Our 8th Grade Homeschool Curriculum Picks

The high school years are creeping up on us fast! I’m already picking 8th grade homeschool curriculum! Crazy.

Kids at this stage are ready to start transitioning to high school-level work. Middle school is a bridge – it’s the perfect time to gently build up their skills, habits, and workload so that they’re ready for 9th grade. But it’s also a wonderful time to really explore their interests!

Our Top 8th Grade Homeschool Curriculum Choices

Here are our plans for 8th grade homeschool curriculum and activities! I’ll come back at the end of the year and note anything we added, dropped, or reviewed in-depth.

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Student Planner

My 8th grader will use the Student Work & Habit Tracker to manage his daily work, including homeschool tasks, Bible reading, personal habits, etc.

Bible

He will have his own devotions and Bible studies throughout the year with suggestions from his dad and I. In addition to that, here’s what we will do:

Devotions with Mom – When he gets to this task on his loop schedule we do a brief Bible study together on a relevant topic such as a character issue.
Sound Words for Kids: Lessons in Theology – My theology curriculum for ages pre-k and elementary. Once a week with some weekly memory review. My older kids review the material and do some notebooking.
Bible Road Trip – Our staple Bible curriculum that we’ve used for years. It’s excellent and can be used for pre-k through high school. Eighth grade will bring a step up in memory work, research, and notebooking, which we’ve already started doing so he can ease into it.

Language Arts

We take a rather Charlotte Mason approach to our language arts studied. In particular, we do a lot of oral and written narration, notebooking, and direct teaching of writing skills when they’re needed.

For 8th grade, this is what that will look like:

Narration and Notebooking: Continue telling back in his own words what he read / heard. Narrations are often oral, but I’ve been assigning more frequent written narrations over time and expect that to continue. Narration helps with composition skills, speaking skills, retention of knowledge, and more. I consider notebooking in this category as well.
Writing Assignments: His notebooking and written narrations will provide many opportunities to identify and work on writing skills. I’ll also give writing assignments to work on specific skills, such as essay writing. I’ll use resources such as Writers, Inc. and The Lively Art of Writing to guide those lessons.
Grammar: Easy Grammar Plus has been a fantastic resource. We don’t do formal grammar until middle school, and this program is not only super easy to use, but it allows for short and focuses middle school grammar. I happened to pick up their Easy Writing book that goes with it (it builds up sentence skills) and I am pleased with the results. We started these in the middle of 7th and will continue into 8th.

Why no formal writing resource for 8th grade homeschool curriculum, you ask? We dabbled with several and I decided that for now I don’t need them. It’s more efficient and effective to combine their writing instruction with their current studies in history, Bible, etc., and build on their skills in a customized way. We DO like Easy Writing to build on sentence strength, however.

For those who prefer a full writing curriculum, I’d check out Writing Strands or Jump In. Those were our favorites out of what we tried. 🙂

History, Literature, & Geography

We use BiblioPlan (Year 3 – Early Modern this year) for multi-level group learning. It covers history, church history, geography, and literature. View my full review here.
Dipping into high school content… For 8th grade, we will be adding BiblioPlan’s advanced map work, timeline book, Giants of the Faith notebook for deeper Christian history, and possibly the first half of their United States geography notebook.
Teaching the Classics – I’ll also be introducing literary analysis and socratic discussion through this resource.
Prairie Primer (Little House Unit) – When BiblioPlan gets to the time period in history that corresponds with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series, we’ll be taking a break from nearly everything else to do an intensive unit study together! He may be a bit on the older side for this, but he’ll join us in many of the activities.

Math

C hristian Light Education is my preferred math curriculum. It’s straightforward and uses a spiral approach. In fact, I love it for all grades. Here’s a video review I did of CLE Math.

Science

My son is a science-minded kid, so I try to let him have as much input into what he studies as possible. He really enjoyed Apologia General Science for 7th grade and we’ll probably come back to Apologia for high school.

But this year his requests prompted me to pull together various materials for our own course. I was able to pick up several items used and most of the reading books are at the library. Here’s what he’ll be doing, in addition to joining us in our nature studies.

Ellen McHenry’s Elements curriculum – this is a fun 9-week intro to chemistry that includes videos and games. If he LOVES it and wants to keep going we’ll do the next book on organic chemistry instead of some of the below plans.
Chemistry 101 videos – This is a complete high school curriculum but he’ll just watch the videos and do notebooking or oral/written narration, then complete whatever labs pique his interest. His dad wants to do these with him.
A chemistry kit and possibly a physics kit (haven’t decided which ones yet) to work through at his pace. He’ll do one lab report each month. We’ll also do some fun games like this Professor Noggin science game.
The Heavens Declare – video series all about astronomy from a biblical creation perspective. You can get all 12 volumes here but our AwesomeSciTV membership already includes them. It also includes a study guide meant for students but I’ll use for ME as a topic check for his oral/written narrations. We’ll probably do some night sky observation trips, too.
Reading – He’ll read great books (my list so far is below)
- The Mystery of the Periodic Table by Bendick and Wiker
- Made in Heaven: Man’s Indiscriminate Stealing of God’s Amazing Design by Ray Comfort and Jeffery Seto
- Johannes Kepler: Giant of Faith and Science by John Tiner
- Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist, and Teacher by John Tiner
- Robert Boyle: Trailblazer of Science by John Tiner
- Biographies on Benjamin Franklin and George Washington Carver already planned for history
- Books intended for lower grades, but fun reading and include more experiments
  - Marie Curie for Kids: Her Life and Ideas by Amy O’Quinn
  - Albert Einstein and Relativity for Kids: His Life and Ideas by Jerome Pohlen
  - Isaac Newton and Physics for Kids: His Life and Ideas by Kerri Hollihan
  - Galileo for Kids: His Life and Ideas by Richard Panchyk
  - Nikola Tesla for Kids: His Life and Ideas by Amy O’Quinn

Fine Arts

Piano Lessons – Our piano teacher is doing remote lessons for us while she’s in college.
Places, Please! Theatre – This is a subscription box for homeschool families that we enjoyed last year and will continue! It includes bi-monthly boxes full of a script, props, and more to help your kids work together to put on a play.
Masterpiece Society Art – My older two kids are continuing to take the “101 series” art courses with our membership. We’ve loved all their courses for every age as well as their seasonal art projects and artist studies. Individual Courses or Membership (this is what we have – it includes all the courses)
Music in Our Homeschool – We use this as a group resource for hymns, preschool music, music for history, geography, and more.
Simply Charlotte Mason for group time: poetry study, picture study, and Shakespeare.

Electives

Coding – He just started a Teen Scratch Programming course right now through Funda Funda Academy and enjoys it so far. It is a semester course with optional high school level work and he’s doing that. In the fall or winter he hopes to continue on with their semester-long Python course.
Robotics and STEM – He’ll be taking a quarter course through Innovator’s Tribe on robotics, then possibly a quarter or two of Disney STEAM courses through LumaLearn
Visual Latin – He finished volume 1 and is continuing with volume 2. He really likes this curriculum and I love the language connections he’s making with other subjects such as history, Bible, and science.
Introduction to Logic from Master Books (1 semester), likely signing up for their self-paced online academy version.
Introduction to Public Speaking from SchoolhouseTeachers (1 semester)

That’s a lot of great 8th grade homeschool curriculum resources! But keep in mind that many of these resources are rotated in a loop schedule or do not last the whole year. It’s important to challenge our students and follow their interests without overloading them!