Wednesday 15 February 2012

Curriculum... eurgh...

We had unexpectedly found ourselves with some extra money. It doesn't happen often and Daddy suggested that we have a think and see if there were going to be any home-ed things that we might need. The first thing on the agenda might be a new laminater, but I wondered what a bought curriculum might look like.
So I took a look.
I spent 2 hours looking until I honestly thought my head might fall off. I looked at the Christopherus curriculum first. It looked quite nice... but would all of it really appeal to MY kids? I looked at Oak Meadows and thought straight away that it didn't look suitable for us. I looked at Enki, which looked lovely but nearly made me faint when I saw the price.
In the end we decided that, yeah it'd save me a lot of work to buy a curriculum, but it'd most likely not work. I mean, it's working at the moment because I listen to the kids. You want to do a project on Starlings? Erm... ok, we can do that. A project on Formula One? OK, we'll sort something out.
I'm not sure we could stick to any curriculum. And just because I think something looks lovely, doesn't mean the boys are going to enjoy it.
*Sigh*
Still, it has made me reconsider some of the things I had intended to do this year...

1 comment:

Big mamma frog said...

I think one of the best things about home ed is being free to follow your children's interests and not be bound by a curriculum, particularly when they are young.

We've only just started becoming more structured now my eldest is 13, but until then it was mostly project-based and child-led. There is so much available now on the internet, through books, and DVDs that you can get pretty much anything you need free or cheap.


The only thing a curriculum or ready-made resources do is save you time foraging for information. (which is why we now download some units from currclick).