Spunky Homeschool had a post recently about making curriculumn choices and I’ve been thinking about it ever since it went up. I’ve been thinking about curriculumn choices though almost non-stop for a year!
When we made the decision to homeschool last year in April I had absolutely NO idea what we were going to do. Making curriculumn choices is difficult but it felt even more difficult for me because my daughter was moving to 9th grade and that seemed really daunting!
I got lucky because our local homeschool fair just happened to be the week after we made our decision. This gave me a huge opportunity to explore what was out in the “mainstream” of homeschooling and get my hands on what everyone in the blogosphere and on message boards was talking about. It’s difficult to really know what curriculumn is like just by hearing people you don’t know review it, ya know?
Being a non-Christian family (well at least Michelle and I are non-Christian), it seemed even more difficult to choose. I’m not anti Christianity and a little Bible tossed into core curriculumn doesn’t bug me a bit. Too much though just isn’t for me and it certainly isn’t for Michelle.
So, I bought a couple of workbooks for “classics” that Michelle wanted to read – Frankenstein and To Kill a Mockingbird. These workbooks contained religious exercises and discussion questions alongside “core” exercises and discussions. We just read through those and pondered them together but didn’t actually “do them” in the way we did the “core” stuff. That worked great for us and we didn’t turn up our noses at that type of curriculumn when we attended this year’s homeschool fair. We were actually disappointed not to find more of the type of workbooks we purchased last year.
I couldn’t find a science curriculumn I liked so we wound up using FLVS for science and for math and then wound up using it for Algebra and a Webmasters class as well. Great experiences and we’re signed up for another math, science and Spanish class for next year too.
I’m looking forward to using the Writers Inc/Write Source books next year and an interesting “Daily Religion” type book for journal writing everyday that TW picked up at BN earlier this month.
TW also picked up a language through memorization poetry thingy that we started with all of the kids a few weeks ago. I’m not 100% sure we’ll be successful, we’re not good at following through with that sort of thing, but I’d like us to really give it a shot. Hopefully we’ll get into a routine with it and the planning of the poetry parties suggested upon completion of each module will encourage us all to keep moving through it.
It looks like we’re going to play around with the Apologia Around the World in 180 Days workbook for Social Studies along with the current events that we both really prefer over bland American and World History offerings.
We’re still pondering the list of literature to read for next year but I’m not feeling quite so stressed now that I’ve sat down and sorted it all out in my head and written about it here. Curriculumn choices are STRESSFUL!