Language Learning At Home

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Our 2021-2022 Bilingual Homeschool Curriculum Choices for 2nd Grade and Junior Kindergarten

Anne Guarnera

I don’t think that I’m supposed to publish an annual curriculum post at the end of the school year, but well, here we are!

My timing may be a bit unconventional, but I think there’s a great advantage to me posting this now: you get to see the homeschool curriculum that we actually used as a family, rather than my pie-in-the-sky plans.

This year, we started school in mid-September, as we all needed a break after powering through Summer Spanish School. I also needed an extended amount of time for planning and prep, as this is the first year that I have planned my own curriculum from scratch, and I needed lots of time to organize my resources and envision how our day would run with them.

The resource that I found MOST helpful for planning, by the way, is Pam Barnhill’s book Plan Your Year. Pam’s process for crafting a homeschool vision, as well as her ideas for how to create written homeschool procedures and loop schedules have been essential to my planning efforts. I have a lot more curricula to balance this year than in years past (and I also have another student!), but thanks to her step-by-step instructions, my load seems manageable.

Choosing Homeschool Curriculum to Fit Your Educational Philosophy

Before I share what we’re using, I’d also like to lay out what I value in homeschool curriculum, so you can understand how I make my choices (which means that you might not necessarily make the same choices!). Here are the three guiding principles that I use when choosing materials to use in our bilingual homeschool:

  • As an educator, I look for curriculum that is as comprehensive and well-designed (according to basic instructional design principles) as possible. In other words, I don’t want to have to supplement my math curriculum with another math curriculum. This is particularly important to me in skills-based curriculum, such as math and reading. I also want curricula that aligns with my general educational philosophy, which prioritizes living books, real-life learning experiences, and is heavily language-focused (both oral and written).

  • As a homeschooling mom, I try to choose curriculum that plays to my strengths AND weaknesses. My strengths are definitely reading aloud and leading discussions, so I choose curriculum that centers around those things (rather than focusing on hands-on activities, for example). My weaknesses are conceptual math (never learned it!) and lack of time for planning and prep. To compensate for these, I’ve deliberately chosen a math curriculum that emphasizes conceptual problem solving, and I mostly use open-and-go curricula, which saves me a ton of time on planning. I never thought that I would say this, as someone who hated teaching in the classroom with scripted curriculum, but as a homeschool parent, I LOVE scripted curriculum!

  • As a bilingual parent, I favor content-area resources in Spanish (our minority language), but don’t stress if I can only find something in English. I work very hard to create a language immersion environment in our home, so even though quite a bit of our coursework is done in English, my kids are getting plenty of Spanish input and opportunities to use the language.

It can be a bit of dance to balance those priorities, but with the incredible breadth of homeschool curricula available, it’s certainly not impossible. If you’re interested in looking at what we’ve used in past years, here are my previous blog posts about our bilingual homeschooling curricula:

2021-2022 Bilingual Homeschool Curriculum Choices

And now, here are our 2021-2022 curriculum choices*:

*Some of the links below are affiliate links—meaning that I receive a small commission (at no cost to you) for any purchases made through them. For my full disclosure policy, click here.

History and Literature (English and Spanish)

Our literature this year tied in somewhat with our history cycle (we started with the ancients), and that included reading living books—in both of our home languages—about:

And yes, I am working on a series of posts with bilingual resources covering those time periods, so please stay tuned for those!

However, I didn’t want to confine our literature selections to only these time periods, so we also read some excellent selections of classic children’s literature. My husband and I tag-team on this: he reads mostly in English, I read mostly in Spanish. Over the past few months, we’ve read:

We also read about 1,000 picture books (and I’m not even sure I’m exaggerating). The audiobook version of the Story of the World (Volume One) saved my hide while trying to teach history with a toddler underfoot. It was enough of a challenge to fit in our literature read-alouds; I couldn’t have also read SOTW myself.

Language Arts (English)

We will be completing the following English Language Arts curriculum on a loop schedule, so that we don’t get overwhelmed. Most of these subjects will be tackled only 2-3 times/week.

English Reading and Spelling:

Second Grade: My second grader used All About Reading and All About Spelling for the first six months of the year, until our concerns about his spelling made us jump to Barton Reading and Spelling, which is a program for dyslexic students (we’re waiting on an official diagnosis). For independent reading, he worked his way through all of Sonlight’s Grade 2 readers and Ambleside Online’s Year 1 booklist before plowing through the Read-Aloud Revival Early Readers booklist, which I also highly recommend!

Junior Kindergarten: My second-born began learning phonics this year with the Explode the Code Primer Set A, B, and C. I like that ETC is a very gentle introduction to phonics and that it includes a lot of phonemic awareness activities. Now that he’s finished, we’re scheduled to start Logic of English Foundations A this summer.

English Writing and Grammar:

Second Grade: This is also the first year that we are adding in writing! We completed the first books of First Language Lessons and Writing With Ease, both published by the Well-Trained Mind. Once these were done (about halfway through the year), we focused on remediating spelling with Barton.

Handwriting:

Both: After giving up on Handwriting Without Tears, we are now happily using Zaner-Bloser’s handwriting curriculum. My oldest is learning cursive with their Spanish-language curriculum and my second-born will be starting with their English-language kindergarten curriculum. We’re doing it this way, by the way, because I teach my kids to read first in English, and want their handwriting lessons to reinforce the English phonics they’re learning. Since my oldest can read in both languages, the Spanish handwriting program acts as extra Spanish reading practice for him.

Language Arts (Spanish)

Because there is only so much that I can do in a day, I outsource Spanish Language Arts to a language tutor, who my boys meet with online. This is a strategy that I highly recommend for parents trying to make bilingual education work!

Second Grade: Lauren of Bilingual Together gave me the fabulous idea of developing an independent Spanish reading loop for my oldest. Here’s what that entailed, when he was doing independent reading in Spanish (roughly every other week):

  • Reading (independently) 1-2 early reader books or their equivalent in Spanish (these are deliberately below his level, to allow him to work without frustration).

  • Reading aloud to me at least twice a week for 15 minutes.

  • Providing one oral narration of one of the weekly readings (which I scribe for him).

List of our favorite early readers in Spanish to come soon—we found some good ones after dedicated hunting!

Kindergarten: My kindergartener is working on basic Spanish literacy with his tutor using books from the Coquito series, which is what many children in Latin America learn to read with.

Math

Both: Going into our third year of RightStart Math, we’re sticking with it! My oldest is on RightStart Level C and my second-born will do Level A this year. We do math in English, but RightStart is a scripted curriculum, and it would be easy to translate into Spanish (if you’re a native speaker). We did find that we needed to supplement a bit for subtraction facts, so I added in worksheets from Math Mammoth (which is one of the few math curricula available in Spanish!).

Science

I didn’t use a formal curriculum for science this year, but instead focusing on various hands-on activities and following my kids’ interests in basic science concepts.

We continued with our Spanish Nature Study Co-Op, which meets twice a month. During those meetings, one of the moms taught a short lesson on a topic of her choice, and then we worked on nature journaling and enjoyed a nature walk together.

We’ll also kept up with our Lelu Boxes, which cover various STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) topics in Spanish. Those are also available with English-language instructions for families who are learning the language. Full disclosure: I found it so overwhelming to do these with the toddler awake that we only finished three over the course of the year. Still, we enjoyed them!

We also read aloud from the following books to supplement our nature study, and as topics naturally arose in conversation:

I let my kids pick the pages from these reference books that most interest them, we read, and then we talk about them. Super simple.

Finally, I’m not sure this “counts,” but they watched a whole lot of Magic School Bus and Octonauts in Spanish (two of our favorite Netflix Kids’ shows in Spanish).

Portuguese

We still used TalkBox.Mom as the spine of our homeschool Portuguese program (here’s my full review of the TalkBox.Mom curriculum), but I also added in more authentic resources as my kids have grown in their Portuguese abilities. Here’s a post with those resources, if you’re interested!

They also do conversation classes twice/week with a Brazilian teacher via iTalki (an online service that I’ve also reviewed here). We have a new teacher who I highly recommend, if you’re looking for online Portuguese tutoring. Check out her teaching profile here!

Christian Education

My husband and I tag team on this aspect of our schooling, with him going through some of these resources and me leading others. This year, we used the following in our discipling of our kids:

Extracurriculars

I love using on-line classes as a way to help my kids pursue their interests and get them extra Spanish practice. This year, we have been very happy with the following classes:

I am so grateful for the dedicated teachers who come alongside me to help teach my kids, and who encourage them daily. They are an essential part of our homeschool!

Our Weekly Schedule

When I list all of that out, it looks exhausting, but really, our school time only adds up to about 3-4 hours daily. We’re not schooling from 8 AM-4 PM daily—there are lots of breaks and fun sprinkled in. At some point, I will publish a schedule breakdown so that you can see what our days look like, but since this post is long enough, I think that will have to be another day!

And with that, I’d like to wrap up this belated curriculum post. Thanks for taking the time to read, and if you’re looking into any of these options for your family next year, please let me know if you have any questions!