Homeschool Curriculum Georgia: Choosing What to Teach Under State Law

Georgia gives homeschooling families more curriculum freedom than most states. There is no state-approved curriculum list, no requirement to use accredited materials, and no inspector who visits your home. What the law does specify is the five subjects your child must receive instruction in — and that specificity matters more than most families realize when it comes to keeping records.

Here is what Georgia requires, what it leaves open, and how to choose a curriculum that works for your family without creating compliance headaches later.

What Georgia Law Actually Requires

Under O.C.G.A. § 20-2-690(c), every home study program in Georgia must provide a "basic academic educational program" covering five subjects:

1. Reading
2. Language arts
3. Mathematics
4. Social studies
5. Science

That is the complete list. Georgia does not specify textbooks, learning standards, pacing guides, or assessments. You decide how to cover these subjects, at what depth, and through what method.

Health and physical education are not listed among the five required subjects in the statute, though many families include them. Including PE and health can strengthen a portfolio and becomes practically useful for high school transcripts where colleges expect to see a well-rounded curriculum.

The law also requires 180 days of instruction at 4.5 hours per day. Your curriculum choice should make that 4.5 hours realistic and sustainable — not something you have to stage or pad.

The Documentation Reality

The five required subjects matter beyond compliance because they are the framework for the annual written progress report — a document you are required to write for each student, each year, and retain for a minimum of three years.

The progress report must include an individualized assessment of your child's academic progress in each of the five subjects. If your curriculum does not clearly map to reading, language arts, math, social studies, and science, writing that report at the end of the year becomes an exercise in retroactive translation. Choosing a curriculum that already organizes itself around those five subjects — or one you can easily map to them — makes year-end documentation straightforward.

This is where many families using highly integrated, project-based, or classical curriculum approaches run into trouble. A history unit that also covers reading, writing, and geography touches multiple subjects simultaneously. That is fine under Georgia law — but your records and progress report need to explicitly assign those activities to the appropriate subject categories. The state requires five separate narrative assessments, not one.

Curriculum Approaches That Work in Georgia

All-in-One Curriculum Programs

Complete curriculum packages like Abeka, Sonlight, My Father's World, and Moving Beyond the Page cover all five required subjects within a single package. Each subject is clearly labeled, sequenced, and documented by the publisher. For new homeschoolers or families who want everything handled in one purchase, these programs make compliance documentation significantly easier because the subject mapping is already built in.

The tradeoff is cost (complete packages typically run $300–$800 per year) and rigidity. These programs have structured lesson plans and are designed to be followed sequentially, which does not suit every learning style.

Subject-by-Subject Approach

Many Georgia families assemble their curriculum from separate components — a dedicated math program, a separate language arts sequence, a history spine, and a science program. This is the most flexible approach and produces excellent results when families choose materials their child responds to.

Popular choices among Georgia homeschoolers include Math-U-See or Teaching Textbooks for math, All About Reading or Reading Eggs for early literacy, Story of the World for history and social studies, and Apologia or Real Science Odyssey for science.

The documentation benefit of this approach: each subject is completely separate, which makes the annual progress report by subject simple to write. The challenge is that assembly requires more research and coordination upfront.

Literature-Based Curriculum

Programs like Sonlight and Ambleside Online center the curriculum around reading living books and literature rather than textbooks. A literature-based approach naturally generates strong documentation for reading and language arts. Social studies and science require more intentional planning to ensure adequate documentation across all five required subjects.

For the annual progress report, a reading log with book titles and a brief note about what each book addressed — "American history through Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; reading comprehension and literary analysis" — is sufficient. Georgia does not require formal grades at the elementary level; narrative assessment is explicitly acceptable.

Unit Studies and Project-Based Learning

Unit studies integrate multiple subjects around a central theme. A month-long unit on ancient Egypt might cover reading (primary sources and historical texts), language arts (written reports and narrations), social studies (geography, history, culture), and science (mathematics of the pyramids, papyrus making as biology). This approach works very well for hands-on and visual learners.

The documentation challenge: you must consciously track which subjects each unit covers and record this in your attendance log and progress report. Without that tracking, an end-of-year review of your records may look like you only covered social studies for three months rather than all five required subjects. Many unit study families use a simple weekly log that lists which subjects each day's activities addressed.

Unschooling and Interest-Led Learning

Georgia law does not prohibit unschooling. A self-directed, interest-led educational approach is legal as long as the parent can demonstrate — through the annual written progress report — that the child received instruction in all five required subjects.

In practice, this requires an active translation layer. A child who spends their days cooking, coding, reading fiction, and exploring the woods is engaged in math (measuring, ratios, budgeting), language arts (reading), science (biology, ecology, chemistry), and potentially social studies (cultural history of food, for example). The parent's job is to document this mapping explicitly, not just note that "Eliza was very engaged this week."

Unschooling families often benefit more than any other group from a structured documentation template, precisely because their curriculum is the least structured.

Curriculum Planning for Different Grade Levels

K-2 (Early Elementary)

Georgia's testing requirement does not begin until the end of third grade, so there is no external pressure during the early years. Focus on phonics, early reading fluency, number sense, and oral language development. Work samples — drawings, early writing attempts, math manipulative photos — serve well as portfolio documentation. Keep a reading log from the start.

Strong early literacy programs used by Georgia families: All About Reading, Explode the Code, and Reading Eggs. For math: Math-U-See Alpha/Beta or RightStart Mathematics.

Grades 3-5 (Upper Elementary)

The end of third grade marks the first standardized testing year in Georgia. The test must be a nationally normed achievement test — Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), Stanford Achievement Test, California Achievement Test (CAT), or the Personalized Achievement Summary System (PASS) are all accepted options. Test results stay in your home portfolio; you do not submit them to the district.

Curriculum selection during this phase should produce clear, dated work samples that can demonstrate progression across the year: writing assignments that show development, math tests showing mastery of sequential concepts, science experiment logs.

Grades 6-8 (Middle School)

The portfolio should begin reflecting increased academic rigor. This is the right time to begin assigning formal letter grades if you have not already — middle school is where transcript habits form, and starting in 6th grade gives you a multi-year record to draw from when creating the high school transcript. Introduce structured chapter tests, book reports, and lab reports. These serve as natural portfolio evidence.

Grades 9-12 (High School)

High school curriculum planning in Georgia carries consequences for college admissions and state scholarship eligibility. The University System of Georgia requires all applicants to complete the 17-unit Required High School Curriculum (RHSC): 4 units of English, 4 of Math, 4 of Science, 3 of Social Studies, and 2 of a single Foreign Language.

Georgia's HOPE Scholarship for unaccredited homeschool graduates requires either a qualifying SAT/ACT score (roughly 1160 SAT for HOPE, 1200 for Zell Miller) or 30 hours of college credit with a qualifying GPA. Neither pathway is served well by a curriculum that lacks rigorous, externally verifiable coursework. AP courses, dual enrollment through the Move On When Ready (MOWR) program, and standardized test preparation should be planned intentionally starting in 9th grade — not junior year.

Documenting Your Curriculum Choices

Georgia does not require you to submit your curriculum plans to anyone, but maintaining a simple record of what programs you used and what subjects they covered makes the annual progress report much faster to write.

A one-page "curriculum overview" for each school year — listing the program, publisher, and subject for each resource used — serves as useful reference when writing the progress report. It also becomes a natural input for high school course descriptions when applying to colleges.

The Georgia Portfolio & Assessment Templates include a complete documentation framework: annual progress report templates structured around the five required subjects, an attendance log built for the 180-day/4.5-hour requirement, and high school transcript templates formatted for the Georgia Student Finance Commission's unaccredited homeschool evaluation process.

Georgia's curriculum freedom is genuine. The families who use it effectively are the ones who spend 15 minutes a week keeping records current, rather than two panicked weeks in August reconstructing a year's worth of learning before the next DOI deadline.

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