If you are following a traditional school year or have a schedule unique to your family, the half-way mark is a fair time to look at your curriculum choices. What do we like? What is not working for us? It is not practical to give up on something after a few weeks. You really have to give a curriculum more time before you determine if you will continue with a program. It is very likely you will find that a supplement will make the material fit your child and your family much better without tossing it out completely.
You can approach the curriculum assessment process casually. Talk with the kids. Look back on the day to day using a certain math program or a particular grammar option. Set anything that was a hit aside as the continue-to-use-as-is pile. Any programs that were ok, not especially a hit, but not a miss either, in another pile. Anything that was a drag to get through, involved tears, and just didn’t fit your child or your teaching style in another pile. These are the misses.
Take a moment to recognize that despite your curriculum research on the front end, misses happen. You don’t know what you don’t know. In other words, you often have to try a program to know if it works for you.
That said, let’s look closer at that middle pile. These are things that could be a hit if they just had a little something extra to them.
The link below is to a handout for a consultant workshop called “Supplementing for Success” that can take you through the process of filling in that something extra. You may simply need a supplement to the program to make it fit your child. Curriculum is rarely a perfect fit right out of the box. After all, part of homeschooling is not wanting to be put into a one-size-fits-all situation. It is normal to find a curriculum that is about 80% perfect for your learner, and for you to adapt the remaining 20% or so to fit your learner and your homeschool.
With that in mind, print the handout, answer the questions thoughtfully, and determine if you can supplement the materials in your middle pile for the rest of the year. At the end of the year, assess your curriculum again. Decide what you want to continue with and what you will change. Using the handout, you now know what to look for if you do choose to change your curriculum.
You can always call our friendly and FREE curriculum consultants to help you wade through the supplemental choices. If you don’t already have one, ask for our Enrichment & Resource catalog or download a digital copy. It is full of items you can use to customize your at-home learning, organized by subject area. ~ Sara
Supplementing for Success Handout
Free handout offers an assessment worksheet in four main subjects: Math, ELA, Science, and Social Studies. Plus it offers suggestions in each subject to enhance your current curriculum.
