Our Chosen Curriculum

For those you of you not too familiar with home schooling and the rules and regulations in place for it, the fact is that it differs greatly state by state.  In some states you have to be associated with a school district and follow their chosen curriculum and check in with a supervising teacher often.  In other states you can choose your own curriculum but need to take standardized tests each year.  In some states the parent needs to have a certain level of education and in other states there are no educational requirements for the parents.  Welcome to Texas, truly the land of the free.  In Texas a home school is considered a private school out of your home and as private schools are not monitored neither is a home school.  All you need to do in Texas is write a letter of withdrawel from your current school district(if your children had previously attended school) stating that you intend to home school and that is it.  A school district or CPS could come to check up at some point if they felt they needed to but in that case you would only need to show that you are teaching with a bonafide curriculum, that is in visual form and that covers the subjects of math, reading, grammar, spelling and good citizenship.  This leaves the options for which curriculum you choose and how you choose to structure your school wide open. 

Once we had learned this information it was great to have many choices of how we wanted to do things and what curriculum we wanted to choose, but it was also a bit overwhelming as there is so much out there.  We decided to turn to advice from others who had traveled this path before.  We contacted our friends Jessica, Jamie, Neely, Heather and Janelle all of whom home school their children.  I joined online groups of home school parents and I checked out numerous books from the library to read.  All of this really helped us narrow down what we were looking for and what we thought would work best for our family. 

We found that of the many options for home school curriculum, they can be divided into just a few categories of basic types of curriculum.  I won't go into all the different kinds here as my descriptions of them wouldn't be the best and it may get long, but in the end we decided that a unit study curriculum sounded like it would be a wonderful fit for our family.  The basic idea behind a unit study curriculum is that there will one main topic that is the basis of all the study for almost all the subjects for 4-6 weeks and then you move onto another main topic for another 4-6 weeks and so on.  So, if the unit was the Solar System, it would be studied for say 6 weeks.  It wouldn't only be studied in terms of science though.  In social studies you would also learn about he history of people who have studied the stars and planets, in writing you would write stories or research facts about it to write about, in social studies you would map the universe, in math you would look at distances, etc.  The wonderful thing about this sort of study is that kids can get excited about and fully explore one subject in so many different ways.  Another advantage to it is that with kids of multiple grade levels you can teach one main lesson and then branch off into activities that are tailored for each grade level. 

After looking through many different unit study curriculum options online, we decided to go with one called The Weaver Unit Studies by Alpha and Omega Publications.  We had decided early on that we wanted our curriculum to be Christian based and this unit study was.  It covers the Bible, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, History, Art and Field Trips.  Then we got the spelling, handwriting and grammar programs that go along with it.  It is so much fun and so hands on the kids are loving it.  They are learning a lot but not having to sit and learn it all doing worksheets all day.  They get to get up and do so much of it and they retain it a lot better that way as well!

You may be wondering where math fits in with this all.  Although there is a bit of applied math available in the unit studies, in order for the kids to really be able to learn all they need in math we purchased a separate math curriculum.  We researched quite a few and went with Singapore Math which is great because it gives me a home educators manual for ideas on how to teach the lessons, there is a text book and there is a work book.  We also use tons of things for it such as base 10 blocks, multi-link cubes, a balance, counters, cards and so much more so it is fairly hands on too for the lessons and then the workbook helps to see if they got what was taught.

Okay, so I know that was all long, but I figured letting you all have a basic understanding of what our curriculum is and how we do things would set the foundation for future posts on our units.  To end this I will post a few pictures of our school room.  A couple of notes on it is that I know it is very small, that is what you get in the tiny house we are renting until we can buy in Texas, haha.  Also, although we do have a school room and we do a lot of work in it, there is also a lot of work done outside of it whether it be outdoors, on field trips, in other rooms in the house, etc.  That is the wonderful thing about homeschooling is the kids can learn wherever they learn best!