How does one choose a curriculum to use once you have decided to homeschool?
Ask any or every veteran homeschooler and they will tell you the same thing – What are your goals?
Do you want an academically rigorous curriculum to push your gifted child to his limits? Or do you want to focus on heart training? Or perhaps you want your child to be skilled in IT or be a missionary? All these will affect your choice of curriculum.
I would strongly recommend that you list out your goals for your children with your dh and then read about all the different styles of homeschooling methods. Then pray and ask God what to choose.
I liked these books put up by Love To Learn: Love to Learn! Homeschool Handbook and Homeschool Startup Kit. It provided an overview to start me off.
Another very fast and easy (tho at times overwhelming!) way of finding out more about homeschooling and the various curriculum available is to google for it! Just type in keywords like “homeschool” and “curriculum” and lots of stuff will pop up on your screen and you can slowly pore through them.
There’s no short cut way when you want to choose your curriculum. You need to do your research and you need to be prepared to make mistakes Yes, you read that correctly.
Even after putting in hours and hours of research, you will still make mistakes. Why? A curriculum may have the greatest reviews but you and your family are unique. What works for thousands of people may just not work for you. Still, you will want to know what others are saying about the curriculum you have your eye on. This is where Google is very helpful.
To share, I was sold on Sonlight. Read its “Is Sonlight Curriculum Right for You?” article and agreed with every point listed. And yet, when it came and I used it on my children, they were totally uninterested. What went wrong? I honestly don’t know. But it just showed me that I had underestimated my knowledge of my own children! Lol!
So I went back to more research and reading and talking to other homeschool mums (mostly from the US as I didn’t know any local homeschool mum yet). As I shared before in my other post on Homeschooling, we then went with BJU for 2 years. But now we have chosen to use Student of the Word*. Why?
UPDATE: It is with sadness that I discovered that Student of the Word no longer exists.
As I got into the swing of homeschooling the children, the Lord began to impress upon me the question – how are the goals for our children being met in our homeschool? We say we want our children to have a heart for Christ and to know Him and to serve Him. But the Bible, God’s Word, was just one of the many sujects to be tackled daily. Just like Maths and English. This began to bug me and I began to search out curricula that will gel with our goals. (*)
To cut a long story short we settled on SOW because it uses the Bible as the centre of our homeschool. SOW uses the Bible as it’s “heart”. It is a bible-based curriculum. Go to the website and download its free brochure and read it in detail. Suffice to say, we have been very pleased with it. It is a whole new way of learning and teaching! But once we got the hang of it, we love it!
We especially love it because all of us are studying God’s Word every day. Yes, the whole family is learning how to study the Bible at the same time and we are all always on the same page!
As you choose your curriculum, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. But I would strongly advise not switching from one curriculum to the next every year or so. Sometimes, persistence is what’s needed to make it work for you. Other times, you may just need to take a short break from school and deal with attitude problems.
(*) Don’t get me wrong. BJU ‘s Bible Curriculum is great! I love it but it still treated the Bible as a subject. Something we did not want. We wanted the Bible to be a big part of our lives and homeschool.