When you buy new homeschool curriculum, how do you know what you should buy?
This all depends on how we understand what an education is anyway.
“…Education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”
Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element
If this is education, then the hunt for the perfect curriculum will not be required.
And in my experience, finding that perfect curriculum will be as elusive as the Rosetta Stone. (Wait, I saw the Rosetta Stone in a London museum. Okay, it’ll be as elusive as my attempt to write this simile.) So how do we decide how to buy new homeschool curriculum?
Much curriculum exists. A perfect curriculum does not.
One can learn snippets of information from…
- textbooks,
- Wikipedia,
- biographies and memoirs,
- experiments and observation,
- apprenticeship positions
- creativity is enabled by solitude, mixed with play.
But a perfect curriculum, you’re not going to find it.
When you buy new homeschool curriculum, choose a curriculum for a specific child.
You’re choosing to educate a child, not an anonymous roomful of children.
Keep the child in mind. Because halfway through the study season, your child might get bored with the curriculum. That’s okay. (ps so might you). That’s okay too. You also may have learned that you bought a whole bunch of stuff that you like, but your child does not.
Lesson learned: you’ll continue to learn about how she learns. Your starting point should be your child.
Observe their learning tendencies.
Pay attention to how they approach their learning when you buy new homeschool curriculum
- Does your child prefer reading on her own?
- Reading with you?
- Completing workbook pages?
- Working together with you?
- Working with others at the co-op?
- Does she prefer games?
- You might discover that your child does not prefer to be self-directed.
- Or you find she never wants direction at all.
We learn many things about our children and how they learn too.
Just as we learned there is no textbook for parenting, there’s no textbook for homeschooling. (Okay, actually, there are, but they weren’t written for your child.)
What are your child’s interests?
Perhaps he’s really interested in dinosaurs.
- Could you add and subtract dinosaurs?
- Could you read about dinosaurs?
- Does he like to draw?
- Would he like to paper mache dinosaurs? (Ha, good luck cleaning that up.)
- Do you like to bake? Shape salty pretzels into dinosaur shapes.
Unit studies of nearly every topic are easy to find. Incorporate their interests, and they’ll engage more closely. (Just check Pinterest for ideas).
Child-led learning is a useful way to determine your new homeschool curriculum choice.
Spend a lot of money, waste a lot of money.
I know there’s a library around the corner, there is a roomful of boxes with the curriculum I purchased in my early years of homeschooling, and there are more online resources than I’ll ever need. Maybe the kids are tired of reading our Apologia Aquatic book, and they want to pursue a little anatomy. We can do that, and later on, we can go back to it.
When we deschool our homeschools, we instill more freedom, individualization, and purpose in our homeschools (& lives).
I love sifting through books and curricula, games, and tables of homeschool offerings. For the few years our kids are with us, we’ll personalize an education, help them build achievement, and build on their individual talents.
And we’ll try, just try, to choose the best curriculum for them.
People also ask…
- How do I capture my charmed homeschool?
- What is an education anyway?
- Is there an art and a science to an education?
- What you want to know about unschooling: 5 ways to move toward it in your homeschool
- A simple guide to where you can homeschool without a homeschool room
- What’s the connection between self-directed learning & free-play?
Why did it not occur to me that you would be at the conference?! You may get a big hug from me when I see you!
Yeah!!
When we started homeschooling last year, I spent ages searching for the best curriculum. It was an excruciating process, and although I liked parts of many of them, there was no complete curriculum which was a good fit for us. Eventually I just made my own out of bits and pieces.
Exactly! Cheaper that way too. Is it tricky to find things overseas?
The overwhelming majority of stuff comes from the U.S. Almost everything which refers to history, climate or wildlife has very little context to our life here in Australia.