Planning for a New Homeschool Year: Phase 3 - Curriculum Development, Part 1.

Over the past several weeks, I have made great progress in planning and preparing our homeschool curriculum and schedule for NEXT YEAR -- that is, the 2025-26 school year.

As secular, eclectic homeschoolers who tend to lean more toward unit-studies and interest-based learning, we have settled on three primary themes that will guide our curriculum next year.

Those three themes are:

1. Dinosaurs

2. Sharks

3. Disney Cars

These are strong interests that will engage both of my boys, despite their age difference (ages 7 and soon-to-be 2), assuming appropriate scaling up and down, based on their individual needs.

(You can read more about how we decided on these themes HERE, and also, why we opted for theme-based curriculum guidance HERE.)

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After settling on our three main themes, I went to work pulling together related materials and dumping digital files into "large bucket" folders on my computer -- each representing broad subject areas:

• Speech and language (phonics, reading, etc);

• Science/STEM;

• Math skills;

• Occupational therapy/fine motor;

• Coloring sheets;

• Sensory activities

• Arts and crafts; and

• Outings and adventures (field trips, digital tours, etc.)

The goal was to collect a large number of (quality) worksheets, projects, and activities on each theme, and for each learning subject, to fill our days for 6 to 8 weeks each.

I also spent a large amount of time surfing video content on YouTube and dumping videos on our three subjects into a "2025-26 Homeschool" playlist. I specifically look for videos that are short (2-5 minutes), extremely engaging (for young learners), and scientifically accurate (obviously) where relevant. I have no problem including cartoons or different modes of content creation or learning styles. I love creative approaches!

To begin, the content I found was literally just saved and dumped into these placeholder folders without much consideration of any overarching flow or day-by-day schedule. Once I have all of my materials together, I will go back, one-by-one and create daily and weekly lesson plans.

For now, it is all about the broad sweep.