How to use the curriculum
Welcome to Nautilus Homeschool! Use this guide to take full advantage of what we have to offer for grades K - 8. (You can view our high school instructions here.)
Choosing a grade
Grades in our curriculum simply denote progression through the material, and do not need to correspond exactly to age.
If you are switching from another curriculum, you will want to make sure your child has completed any recommended prerequisites. Our curriculum does not sync grade by grade with other schools, and many subjects build on knowledge covered in previous years.
Luckily, it's easy to ensure your child covers everything he or she needs. We suggest that you start by reading through the Overview by grade, which outlines the main focuses and milestones of each Nautilus Homeschool grade level. You may find that one of the grades is an ideal fit for your child. If you aren't sure, we recommend that you err on the side of starting at a lower grade to ensure foundational material is covered.
What if you want to cover some of the material from a different grade without using that grade for the entire curriculum? You can do this by choosing the desired courses instead of the suggested default option in the course selection tool that appears once you have chosen a grade level, or from the Edit Courses page at any time.
The top of your Materials page will also display a list of suggested additions, which consists of some of our favorite material from previous grades. Simply choose which of these you'd like to add to your child's curriculum and select a convenient month. You can remove or reschedule some of the default curriculum material if desired to make room for these.
You can also view all material for a given grade from the Explore Books page. From there, you can open each book's profile page to view options for adding it to your curriculum.
Once your child has completed a given grade, you can use the Your Students page to move him or her to a new grade.
Your academic calendar
When creating a new grade in the Your Students page, you can specify the date you would like it to start. The course and assignment schedule will then start on your chosen date. You can edit the start date later from the Your Students page.
The default curriculum includes material year round with lighter summers for younger grades, and for ten months during high school. You can add vacations using the Vacations page to specify any periods you will be away. Your schedule will automatically move any missed material forward to accommodate the vacation.
Adding courses
Once you've decided on a grade level, use the Your Students page to add each student in your family. We'll then walk you through course selection to generate a curriculum for that grade. For each subject, you can choose the suggested course based on what is typically covered at your student's grade level, or another option from a different grade. You can learn more about each course by clicking on the course title.
You can remove courses and add new ones from the Edit Courses page. You can also use the Create Course page to create your own courses.
Curriculum materials
The Materials page contains an overview of your student's grade, and a list of all core and optional materials that will be used during the year. If you start after kindergarten, this page will also display a list of suggested additions from previous grades. This is a selection of age-appropriate books and activities from previous years that we think are too good to miss. You can use the Add To Curriculum button to add any of these you choose to your current grade.
Each course consists of a core curriculum plus a set of optional books and activities. We recommend completing the core curriculum, and including as time allows the optional items that are of most interest to your child and relevant to your family's educational goals. You can rearrange items between the core and optional categories as desired.
You can use the options next to each book or other material to change when items are scheduled, or remove them entirely. You can use the Add assignment page to add your own books and other activities to ensure a truly customized fit for your child.
Your weekly schedule
You can view a schedule of assignments for each week in the Weekly schedule page. This schedule contains all core and optional assignments for the selected week that for materials not already marked complete.
For courses, textbooks and other long-term structured materials, each assignment specifies the chapter and section that should be completed on a given day. Following the suggested pacing will result in completion of the book or course within the scheduled timeframe (usually a semester or academic year). Changing the schedule to complete a different number of daily assignments per week, or scheduling vacations, will change the time it takes to complete the material.
For chapter books and other materials where student pace is variable, each assignment suggests an amount of time but does not specify sections or page numbers to allow for a more flexible self-paced schedule.
You can drag and drop assignments to different days, and edit and delete individual assignments from the Weekly schedule page. Options to edit all of the scheduled assignments for a given book or activity can be found in the Materials page.
Daily checklist
You can view and print a checklist of assignments for each day in the Daily checklist page.
Both the daily checklist and the weekly schedule pages include checkboxes that you can use to keep track of which assignments are complete.
Exporting records
You can use the "Mark started" and "Mark complete" options next to each curriculum item to create a record of the time your child spent on each item. All curriculum items that have start or completion dates will be included in record exports.
You can export each student's records by grade and month in the Export record page of your account.
Getting help
Need more help? Please don't hesitate to reach out to us at team@greatbookshomeschool.com. We'd love to help you create a perfectly fitted educational experience for your child.