Our 25-26 School Curriculum Picks

This year we’ve taken a slightly different path in our education journey. After years of piecing together curriculum from an eclectic array of sources, I decided to go all in and order the full box curriculum from Memoria Press.

Usually, I’ve loved cobbling things together—finding gems here and there—but after a season of ill health, I knew I needed simplicity. Less juggling, less planning. I researched, thought it through, and finally made the leap into something tailor-made for our Classical Christian approach to education.

Testing the Waters

In the 2024–25 school year, we dipped our toes in with Memoria Press: working through Rod & Staff maths and their enrichment program. Nothing too heavy, just enough to get a feel for it. One thing to note about this Maths program is that it is highly repetitive because the aim is mastery of the subject . This has been good for my son who needs to develop better independent working habits because he is not moving so quickly through a subject that he forgets what he has previously done, the repetition means he has been growing in confidence when completing independent maths work something I really like about this program.

In July’s I completed the MP week-long conference, and after that it was clear—this was the right fit. We were ready to go all in. It was a big investment, and I’ll admit I was a bit nervous. But the experience couldn’t have gone more smoothly: the box shipped from the US and arrived in just three days. Three! And to top it off, I managed to secure free shipping—a little blessing I hadn’t expected.

We selected the Grade 2 Core Package , this is around Year 3 , ages 7-8 in the UK. We had already completed the Grade 2 Arithmetic program so we opted for the Grade 3 Rod & Staff program. As we are technically considered new users of the program we also purchased the add on set that is advised which gives you the Music and Christian Studies guides needed for Kindergarten – Second Grade plus a number of books and flash cards. The study guides were helpful because we were able to look through past materials over the summer break and get a better feel for what to expect in our upcoming year.

In Grade 2 MP don’t have a Geography curriculum so I opted for the Charlotte Mason Elementary Geography living book which we will be completing during our Morning Basket work. The curriculum overall is considerably more structured then we have done historically and while we could have purchased in the older grade Geography pack I was concerned the schedule would become to much but I also don’t want to exclude the subject so this is a nice balance.

I also looked through the History program and knew that I would need to tweak this as the focus is American and while some elements of that I think we need to learn it cant be at the expensive of leaning our own history but I wanted to do something a little different this year. I found this fantastic book which combines history with folklore and we’ve been having so much fun reading through this and some of the conversations we’ve had of the back of these stories have been simply incredible. We will also be reading through Our Island Story which is a more intensive book and we will be working through this at a much slower pace over the year.

If you want to take a deeper look into each element of our curriculum check out this playlist on my YouTube.