Choosing a Curriculum

My husband works non-traditional days and hours, so we homeschool non-traditional days and hours! I love having a schedule and routine, but we don’t. Keeping flexible is a challenge for me, so his work schedule has forced me to be more flexible. That’s probably a good thing, because otherwise, I would no doubt have become very rigid by now.

So because of DH’s work schedule, (and because we live in Florida and most of our family live in the mid-west where it is cold and snowy from October to May, which translates to “let’s go south where it is warmer”, we have a steady stream of family visiting during the school-year and we too much like to play hooky from school with family in town), we school year-round.

After a one-month break, last week we started back to school. It never goes as smoothly in real life as it does on paper:( This week, we made some modifications in the plan and yesterday went fairly well.

My 14 year old daughter started high school and my 6 year old son started first grade this year.

Homeschooling has changed a lot in 16 years. We can go out of the house during school hours! When I first started homeschooling my 2 oldest, way back in 1992, we could not go out of the house without a neighbor calling the authorities on us. When my husband told some people he worked with that I was homeschooling the kids, they said, “that’s not legal!”. Well, it WAS legal, but not many people knew it then. If we dared to go into a store during school-hours, the check-out clerks were sure to question the kids about why they weren’t in school.

However, we did not have the abundance of resources and options for schooling. I remember every night, after the kids were in bed, grading their math papers and then making up new problems for the next day. I hand-wrote each problem on notebook paper, based on what I thought they needed to work on. There was not a teacher’s manual or answer sheet. I just had a book with guidelines of what types of problems they should be learning at this level, and I would make a sheet of about 20 problems for each of the kids every day. They truly got a personalized education!

Now, we have so many math books to choose from that it overwhelms new-comers. “How do I know WHICH math program to use?!” Years ago, when I was stressing over such choices, my husband said, well if they were in school, they’d just use what the teacher had for them, they wouldn’t have a choice. So, I thought to myself, well, I’m the teacher, so from then on, I started making my decisions based on what works for ME!

Selfish, I know, but it works. It’s sort of like the old saying, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!”. If a homeschooling mom is not happy using a program, then she’s probably not going to use it, even if it is the latest, greatest thing that suits that particular child’s learning style.

Cathy Duffy has a great website and book which has helped me so many times, to be able to narrow down the choices and figure out what works best for ME! I’m a much happier homeschool mom for it.