31 August 2010

Putting on the Brakes

So, I had the realization last night that perhaps I'm pushing too hard on developing a curriculum **RIGHT NOW**. I've had marketability on the brain at the expense, I think, of my child's education, which should be the primary focus here.

He's four. In some ways, an advanced four, but he's four. I don't need to break my neck creating the *perfect* curriculum by next week. Let's just go with the flow for at least until January and see how it goes. I can develop curriculum later. Maybe let's wait for "kindergarten" and see how far along he is.

That said, I'm liking some of the curriculum resources that I've come across.

  • Typical Courses of Study by grade level from World Book. Tiffany and I read through the preschool and kindergarten lists last night - Isaac is definitely beyond the preschool things (with one or two exceptions) and definitely not at the kindergarten level yet. I'll probably refer to the kindergarten TCoS over the next year, but I figure we've got two years to get those done.
  • I checked out How to Write a Low-Cost/No-Cost Curriculum for Your Home-School Child (quite the title) from our library this past week. It's information-dense (and could stand new typography to open up the pages a bit), but I like how it steps you through the process of developing individualized curriculum. Again, it starts with kindergarten-level goals, so I will likely refer to it often over the next year and ease into things. First objective: determine our philosophy of education and life-long learning goals for Isaac.

For the immediate future, we'll probably stick with our geography framework - one state per week in the order they joined the union. We'll read lots of books from the library on the state (e.g., Delaware), items associated with that state (e.g., chickens, ladybugs, maybe holly), try to find some typical foods from the state (saltwater taffy, anyone?), work on reading and drawing maps, etc. Once we hammer out some broad objectives for each state (hopefully, over the holiday), I'll share them here. If I can pull in some "curriculum" ideas from my various sources, so much the better, but I'm not going to make myself crazy pushing it.

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