Homeschooling 7 kids isn’t for the faint of heart. The process of choosing, printing, binding, and organizing all the curriculum can be a bit overwhelming. I “think” I finally have everything figured out for our upcoming (2025-2026) school year and I’d love to show you our large family homeschool curriculum picks!
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How many kids do you have?
This year marks year 16 of homeschooling for me! It’s crazy to think! I have tried all sorts of curriculums. But I tend to stick with a more Charlotte Mason, family style way of teaching. I’m not big into workbooks, especially with my elementary aged kids. We have always done a lot of reading aloud, lots of time playing outside and lots of real life learning.
As my kids grow, I slowly introduce more workbooks. I don’t really like doing this but some of them need a bit more guidance than others. And a bit more accountability. I think the reason I don’t like workbooks is because I have to grade them…. ugh. I’m not fantastic at remembering to do that. But this coming year, I am putting it in my planner so I make time for it.
This coming year my kids will be grades:
- 11th
- 9th
- 7th
- 6th
- 5th
- 3rd
- 1st
As you can see, this is a huge range of ages and abilities. It’s becoming more and more challenging to figure out how to teach everyone. While trying to figure out why I’ve decided that its because I love to learn with my kids! I am having a difficult time letting them work independently because I want to read all the books and learn all the things right along with them. I also have a few that have difficulty with reading, which makes me so thankful for all the audio books that are available these days.
Math and Language Arts
Several years ago we started using Math Lessons for a Living Education from Masterbooks for math. It has been such a huge blessing for us over the years. Last year though, I needed to make a change. I switched to an online program that grades math for me and keeps records of everything.
I chose CTC math mainly because I had a coupon for it. So far, we are really enjoying it and will continue on for a few months until our subscription runs out. In the mean time I am evaluating to see if we will keep using it or switch to a different program.
While my older kids all use CTC math, my 1st grader will be using MLFLE from Masterbooks. I want him to have the extra handwriting practice that comes with using a workbook.
For language arts we have always used Language Lessons for a Living Education from Masterbooks. I think it is an excellent curriculum that covers all the bases. It’s very gentle in the early years. It is also contains some Charlotte Mason aspects and most of my kids are able to do it independently.
My 1st grader is using Foundations Phonics from Masterbooks for the first half of the year. After he completes that he will move on to Language Lessons for a Living Education level 1.
My 3rd grader and my 5th grader are both using Language Lessons for a Living Education level 3 this year. My 5th grader struggles with reading. It’s been nice to teach them both on the same level so I can kill 2 birds with one stone.
One of my favorite things about Masterbooks is the option they have to purchase their books in PDF form. This has been a huge money saver for our large family over the years. We invested in a good printer a few years ago (after several years of battling with others) that puts the cost to print an entire book right around $5.
In the past I have always printed the entire book and used my spiral binder to bind them. But last year I realized that it works better for us to have our papers stapled together one week at a time. So for Language Arts I printed the books off, then stapled them together one week at a time. We take about 4 weeks worth and put them into a paper folder. This way each kids only has to carry around a little at a time, and it doesn’t seem so overwhelming.
History/Geography
After A LOT of thought and prayer, I finally decided on using My Story 1 and Elementary World Geography and Cultures both from Masterbooks. I will use these resources together with my 6th grader, 5th grader, 3rd grader and 1st grader. I’m not sure the worksheets that go with the geography and cultures course, but we will be adding in some notebooking.
I purchased a lifetime membership to notebookingpages.com several years ago and I love it! I am using my membership with notebooking pages to print off sheets that go with each country we will study in geography this year. Every time we read about a new country we will draw a picture and do some written narration. Last year we created history binders (click the link to head over to my YouTube channel for a peek at what these look like!) that contained all of the notebooking pages we did for history. These are such a fun treasure for us to look back on and I would like to do the same thing again this year.
Along with both of these we will be reading through “The Story of Jesus’ People” from Generations. I am using this mostly as a read aloud. If a story catches our attention and the kids seem more interested in it, we might dig a bit deeper and do some notebooking.
Science
The large family homeschool curriculum we chose for science this year also comes from Masterbooks. We are going to begin the year by finishing “Adventures on Planet Earth” from Masterbooks. We used this last year but never finished it. My kids LOVED it so much that I want to make sure we complete the whole book.
We have learned about all the different biomes of the world and some of the animals that live in those biomes. My kids have enjoyed making biome boxes when we complete a biome as well!
Once we finish with “Adventures on Planet Earth” we will decide what we will study next. Right now I’m leaning toward dinosaurs but I’ll see what the kids are interested in by then and let them help me make a choice.
Bible
For our Bible time we have a bit of a mixture of things going on. I have so many wonderful books on my shelves, several of which we have never read. My plan is to simply pick one, start reading, and when we finish we will move onto the next.
We are going to start with “Sammy and His Shepherd” by Susan Hunt. This is a sweet story of a little sheep named Sammy who learns many things about his good shepherd. The tag line is, “Seeing Jesus in Psalm 23”. We will also be reading “Church History ABCs“.
And that’s it! Those are our current large family homeschool curriculum choices for elementary grades. If you can’t tell, Masterbooks is my favorite large family homeschool curriculum. The lessons are short and effective. The quality of the books is top notch and I love that it is written from a biblical worldview. What are you using this year? And what is your favorite curriculum? Let me know in the comments below!
Shop this post
Math:
Math Lessons for a Living Education
Language Arts:
Foundations Phonics
Language Lessons for a Living Education
History and Geography:
Elementary World Geography and Cultures
FREE Printable Country Flags
My Story 1
The Story of Jesus’ People
Science:
Adventures on Planet Earth
Elementary Paleontology
Extra Reading:
Sammy and His Shepherd
Church History ABCs
The 21 Balloons
If you need more homeschool inspiration check out these posts!
How I Homeschool Multiple Grades at Once
My Favorite Christian Homeschool Curriculum
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