Choosing Homeschool Curricula

2 Important Questions

The great thing about choosing homeschool curricula is that there are so many options today. The unfortuante thing is that there are so many options today. True story. LOL! You can get caught up in the endless search for the perfect curriculum for each one of your children for every different subject. It can wear a parent out! Not every parent has this problem, but if you happen have a child that tends to learn a little differently or seems to struggle in a certain area, you may end up in this place. Hopefully the following information will help steer you in the right direction, and help you make some good decisions for your family.

I will start with some things you might want to consider when choosing curriculum for you homeschool.

• How much do you want to teach?
• How long (years) will you be homeschooling your children?

Even if your plan or vision isn’t perfectly clear, you should still have a rough idea about these 2 things.

How Much Do You Want to Teach?

By this, I am referring to how many subjects you will personally be teaching your children and how much time you have or are willing to give each day to this task. If you are a full-time stay-at-home parent with no outside career or job then you probably have more time to devote to the actual teaching than someone who is homeschooling and also working a full-time job outside of the home. If you are running a business out of your home or have an elderly parent you are taking care of you may not have as much time to devote to the actual teaching either.

The choices of curriculum range from having your children fully online watching a teacher in a classroom all the way to you (the parent) being the one teaching every subject to every child. There are a ton of options in between as well.

If you are a working parent beginning to homeschool, an online option may be your choice. There are Christian based options and public-school options. These can both be utilized as full school curriculum, or you can pick and choose only certain subjects. Our family utilized the online public school system in our state for Driver’s Education for all our children. A few of them also took some electives through this same system. It was completely free, so we took advantage of it.

If you are a parent who is home full-time and want to be the one teaching everything, you have even more options. I was the sole teacher in our homeschool until at least the middle school years. Once my children were in 6th grade, and could handle being more independent, they started to take some online courses. They weren’t enrolled in live classes at that point. The online courses they took mostly consisted of reading material and/or watching videos and completing assignments. 

I would not recommend having younger children sit on a computer all day to do their schoolwork if it can be helped. A child in kindergarten through 2nd grade usually wouldn’t need any more than a couple of hours at the most to complete all their daily schoolwork. It really doesn’t take long at all. They should spend most of their day running around outside in the sunlight and fresh air and not staring at a teacher in a classroom online.

How long you will be homeschooling?

This is important, because If your children will eventually be back in school at some point then you will need to make sure that their school curriculum follows the same course of study as the public or private school they will attend in the future. Homeschooling allows for a lot of flexibility in this area, but you do not want your children to be behind or out of place when they go back to school. For example, my youngest son did his high school math starting in 8th grade. He took algebra 1 first, followed by algebra 2, then he took geometry. In a school setting, the usual order would be algebra 1, geometry, then algebra 2.

Most traditional curriculum publishers have courses of study that match very closely to what the public or private schools teach, so this would be a good option if your children will attend school in the future. By traditional, I am referring to curriculum that was originally published to be used in private or public schools. Many of these have been adapted to be used as homeschool materials now, but they still teach the traditional subjects in the traditional order.

It’s important to keep in mind that homeschooling doesn’t have to be school at home. You don’t have to keep a strict 8am to 3pm schedule. I can’t ever remember a day when school lasted that long even when I was homeschooling all 4 of my children. Actually, we did have days that lasted that long, but only when there was an all- day field trip involved.

Consider your time and their educational path, and that should help you narrow down the choices of curriculum.

In my next post, I will go a little deeper into the topic of homeschool curricula and offer some examples with links, so you can start looking through some of the amazing teaching materials available to homeschoolers today.

Let me know if this has been a help to you or if you have any questions about homeschooling.

You can leave a comment or email me at Mary@whatabouthomeschooling.com

“…And the sweetness of the lips increaseth learning.”

~Proverbs 16:21