When you buy new homeschool curriculum, how do you know what you should buy? This all depends on how we understand what an education is anyway. When you buy new homeschool curriculum, here are five suggestions for you. 🎧 Listen to the podcast episode above, or watch the video below. https://youtu.be/yweTuimuNdk You might also be wondering… How to Start Homeschooling Confidently in Year 1 how to choose the best curriculum for your homeschool What is an education anyway? Is there an art and a science to an education? How to Choose Homeschool Writing Activities for Any Kid How to Deschool 101: Embrace Freedom and Individualization how to do homeschool science in a child-directed way choosing the right homeschool curriculum What’s the connection between self-directed learning & free play? “Education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” — Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element What Does It Mean to Buy New Homeschool Curriculum Anyway? What better place to learn than a home environment? And if this is education, then the hunt for the perfect curriculum will not be required. And in my experience, finding that perfect curriculum won’t happen. It will be as elusive as the Rosetta Stone. (Wait, we saw the Rosetta Stone in a London museum in 2012.) Okay, it’ll be as elusive as my attempt to write this simile. So How Do You Decide When You Buy New Homeschool Curriculum? Many curricula exist, but a perfect curriculum does not. One can learn snippets of information from textbooks, Wikipedia, biographies and memoirs, experiments and observation, apprenticeship positions and play, and solitude and within big large groups. But a perfect curriculum, you’re not going to find it. 1. First of all, what IS curriculum? Perhaps that question is goofy to you — if so, you may move on and ignore it. But for those who ask, what constitutes curriculum? Anything someone learns from. Buying New Homeschool Curriculum? First, Look Around You Which, as you know, can be a whole lotta possibilities: I see it in a Wii system when my child learns hand-eye coordination playing Wii tennis. I see it in a tennis racket when my child learns the game in real-time. I see it on a chessboard when my child learns strategy. I see it in a book, obviously. I see it in an Usborne-internet linked book, a historical narrative like To Kill a Mockingbird or Jan Hudson’s book, Sweetgrass, a fun poetry book by Shel Silverstein, a chemistry textbook, graphic novels, an atlas, or any book whatsoever, yes, whatsoever. I see it in my child’s Mac laptop when my daughter edits and creates videos for her YouTube channel. I see it in the daily use of math workbooks, using a calculator for play, using measuring cups in the kitchen, or doing word problems, calculating tax and tips at a restaurant. I see it in a can of paint when my child decides to paint over her childhood favorite, fuchsia walls for a teenage white. I see it in a measuring tape, hammer, and circular saw when my son and his dad build a goat barn. I see it in games, like Professor Noggins, Scrabble, Pictionary, Scattegories, Monopoly, Chutes & Ladders, math dice, or any of the one bazillion games we have in our family room. I see it in the arts and crafts closet when a child learns to draw with Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad or the girls start their own slime business online or they’re into creating beaded friendship bracelets. I see it on the internet when my son researches the purpose and value of democracy as his dad enters politics. The Curriculum Is Your Child — And It’s Everywhere I see it in Kiwico builds where I end up with a homemade pencil sharpener, ring light, ping pong ball spitter outer, and a date and time flipper. I see it in a guitar when my daughter decides she’s done with violin lessons and wants to learn Taylor Swift songs. I see it when the entire family, except me, memorizes the entire soundtrack of Something Rotten, Hamilton, or any other Broadway musical known to my husband (which is all of them). I see it in the hours the kids while away caring for the Alpine and Nubian goats, the barnyard chickens, the kitties, and the great pyr. And Then There’s the World Outside Our Door… I see it in unfinished NaNoWriMo novellas written every November. I see it in long discussions about politics, discrimination, black lives matter, abortion, human life, women’s rights, patriarchy, democracy, war, and the power of a listening, non-violent communicating ear, an empathetic heart, and a will to pursue peace over being right. I see it in writing contest submissions or weekly published blog posts by the girls when we travel or when they want to make their way through Julia Child’s recipes. I see it when the kids are making mud patties in the backyard under the semi-arid Canadian sun. And I most certainly see it literally any time we leave our home, whether we chat with the post office clerk in our town or take five plane flights into rural Africa for six weeks, a Cessna flight to the Arctic Ocean, or attend a Chicago Cub game at Fenway Park where my son and husband run the bases. The curriculum is everywhere. And once you see it that way, buying new homeschool curriculum becomes less about finding the perfect box and more about choosing tools that fit the child already in front of you. Which brings us to suggestion two. 2. When you buy new homeschool curriculum, choose a curriculum for a specific child. You’re choosing to educate a child, not an anonymous roomful of children. You are choosing to educate a child, not USE curriculum. Keep the child in mind. Because halfway through the study season, your child might get bored with the curriculum. That’s okay (ps so might you). You also may have learned that you bought a whole bunch of stuff that you like, but your child does not. Lesson learned: you’ll continue to learn about how she learns. Your starting point should be your child. That starting point gets clearer when you slow down and actually watch how your child moves through their day — which is exactly what suggestion three is about. 3. Observe How They Learn Before You Buy New Homeschool Curriculum Pay attention to how they approach their learning when you buy new homeschool curriculum. Does your child prefer reading on her own? Reading with you? Completing workbook pages? Working together with you? Working with others at the co-op? Does she prefer games? You might discover that your child does not prefer to be self-directed. Or you find she never wants direction at all. We learn many things about our children and how they learn, too. Just as we learned, there is no textbook for parenting, there’s no textbook for homeschooling. (Okay, actually, there are, but they weren’t written for your child.) Feeling like you’ve observed everything and you’re still not sure what’s working? That’s exactly what the Aligned Homeschool Reset Session is for. It’s a free 30-minute call where we look at what’s actually going on underneath the decisions you keep second-guessing — not which curriculum you’re using, but what’s driving the search in the first place. → Book Your Free Aligned Homeschool Reset Session Book your free Aligned Homeschool Reset Session I help homeschool moms release pressure, edit expectations, and make small, intentional shifts that lead to a more confident and connected homeschool life. Book a Free Aligned Homeschool Reset 4. Let Their Interests Guide You When You Buy New Homeschool Curriculum Perhaps he’s really interested in dinosaurs. Could you add and subtract dinosaurs? Could you read about dinosaurs? Does he like to draw? Would he like to paper-mache dinosaurs? (Ha, good luck cleaning that up.) Do you like to bake? Shape salty pretzels into dinosaur shapes. Unit studies of nearly every topic are easy to find. Incorporate their interests, and they’ll engage more closely. (Just check Pinterest for ideas.) Remember that your commitment is to your child, not to the curriculum: does the curriculum serve your child? Child-led learning is a useful way to determine your new homeschool curriculum choice. And once you’ve followed their interests for a while, you’ll also notice something funny: the budget question sorts itself out pretty naturally. Which is a good segue into our final suggestion. 5. Spend Freely When You Buy New Homeschool Curriculum — And Don’t Feel Guilty I know there’s a library around the corner, there is a roomful of boxes with the curriculum I purchased in my early years of homeschooling, and there are more online resources than I’ll ever need. Maybe the kids are tired of reading our Apologia Aquatic book, and they want to pursue a little anatomy. We can do that, and later on, we can go back to it. So if we don’t spend the money on curriculum, resources, or books, we don’t feel compelled to use them all. Hence, the handy library benefit. You can just return it if you don’t like it. When we deschool our homeschools, we instill more freedom, individualization, and purpose in our homeschools (& lives). I love sifting through books and curricula, games, and tables of homeschool offerings. For the few years our kids are with us, we’ll personalize an education and build on their individual talents. And we’ll try, just try, to choose the best curriculum for them. Every time you buy new homeschool curriculum, give yourself permission to experiment. Are You Just Starting Out? Start Here. If you’re in your first year and feeling the weight of all these decisions, you don’t have t
