How I Decide What Curriculum To Use

Please note: this post may contain affiliate links. For more information please see my affiliate statement page. 

One recurring question I receive is about, considering how eclectic my selections are, how I decide which curriculum or books to use. While the only concise answer is that I follow my intuition based on a number of factors and nuances, in this blog post I will attempt to isolate the specific and individual components of my thought process in order to hopefully provide some insight!

One thing that has changed since I wrote this is that I do not stress about the amount of time curriculum takes. Since we are not in a charter school, it does not matter if we cover an entire weather unit in X number of weeks. We just keep going until we are actually done, significantly bored, or I feel that enough of the main corpus of the lesson material has been covered.

I also do not worry about how long it takes to finish a book. It took me one year to finish Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and it took me five years to finish The Closing of the American Mind. It takes the time that it takes.

Pedagogy

The first thing to know is that over the years I have read probably close to one hundred books on education, homeschooling, parenting, ECE, memoirs relating to homeschooling, and pedagogy. You can see many of my favorite such selections here. Having a sense of your homeschooling guideposts will go a long way into developing your gut feeling for selecting materials.

You can also watch youtube videos, attend webinars, and further explore specific points of pedagogy which you desire to explore further. If I had unlimited time and funding, for example, I would attend Waldorf workshops offered in person nearby to become better equipped to implement Waldorf materials.

In making selections, I think about the strengths and drawbacks of certain approaches. Classical curriculum is excellent for ensuring rigor and ensuring that various datapoints are covered. Charlotte Mason shines through in developing a love for natural history and historical fiction. Waldorf can help cultivate a sense of wonder and phenomenological thinking as well as supporting artistic work samples and main lesson books.

I like using Waldorf materials for age specific topics such as saints in second grade or Norse Mythology in fourth grade. I like Charlotte Mason historical fiction and really anything Yesterday’s Classics publishes. I like the simplicity of core ELA grammar usage and mechanics offered by Classical materials, as well as the skills built with reading comprehension and more straightforward presentation of material offered by Core Knowledge (but it can also be rather dry.)

Winners

The following curriculum I already know and love (I am an affiliate for many of these, I fell in love then became an affiliate, sharing for transparency! You can see a full list of my affiliate links on my instagram page.):

• – Memoria Press
• – Moving Beyond the Page
• – RightStart Math
• – Mr. D Math
• – Brave Writer curriculum and online classes
• – Beautiful Feet Books
• – Build Your Library
• – Bookshark
• – The CMEC
• – Ambleside Online
• – Blossom & Root
• – Christopherus Homeschool
• – Waldorfish
• – Lotus & Ivy
• – Oak Meadow
• – UC Scout
• – BYU Independent
• – Sabbath Mood
• – Saxon Math
• – Studies Weekly
• – Well Trained Mind (includes writing with ease, story of the world, etc.)
• – Yesterday’s Classics
• – Five in a Row
• – Real Science 4 Kids — it looks like these may have been updated. I am familiar with the ones linked to at HST for elementary, middle, and high school level.
• – Elemental Science

There are probably others I forgot, so I will come back and add those as I remember!

Student

Who is the student I am planning for? What are their interests? goals? What is their personality like? How do they learn best? What is missing from their education? What have they recently covered? What is the least likely to make them whine, groan, or drag their feet? What have they not yet developed that may make them whine but is worth it/necessary? What do they need to cover in the next 1-3 years? 5 years? What will they cover in high school? What forma t(print, digital, etc.) works best for them? Should I outsource this? If I do, what will that cost? Is dual enrollment an option? Are there any in person options for this? If so, what do those cost? What will the impact on our schedule be? Amount of time spent in the car? How long will it take them to read this book? Should I have them complete written work or just read the book to have read it?

Curriculum

What do the pages of the curriculum look like? Are there colorful pictures? How is it written? Is it dumbed down or conversely overly dense? Is the page completely filled with writing with little white space? How many pages is the assigned reading in general? per lesson? Is this secular? If not secular, to what extent is it religious and can I make it work? How long ago was this curriculum written? Does it contain factually inaccurate information or misstatements? Is it objective or biased in some way? If biased, what is the bias and what underlying assumptions are made? Can I reuse this with future students? How teacher intensive is this? What teaching support materials are available? Can my student do this independently? How hard will it be for me to assess if my student is on the right track? What student success support materials are available? Is this in print only or is there an online component? How long will lessons take to complete?

Books

This category will involve reflection on all of the prior sections, but is a separate consideration.

In considering which books to use I will of course consider the topics that we are trying to cover for the year. Which history topics are we covering this year? (This will be based on selections I have already made such as that we are using The CMEC for this or Memoria Press for that) How will these books fit into the curriculum selections we’ve already made. I will often use books to complement what we are already doing. So, for example, if we are doing physical science with Blossom & Root, I may want a science book on nature study or weather to rotate in on days when I don’t feel like doing physical science.

I have grown to prefer books from lists like bookshark or The CMEC because I know that it is much less likely to encounter issues with NSFW topics or other issues I may have to think about whether I want to include. I have very limited to nonexistent time to pre read materials, and I do lean onto programs that I respect.

I have increasingly come to appreciate the inherent value of older books. Aside from often having various positive character traits either implicitly or explicitly present, the advanced vocabulary in such older texts (Ambleside Online, The CMEC, Memoria Press) offer an extensive opportunity for positive growth in reading, listening, speaking, and writing for my students. This is all the more true at the high school level. Such books are directly responsible, I believe, in my oldest child having been able to tackle both Anna Karenina and Dante (complete) this school year.

I also like to look at a program like Bookshark and just loop in titles that I think are independently interesting, on a topic we haven’t covered yet, or are relevant to our current plan of study. This year, for example, we have been weaving in titles from Bookshark’s Eastern Hemisphere collection in order to supplement what we are doing. Next year we will attempt to use Bookshark as a core curriculum for history, but because my son is not as voracious of a reader as my teenagers were at his age, I suspect we will not be able to finish all of the reading within one school year.

Additionally, I like to look at book lists from Build Your Library and Brave Writer (and places like Here Wee Read or Stories of Color) for contemporary book selections and more diverse authors or titles.

Teacher Time

How much time/bandwidth do I have to commit to this? If I do not have the time, what is another way this can get accomplished? If I want my student to learn this concept, what free or low cost alternatives do we have? Can it be done independently or is this better suited to a paid synchronous or asynchronous course?

Big Picture

This encompasses all of the prior categories, but in essence at the end of the day, I am always thinking about the education that I want this particular child to receive. It involves looking at an education to match their mission. See TJED for more on that. It also involves my feelings about certain types of materials. For example, this child has not done a lot of art over the years, perhaps they should do that this year. It also involves literally looking at IOWA end of the year assessments and seeing that my students have not mastered Earth Science or punctuation, let’s focus on that more next year.

Can we find a way to do this in a group setting? Is the curriculum I am considering usable with a group? Would I have to facilitate this?

Additionally, I learn from the experiences of my older children in thinking about how things may work for the younger ones. How did XYZ curriculum or book go with that student? Was it good or bad? What was good or bad about it? (This goes for things like science curriculum and experiments. Was it a total disaster doing the experiments for that level or was it not bad– Studies Weeklies has very easy to implement simple science labs for first grade, I remember vividly, for example.) How do my younger kids factor in to decisions I make for the teens? How do my teens factor in for decisions I make for my younger kids? What else do we have going on in our schedule?

For example, Mondays we have the following zoom schedule: Mr. D Math Geometry at 9:00, Algebra I at 11:00, Pre-Calculus & Trigonometry at 1:00, SAT math bootcamp at 2:00. Why does this matter? It has to be relatively quiet during these classes, which are Live. Also, there is a very unlikely chance I will have help with the toddler from the teens on Mondays. Read this to hear more about that. Also, I try not to do any outside of the home activities on Mondays, unless absolutely necessary. Conversely, I try to leave the house as soon as possible after all of the classes end. Tuesdays one of my teenagers volunteers at the hospital and my middle son has travel baseball practice– so our schedule has to work around those anchors. And so on for the rest of the week. I believe it is very important to keep your scheduling commitments in mind when deciding on what curriculum and books to select.

The closer a student gets to graduating, the more precious time becomes and the less opportunity to make selections. What do I absolutely want my student(s) to do before they graduate from our homeschool? Do I want everyone to read Anna Karenina or only my most dedicated readers. What about The Giver? Should everyone have the same 4 science classes? What about the same math sequence?

Are there things that are not academic that I would like them to do? Are there experiences I would rather they have instead of another school subject?

Lastly, if something looks cool, I may just want to try it. Instagram is especially a source of inspiration, and occasionally Pinterest.

And that is essentially how I approach these things. Hopefully it all fits together in a coherent way and offers some guidance to those of your who have asked.

This recent post may offer additional insights.