DS7 and I don't really use a curriculum for much of anything, though we're definitely not unschoolers. We just raid the library and the Internet a lot. We sort of do eclectic, child-led unit studies (in the loosest sense of the word!), I guess. the curricula I've seen are generally too limiting for DS7. We need more flexibility than they offer. Plus I am constitutionally opposed to curriculum anyway, and always have been, even when I was teaching. How should I know what we'll be doing in March? Let's see how it goes!
And raiding the library is cheaper than most curricula, too, and added benefit!
We're starting the year with a study of origins: the Big Bang, the origins of numbers/math and the origins of language. I bought a couple of things from the Learning Company to help us, but most of our material will come from library books that we read together. He also wants to study robots and the human nervous system, and those seem to be a nice pairing, so we'll do that either at the same time or after we're through with the origins unit. We'll see how it looks.
For fiction reading, I think we're going to start the year with
Alice in Wonderland, since he requested adventure stories with people taking exciting journeys.
For math, we're going way off-road. We used Singapore last year and may come back to it, but DS7 wasn't ready to memorize his times tables (though he has a firm conceptual grasp of multiplication and was bored with it). That became a problem last year when we got to the level 3 books. We switched to doing geometry--high on concept, low on math facts--and he loved math again. Yay! So this year, my engineer DH is going to teach a unit on physics that will use concepts from calculus, algebra, geometry and I don't know what all. Hopefully, DS7 will learn his math facts along the way just out of convenience. If not, we'll get to them when it's time.
So no boxed curriculum at all. But lots of cool stuff, I hope!
