As a recovering curriculum junkie, I guess you could say that I’ve gone from one extreme to the other. When I first began homeschooling my three children, I thought I had to have every item on the market that was targeted for homeschoolers. Now, 12 years later, I have an aversion to packaged curriculum and instead prefer ‘various resources’ in the form of books, CD’s, DVD’s, online resources and field trips. Of course that doesn’t mean that I won’t ever use a curriculum or textbook, we do on occasion make use of workbooks, like Easy Grammar, Sequential Spelling, and Life of Fred math but I’ve grown more confident and don’t always feel it’s necessary to spend the extra money.
Tomorrow we will kick off our 12th First Day of School and for the first time ever, I’ve not spent a dime on curriculum this year. I do plan to make some purchases, like Teaching Textbooks for math and Rosetta Stone for foreign language, but right now we’re going to work our way through some of the resources that I already have laying around before I buy anything else.
As you can see from our assortment of books in the picture, the kids will be learning about anything from architecture, to logic, to the Mayan culture. Though it doesn’t look like it from the mix and match of books, I can assure you that I do have a plan and can’t wait to see how it unfolds throughout the year.
So, do you have an interesting subject that you’re excited to delve into this year? What resources do you plan to use to help you teach your children?
Great line up! I know you will have a fantastic year!
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of using what you got. I hope to get there before too long. The way I figure it I mostly just have to buy for my oldest's high school years and then reuse for the rest of the crew.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing on the NOT Back-to-School blog hop.
Hi, there! Found you on the blog hop! We use Rosetta Stone Homeschool for German. It's not perfect, but it's the best thing I've found for language study.
ReplyDeleteI'm extremely excited to learn history and science with my kids--they teach me more than I teach them!
Have a great year!
Hi, from the blog hop! I'm the opposite of you: I've gone from piecing it together to using a "package," though I don't really consider it that because it's a Charlotte Mason-style (not "school-at-home" style) program so it's very creative, etc. Anyway, hope you can visit me. I'm at #183 on the hop and my curriculum post is at http://tinahollenbeck.blogspot.com/2010/08/not-back-to-school-blog-hop-curriculum.html. :^)
ReplyDeleteI'm like you we have certain goals that I want us to achieve for just the Fall season then we will move on to Winter.
ReplyDeleteI really want to do more science experiments with the kids. They have also talked about wanting to learn sign language. So we will use a lot of what we already have here at the house in regards to books and what we don't have I usually get at the library.
Have a great weekend!
My son is especially excited about learning to design video games (I found a book geared for teens) and we will work through Legos Robotics curriculum. It looks fantastic. Hopefully, it will deliver. We will also cover basic economics (8th grade).
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