Planning For Next Year

One of a homeschool mom's benefits of teaching her own children is the yearly task of planning  next school year's agenda. Once you have homeschooled for a few years,  springtime includes a bouquet of book and text distributors in your  mailbox as well as mailings of deals and good buys galore. It is such a  grand time to begin envisioning your year ahead and the awesome  educational endeavors you will embark on but, it can be a little  intimidating as well. Do I go the traditional route of textbooks,  tests, and workbooks or the more flexible classical approach of "living"  books, exploration, and nature discovery? Do I listen to this  publisher who says they have just what I need or use a combination of  materials to form my children's education?

As a former schoolteacher, you would think I had the answers of what was  best for our first child and could go into the new adventure of homeschooling with determined confidence. Not necessarily so!  Just as the process of deciding which foods are best for your  child can be overwhelming, so is the task of choosing which venue one will take as a homeschooler.

Case in point: If your  child has allergies, you would want to stay away from certain foods, right?  The same can be said of the child with a short attention span.  The combination of children with 'ants in their pants', and  traditional textbooks will have both parent and child in tears more times than not!  So, in essence, a parent has to pick the  curriculum that best fits their child as a student.

My approach for our first year of homeschooling was very traditional  since I was more comfortable with that method.....and amazingly, my son  did very well with it. As I've said  before,  he is VERY active, so I was careful to stop before he started to become too  distracted. And fortunately, he has enough of a 'take charge'  personality which allowed us to get the work done in about an hour. Of course, there were those days it seemed to drag on forever, but that's in any classroom environment.

As the years have gone by and I have gotten more comfortable with taking  charge of how our children learn, my approach has become a little more  eclectic. For math and language arts, we still follow a more  traditional approach but I also like to do a lot of math in the kitchen  and nature journaling as well so that it keeps the fun in learning. After a  child learns to read, however, we give up the traditional readers and my  children absorb 'real' books, especially the classics. My daughter  enjoyed reading The Wizard of Oz and some of the Little House books in  first grade last year while my son delved into Tom Sawyer. With science  and history, I take a more classical approach and we read a lot and do  projects, maps, and timelines that revolve around what we are studying. Right now, we are reading Johnny Tremain together since we are studying  early American history and doing a lapbook (a big folder of different  fun writing and research projects about one subject) about that time  period. For science, we also do a lot of reading and also include  various projects and experiments. For writing, we practice cursive and  print with a Scripture verse that my children or I choose for that  week. I also like to include cooking, art, and foreign language once  or twice a week or incorporate them into a science or history theme.  And above all, our family and personal devotions are such a peaceful  time in our home that if I forget, my children make sure to remind me!

All in all, even though it is a big undertaking no matter what choices  you make in teaching your child, it is such a blessing to be able to  choose a curriculum that fits your child's needs and helps them become  victorious in their learning. So many times, a child failing in a program can be attributed to a curriculum that does not fit their needs or  personality. It is a wonderful accomplishment as a homeschooling parent  to begin the process of knowing your child and their needs well enough  to help them along the learning process.