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 So, is it worth teaching something that is probably going to be an outdated skill?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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Off the Beaten Track 