Jody Cooper

Kimberly: I Love Creating my Own Curriculum

Many of my parents love homeschooling. However, Kimberly exhibits a tremendous love of curricular content. She displays a deep interest in exactly what and how their curriculum should be built and seems to find joy doing it. She continually works at refining strategies for how certain subjects should be taught and why. For example, she has ideas about teaching cursive, and spelling;

I have discovered that it is important to teach cursive, so children can read it. Once my children were proficient at reading cursive, I stopped requiring them to write it, so they forgotten most of it now.

Even though spell check is available to them, I don’t think this can “teach” spelling nor be used as an excuse not to learn to spell. I still think spelling is an important subject to learn, so we do a traditional spelling program.

 Kimberly uses some technology in her planning and she struggles with how much “teaching of technology” she should do with her kids;

 When I’m researching a new subject to teach, primarily history/science, I use Internet searches extensively to plan the curriculum I will teach. For these subjects, I use a combination of traditional textbooks, regular ‘reading’ books, worksheets printed off the Internet, videos, field trips, etc.

 If that’s where technology is headed, you don’t type like this and you text like this (demonstrates texting in the air). So, is it worth teaching something that is probably going to be an outdated skill? And so, I struggle with this, and I have run out of time. If I had excess time it would probably get taught. I don’t have excess time, I’m cutting things out that I really want to teach, so I have a feeling that typing is going to end up not being taught.

Kimberly believes reading is “number one the most important thing of any skill that if I could only teach one thing ever, I’d teach reading, and I honestly think that they would end up being fine, because once you read, you can do anything.” Writing is the second most important thing to teach. Kimberly has worked very hard at writing with her children. She didn’t know how to teach writing, especially to children who didn’t want to write. I experienced this same challenge when I tried to teach writing to fourth graders who really didn’t have anything to say. She attempted to teach it and sometimes just gave up on it for a time, while her children developed other skills, and went back to it later, a strategy more easy for homeschooling moms to use that classroom teachers would find more difficult.

Kimberly talks a lot about loving the work she does to prepare for homeschooling. She has used a formal math curriculum for years and a spelling curriculum that she plans to continue using, and explains how she approaches building her own;

I usually take bits and pieces of a lot of things. I love creating my own curriculums. I find something that I could base it on. I spend a lot of time…I like my spelling program, it works, so I stick with that, but I think that in literature and vocabulary, I love being able to tie things in together. That’s one of the things I love most about homeschooling…we tied science and literature and history and all of those things in together. And there isn’t a curriculum I found that does it in a way I like, so I just make up my own. 

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Jody Cooper

An Unschooling Curriculum?

When Sara’s phone rang, she was surprised to see it was Ryan. He was at the local community college taking his first math test of the semester. What was he doing calling her? “Mom, I don’t know what’s going on in this test,” Ryan whispers, “I don’t know anything.” Sara explains further,

 He was almost in tears. Where are you? she asked. I’m in the bathroom. For whatever reasons the teacher let him get up in the middle of the test to go to the bathroom, which was kind of surprising to Sara. He was in a complete panic, because he didn’t recognize almost anything on the test.  

 Sara was thinking that she should have coached him better. She should have prepared him for a ‘test’. His experience learning at home included no test-taking and very little formal math instruction. So, she just gave him the best advice she could think of,

So, Sweetie, just take a breath, do what you can. Do not get caught up on any problem you don’t know, just go on to the next one.  Just let go of this one. This is going to be a bad test, that’s fine. Yeah, you can fail or whatever.

So, Ryan gets the test back, his grade is 30. He went and asked the teacher if he could take a retest or do extra credit. Sara said, “To his teacher’s credit I like that he said, ‘No, actually, I’m not going to coddle students. If you bomb something, learn something from it.’”

To some, this approach to learning math might seem faulty or inadequate. However, this was exactly the plan Ryan’s mother had for him. Ryan and his siblings were not just homeschooled, they were unschooled. Sara, believed all along that when Ryan needed to learn math, that would be the best time for him to study math. He would then use it for something that mattered to him.  After badly flunking his first test, he moved on, taking the accounting test and getting an 82, but because so many people did badly, the teacher rounded up, and Ryan ended up with a 92. And then on the probability test he got a 90, and finally on the statistics test he got 102. And this is a kid who literally had almost no math background.

Unschooling philosophy discards the whole idea of curriculum. Sara believes that kids are wired to learn what they need to know when they need to know it. Therefore, no set of skills or knowledge is predetermined for unschoolers. A traditional curriculum sets forth exactly what needs to be learned and when a child should learn it. In a school setting one might argue that the knowledge and skills sets defined in a curriculum are necessary for a child to learn because they are needed to accomplish the next step in the curriculum, not because the children need to use them in their lives.

Ryan has been unschooled from second grade through twelfth. But he has set his sights on college. As Sara contemplates the collegiate journey for Ryan she admits that he has, “holes in his learning.” It is an interesting term. There is no way anyone knows everything there is to know. There are always holes in one’s learning. But the term holds meaning for many because they are referring to the learning described by a standardized curriculum and an unschooler who isn’t following any curriculum will most likely have those kinds of holes in their learning.

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Jody Cooper

Roxanne’s Curriculum – Unschooling Extremely

Roxanne identifies their schooling as extreme unschooling.

 Yeah, what else can I tell ya? We unschool – extremely…I don’t plan things for them to do or try to push them too hard in any direction.

Unschooling, by most definitions, would not include a structured curriculum, or even an unstructured one. Roxanne’s strategy of not planning things for her boys or even pushing them towards something she thinks is important reflects an unschooling philosophy. She’s not building a curriculum of things that are important to her and adjusting it for her children’s interests like many other homeschoolers.

Roxanne has both shared her distrust of the educational authorities in Harrisburg and she has explained why she and her boys believe that most textbooks are outdated before they are even published. Roxanne reports Luke saying,

People who are often writing textbooks don’t know the subject they are writing about. They are basically anybody with a college degree, gets hired on a temporary basis to put this stuff together, they may or may not have any clue about the subject, and that’s how textbooks get so stupid. The thing too though, is he also knows that anything that has been printed out is already old news…If you’ve had time to make a textbook on it, it’s too late man, unless it’s on Ancient Rome.

Such beliefs could fuel an approach to learning that discards both textbooks and learning strategies such as Common Core. Therefore, the carefully arranged and balanced curricula used by schools would find no place in an unschooling home. Roxanne’s home is like that. Below she describes different ways that her boys learn.

First of all, when John comes home for dinner the question “What did you learn at school today?” is never asked. Instead Roxanne reports far-ranging conversations that astonish her. She is usually surprised at the things her sons are interested in and have learned.

There’s constant conversation instigated by the kids about everything from world politics, the history of Rome, the Mormon faith. I mean they stun me with the vast amounts of things that interest them and how they pick it up and remember huge amounts of information and can verbally dance circles around anybody.

She explains how their learning is like following threads of information. She tells a story about how Luke learns about foxes,

They’ll read a story about foxes. Luke will start looking into more about foxes, more about domesticating foxes, how they domesticate foxes, why they domesticate foxes, what are the problems with it, what could be the benefits. Then that might make him look up another animal that was bred to become different than it was…  So, it’s like this “following threads” that take them all over the place.

 Another way their threads work is Everett wanted to read Dracula because he could tell that a lot of things he had seen were spoofs of Dracula, so he felt that everything would be better if he understood Dracula. So, he read Dracula. And then he read Frankenstein, cause he’s like well obviously you gotta read Frankenstein or you’re not gonna get it. So, the things that motivate them take them to places that I wouldn’t expect.

One of their computers broke and when it was taken to be repaired Everett paid close attention.

Our computer broke. We went to the computer store…Everything the guy did to try and retrieve the data, Everett was watching and saying, what does that keystroke do? What does that key stroke do? What are you doing now? Do you mind if I ask you everything you’re doing…and the next morning Everett said, Well I stayed up till about four or five and I really looked, and I found about 10 ways we might have been able to retrieve the data, but I don’t think any of them are going to work in this situation?

 Roxanne believes when you don’t have to get up and go to school every morning and you’re not bogged down with learning things, like a language, that you will never use, that you can specialize and become good at things you are interested in.

 Video games are also important vehicles for learning.

I would say as far as what we actually use, video games are one or our most important ways of learning, and ways of expressing what they learn. An example being the game Civilization.

 Adopting an unschooling approach to learning fosters different attitudes and behaviors. Many homeschoolers set up their learning experiences in ways similar to school. They begin school at a certain time, walk through lessons prescribed by bought curriculums or home built ones, and end school at a certain time. The closer one adheres to an unschooling approach the difference seen between schooling and life diminishes; the accepted philosophy becomes that children learn all the time. Roxanne explains how she reports the ‘’days her kids have gone to school.”

Once a year, I have to turn in a portfolio, that has a calendar that shows they went to school a hundred and eighty days…which is malarkey. So, I look at the school calendar and x off all the days they would have gone to school. There is no on or off for us. They are always learning.

 My experiences homeschooling led me to much the conclusion that Roxanne arrived at. Children start off so curious and are such good learners when following their nose. I love the idea of life-long learners, and that we can learn about all kinds of things all the time. These ideas came to me as an adult and fed not only my thoughts and ideas about my children’s learning, but my own behaviors as an adult and my attitudes towards learning.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Jody Cooper

Isabel’s Curriculum: Structured yet Informal

Money is often a concern in schooling. Public schooling is probably the cheapest. Private school is expensive. Homeschooling costs vary widely. One can spend money on a curriculum, textbooks, books, technological devices, classes, projects, field trips, and much more. Isabel believes that public schools should be excellent, and that they aren’t. She admired Waldorf educational approaches. In the beginning she would probably have chosen a private school over homeschooling if she could have afforded it. However, after homeschooling for a while she may have changed her mind.

Isabel doesn’t buy a curriculum and has used very few textbooks or structured materials. However, she does take advantage of some curricular frameworks.

 J: Do you have a curriculum you buy?

I: Nope

 I: …I do objectives that have a lot to do with what Waldorf proposes, because I do believe they have a very good understanding of development and interest of the children. So, I do need a base…I do need something structured.

When she began homeschooling Isabel used Waldorf as a frame for their curriculum, but she didn’t stick closely to it because she believes it was “very strict” and she doesn’t like that.

It was really hard to keep the kids interested in the themes and activities of that curriculum. And it was really hard for me to keep up with my own skills and professional-development necessary to be true to that curriculum.

Their schooling is very informal. She is a mom who includes what she thinks is important, but then modifies things according to her children’s interests. She describes their curriculum as,

Very, very informal. I still kind of keep the direction of it. They work on things they really enjoy, and we do kind of projects on topics of interest.

 Isabel doesn’t have money to do all the things she would like to do with her children. So, she encourages them to be independent and creative and participate in making and saving money for field trips they want to take.

So, they do everything around that. For example, it could be an animal they want to study…or it could be like the lanyard, they wanted to make money to go to the museum and we have not money…and I say well, if you wanna go to the museum you have to find a way to make money. And that’s when we work on brainstorming how we can do that.

Isabel doesn’t buy structured curricula. However, her children have used Khan Academy for math for the last three years, Matias started introduction to chemistry at Khan Academy, and Isabel always has her eye out for materials that might be interesting and useful.

J: Where do you get your materials and stuff?
I: We don’t. I mean I’m going to get a book for Luciana for math because I saw it and I really liked it. I mean it’s the life of Fred.

J: That’s a math book?

I: That’s a math book and I looked through it and I went ummm, because she needs more than I can, like she needs structure. Now for me this is a time when she needs to start learning specific things, even if they don’t come her way.

J: But you don’t want to get a math textbook?

I: No

 As Isabel’s daughter, Luciana, approaches high school, Isabel wants her to have a more structured approach to learning so that she can be successful in high school.

We are looking for a school for Luciana for next year (10th grade) because we feel that she needs a more structured schooling to be prepared to apply and attend college.

 Families that don’t use structured curriculum often become concerned as their children approach high school age and contemplate attending a brick and mortar high school.

 

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