copies of our literature books so we all can take turns reading and following along in the text! If you've never done this with older kids it is a game changer! I started doing it with the Bible when Eva Mae learned to read and we've continued every year since - either with Bible reading or with novels and other literature.

Reach out to me if you have any questions about our studies! I love sharing about our homeschool and feel so blessed to continue this tradition in our family.