Monday, March 3, 2014

V is for Variety: Choosing Curriculum to keep interest in your homeschool #abcblogging

When picking curriculum one thing I recommend is thinking about what will keep your kid's interest.  If they are not big fans of reading then a heavy literature based curriculum will not be a good fit.  They will be overwhelmed with all the reading.  If they are hands on then a science curriculum lacking experiments will leave them bored. 

So what do you do?  I suggest figuring out their learning styles.  There are 3:  visual,Kinesthetic and auditory.  You can find a very detailed post on that on the HSLDA's website.  Then pick things that work for your child. 

For my oldest two kids they like to learn in a variety of ways.  We have found that for science they enjoy hands on learning so Apologia has been a good fit.  For grammar they prefer to just get it done so workbook style like Easy Grammar and Daily Grams are perfect. 

Math is a subject that works well on the computer and teaching textbooks has been a lifesaver for us.  History we do together and I read aloud the book.  I think this might be our favorite time of day!

Do you notice anything about our curriculum choices?  There are a variety of different companies we use for all of our subjects.  This too also keeps interest.  We like to switch things up further with a Unit Study or a Lapbook occasionally too.  To me it is important to keep the interest up by using many tools. 

One tip I'd like to close with.  While we use a bunch of different companies for our curriculum we don't jump a lot from year to year.  We have used Teaching Textbooks for the last two years for math and will continue on with that - this way the kids are not confused by jumps in the scope/sequence with individual learning.  I'm not saying we will never switch things up, but we will only do so with careful consideration so that we are sure they are learning all they need to. 


So, how do you keep variety in your homeschool curriculum?

This post is part of blogging through the alphabet with benandme.com.


1 comment:

  1. we go the delight-directed well, and it makes all the differnence in the world! thanks for linking up with me!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for leaving a comment!!