Curriculum tends to be the question homeschoolers first think of when they are starting out. It’s something we often use as a proxy for our plan for how we’re teaching and raising our kids. But let’s discuss the more foundational topics we should consider before we get to that question.
Know your “why”
It’s important to know your own “why”, not everyone else’s.
Also, write it down. Going through the process of defining “why” helps clarify it. If you have to form enough words to write down, it helps to get into specifics. Writing it down helps to refer back to when sorting through all the decisions you make in your homeschool:
- How do you spend time?
- What materials and resources do you use?
- What events do you prioritize?
If you can draw a line from <whatever the thing is> to your “why”, then it probably belongs. If not, then it may just be clutter on the schedule or on the bookshelf.
Your “why” can help ground you in why you started.
Writing it down also helps to refer back to when you get to the point of questioning yourself or you’re pondering throwing in the towel or you’re considering throwing everything out and starting over. It can help ground you in why you started.
Your “why” may shift over time as your family changes – and that’s ok
What makes your family unique?
Household rhythms
Do you have an early riser? Do you have a kid who has 25,000 words to use each day? What work schedules and errands and appointments do you have to plan around?
Ages of kids
Do you have all young ones? Ones learning to read? Ones that are old enough to be self-driven?
Season of life
Are you in newborn mode, where most of life is scheduled by a baby? Similar to that, do you have elder care responsibilities either at home, or outside the home? Are you homeschooling your first, where you can provide one-on-one attention, or do you have multiple kids of different ages? It may seem unnatural to name your season of life, but if you include this step in your planning, and you explicitly identify where you are, then you can identify the practical impacts that season has before they pop up along the way.
Kids learning styles
This is one that takes some observation. When your kids are interested in something, how do they go about learning more on the topic? Do they put their nose in a book for hours? Talk about it all the time and verbally process what they’re learning? Do they take things in from a variety of sources and write it all down and organize it themselves. Do they have to touch everything?
What are your big rocks?
You’ve heard the analogy before: to get a bunch of differently-sized rocks in a jar, you need to put the big rocks in first. It’s an imperfect analogy, but the idea is that the most important things need to be prioritized, otherwise they’ll get crowded out by less important things. Identify the important things for your family, whether that’s vacations with distant family, planting a church, grieving a loss, involving your kids in a business, or whatever. It’s also worth noting that your list of rocks may change over time and some conscious re-prioritization may be in order as things shift.
What role should you play?
To answer that, we need to ask: What is education anyway?
Let’s head back to Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary:
Noah Webster’s definition mentions the bringing up of a child – this is a picture of preparing them for adulthood. Noah Webster’s definition mentions instruction, but it also mentions discipline and hangs both on the intention to “enlighten the understanding”. That’s a lot different than the process of schooling.
There are two main takeaways from this:
- Education is so much more holistic than the list of subjects and training we often call “school”.
- In the educational environment that we’re tasked with creating, learning needs a higher priority than teaching.
So, with that backdrop, what’s our role?
We are a guide
A facilitator, enabler, encourager, a revealer of things that they don’t know exist. We’re less of a “teacher” since that implies we’re either the source of, or conduit of, knowledge. We may be in some cases, but not in all cases.
“You’re not a classroom teacher. You’re a tutor and the first thing a tutor does is finds out what the kid knows and moves at the kid’s pace.”
Steve Demme
We are a coach
Coaches develop skills. They don’t know every future game or opponent, but they help to develop skills that will be useful in those future games. We’re preparing our kids for a world that doesn’t exist yet. Even looking at formal occupations, they change over time. How many people do you know work in a field that they didn’t go to school for? Or in a field that didn’t even exist when they went to school? We know as humans we are able to learn; we are able to take what we know in one area and apply it another area. Both of these things help prepare learners for a world that doesn’t exist yet.
For another imperfect analogy, think about each of your kids as a hurricane. You know where they are right now. Based on their current interests and skills, you know a general direction that they are likely to head in, but you don’t know exactly which direction they will go, or at what speed they’ll travel. But that’s ok. Using where they’ve been, as long as they have the ability to continue to learn, they’ll take the world by storm wherever they go.
As a coach, we’re preparing our kids for a world that doesn’t exist from both an occupational standpoint, but also a knowledge processing standpoint. The amount of knowledge discovered or created each year isn’t something we can keep up with.
Learning how to learn, how to research, how to evaluate and assess information and sources of information is way more important than specific academic information or curriculum. All that to say, we are a coach preparing kids to learn what we can’t teach.
We are an example
There are many facets to being an example, but let’s mention just two:
We’re living adult life while we’re preparing our kids for adult life. So we have to ask the question: What do our kids see in us? How do they see us learn? What habits do we demonstrate? What do they observe when we interact with other adults? And kids?
On the topic of work and job shadowing, we can take our example role and pull in others. If your kids are interested in a career that you don’t have, we have the opportunity to find others who can be examples. As homeschooling parents, we have already handpicked ourselves to craft our children’s educational experience. Here we can handpick others to expand their education further. Specifically choosing adults to influence our kids isn’t an opportunity that exists in institutional schools, but with homeschooling we can take advantage of that flexibility.
“One of the many great advantages of home-based education is that children not shut up in school have a chance to see their parents and other adults work, and if they wish, as many do, to join in.”
John Holt, How Children Learn
What outcome do you want?
We all want our kids to have a “good education”. Before we dig into that, let’s address the question of learning gaps that often comes up. A learning gap is the difference between what a student was expected to learn by a certain point compared to what they actually did learn. Let’s question that mentality. As long as each child has a good baseline of skills to carry into adulthood, let’s avoid worry for 3 reasons:
- The premise of a learning gap is a one-size-fits-all model, where everyone is supposed to learn the same things, at same time and at the same rate. It’s a factory model that doesn’t work well with unique people. They have unique interests and abilities. Expecting everyone to have the same set of facts memorized isn’t just unrealistic, it’s kind of boring. It’d be like going to a dinner party where everyone has the same set of knowledge to talk about.
- When you look at curriculum and concepts like grade levels, note that everything is made up. Someone somewhere had their view of “what” and “when” and wrote it down as a standard, but that doesn’t make it a universal standard. If you can move across state lines and create a “learning gap”, that’s a factor of the artificial standard, not the child.
- Everyone, regardless of whether they are homeschooled, public schooled, private schooled, privately tutored, etc. will have learning gaps. Earlier, we saw the sheer amount of knowledge that is generated every year – it’s impossible to know a significant portion of that. Every institution or parent that adopts a curriculum makes decisions on what they want to cover in the given time they have. The opportunity cost of that is everything else that they don’t cover. In addition to that, knowledge changes. For example, curriculum used to teach that there are nine planets in our solar system and never mentioned cryptocurrency. Learning gaps are inevitable. But let’s set aside the negative concept of learning gaps and look at some positive outcomes to aim for.
While there are probably hundreds of specific desirable outcomes, let’s look at two categories and two specifics:
Abilities over specific academic knowledge
In the changing world covered earlier, we can prioritize abilities over specific academic knowledge. Overall, these would be how to learn (how to gather knowledge, assess sources, discard and re-learn knowledge, find experts). Another set of abilities are life skills – those things adults often classify as “things they didn’t teach me in school.” Hiring managers and interviewers will likely never ask your child to diagram a sentence, to name elements on the periodic table, or the age they learned to read. They want to know about skills: those relevant to the job but also fungible skills, i.e. skills that are interchangeable and useful in more than one area. Things like critical thinking and soft skills. Skills, abilities and experiences have more weight than academic knowledge.
Character traits
A lengthy list of character traits could start with persistence, integrity, humility, courage, patience, creativity, etc. Positive character traits are worth the time to develop, and vice versa, avoiding negative traits is also a good goal. Each of these may or may not come from a curriculum decision, but if they do make sure to evaluate the impact of the decision intentionally.
A solid relationship with your kids when they are grown
This outcome won’t show up on any list of goals you’ll find at an institutional school. As homeschoolers we have the unique benefit not just to see that our kids are prepared to launch as adults but that we can continue a positive relationship with them after they have launched based on the foundation built while they are growing up. If a “schooling” approach or a particular curriculum starts to impede that relationship, it’s worth reevaluating that. Just by the numbers, the time spent when kids are young in what we call K-12 is much shorter than the potential lifelong relationship that’s possible. We have time after they are grown, where we will still welcome questions and want to spend time with them to be an extended family. Even if we don’t live to see that much time, the investment we make in the relationship while they are young can still bring them benefits and good memories after we are gone.
Kid’s solid relationship with Jesus
Speaking of solid relationships, many of us would want our kids to establish their own relationship with Jesus. Why mention this in a discussion about homeschooling and curriculum? Since it’s a desired outcome with which some homeschooling decisions may interfere. That could include curriculum but could also include other things like what activities we pursue or even how much of our schedule is filled with activities. You may have heard the expression that God doesn’t have grandchildren? Each person needs their own saving relationship with Jesus.
How do you reach that outcome?
How to reach that overall outcome is the big question. A few pointers:
Know your state law
This is the starting point since compliance is important regardless of where you live. For those in Delaware, check out How To Start Homeschooling in Delaware for details on Delaware’s law and how to comply with it.
Don’t assume you need replicate “school” at home
Institutional school as we know it was designed for mass instruction. You likely don’t have 30 kids at home lined up in 6 rows of 5 where a one-size-fits-all approach is the only scalable one. You have the freedom and ability to tailor your approach to provide what each individual child needs. An example:
“…we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one—when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own.”
John Holt, How Children Learn
The same principle applies to any other skill. When we use it for something we want to do in a context that makes sense, then we not only get practice in that skill, we get good use out of it.
On the friction a school at home model could have, let’s take a reminder from Ephesians:
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4, NIV
How many school lessons did we endure as kids that could fall into the category of exasperation? We get to interact with our kids in a relationship that is more caring that a school-based teacher/student relationship. Let’s use that closeness to “bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” and to apply the home-oriented model to academic learning.
Follow your kid’s interests
As adults, we tend to have our own interests and pursue knowledge related to those. Kids can follow that same model, and as noted below, likely retain more of what they learn when it comes naturally.
Start each thing at the right time
Starting earlier isn’t always better. This is especially true of the younger ages for things like reading and basic math concepts. There is research 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 that points to kids learning things naturally later than we are used to who end up just fine and even in some cases better off than kids who were forced into formal learning earlier. When someone wants to learn something they tend to retain it more and they are more likely to keep the love of learning that they are born with.
What about curriculum?
What then shall we say about choosing a curriculum?
It’s a tool, not a boss
Whatever you choose to use, make sure to keep it in its position as a tool that you are using, not as a boss that is micromanaging you. If your child gets a concept in three worksheets, there’s no need to do ten more just because the curriculum has them.
You’re the parent
As the parent, you get to create the learning environment for your own learners in light of everything mentioned earlier.
Make sure it matches with your kids and your goals
Going back to what makes your family unique, especially your season of life and kids learning styles, make sure the methodology of what you choose matches with your kids and your goals. A traditional textbook style resource is going to look different than a project-based unit study which will differ from an interest-led unschool approach which is different from strewing. Not to mention online vs. physical variations. What you go with could be different for each subject, kid or both. If you haven’t encountered a homeschooler using the word “eclectic” yet to indicate a mix and match of styles and materials, you will.
Take a breath
Your kids are your kids. They weren’t assigned to you by mistake. You are in the best position to know them and their interests and where they could be headed in the world. Hopefully this provided some food for thought, but more than that, let this take some of the pressure off of finding the “right” curriculum.
This post was adapted from a presentation at the 2024 Delaware Home Education Convention
Footnotes:
- Webster, Noah, 1758-1843. An American Dictionary of the English Language : Intended to Exhibit, I. The Origin, Affinities and Primary Signification of English Words as Far as They Have Been Ascertained, II. The Genuine Orthography and Pronunciation of Words, According to General Usage or to Just Principles of Analogy, III. Accurate and Discriminating Definitions, with Numerous Authorities and Illustrations : to Which Is Prefixed, an Introductory Dissertation on the Origin, History, and Connection of the Languages of Western Asia and of Europe, and a Concise Grammar of the English Language : in Two Volumes. New York :S. Converse, 1828. ↩︎
- Moyer, Melinda. “Early Education Is More Demanding than Ever, and Experts Have Concerns.” New York Times, 19 Apr. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/parenting/early-childhood-education-demands.html. ↩︎
- Whitebread, David. “Too Much, Too Young: Should Schooling Start at Age 7?” New Scientist, 2013, www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029435-000-too-much-too-young-should-schooling-start-at-age-7/. ↩︎
- Liliana. “Cons of Early Childhood Education: Considerations for Parents.” Mighty Kids, 24 Jan. 2024, mightykidsacademy.com/cons-of-early-childhood-education/. ↩︎
- Semrud-Clikeman, Margaret. “Research in Brain Function and Learning.” American Psychological Association, 2021, www.apa.org/education-career/k12/brain-function. ↩︎
- Elkind, David. “Much Too Early – Education Next.” Education Next, 20 July 2006, www.educationnext.org/much-too-early/. ↩︎