Creative Curriculum

Susan was driven to make learning interesting and sometimes strayed from the traditional path. She started homeschooling because her oldest was bored in school. He was bright and quickly finished up assignments and sat around waiting for more. Susan knew she could offer him more at home.

I used a math textbook when I homeschooled my kids, and I found a workbook with science experiments. But I always was looking for creative ways to jazz up learning. Susan seems like a woman after my own heart, but she may easily top my creative efforts. Once, I decided we were going to only study pirates for a week! And that’s what we did. It was amazing. We read Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and visited the museum that displays the originals he painted for his book. We studied the Caribbean and the history of pirates. I’m sure we must have calculated the value of plunder on Black Beard’s ship and other such mind-bending activities. However, Susan picked a topic each month, for practically all the years she has homeschooled, and molded their studies around it. They studied the moon landing, the Erie Canal, Native American mythology, the Great Lakes, Aesop’s Fables, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, physics and many other topics. Some favorite activities included Performance of the Week, where they studied a different genre of music each month and look at an example each week, electronics using Snap Circuits, mapping the journey described in Around the World in 80 Days, something with the Olympics every time they’re on, and a study of the states like when they were founded, their motto, and state birds, etc.

Susan thought a blog might be an opportunity for Ozzie to write creatively. Ozzie was all over the idea, “What would it be about? Oh Minecraft!!” Susan may suggest that today might be a write a post on your blog day,  but she doesn’t tell him what to write. She doesn’t proof read anything before he posts it. They talk a little about it, but it’s his thing. However, she likes to keep an eye on this activity because once Ozzie’s on the computer, he slips easily into watching YouTube videos of kids playing Minecraft instead of blogging about Minecraft.

In 2014 they used the book Hello World to learn Python. Susan thinks it’s important for her kids to learn computer programming,

I want them to be able to program. I think that’s important, to understand the basis of the Internet…I’d love for them to be able to make an app.

Last year Ozzie used Python to analyze wave data from the Great Lakes. Monitoring stations in the Great Lakes gather data. Ozzie learned to pull that data from buoys, organize the data, graph the data, even graph multiple lakes onto the same graph. But her daughter, Melanie, wasn’t nearly as interested in programming, so Susan took a different approach with her,

Melanie is not quite as interested in coding. I’m still looking for the right hook for her. This year we ended up reading a book called Computational Fairytales, which introduces coding concepts in a general, fairytale type story, which was the right way to do it for her.

While Susan is a teacher, she doesn’t write or use lesson plans. Each Sunday she plans out the week, writing out a schedule on paper and giving each child a daily list. Like many other parents, as her oldest approached high school, she began to feel nervous about their past endeavors,

Oh, I can’t put it into words…you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some of this and some of that and we’d have big gaping holes, and I’d be like, “Oh, why didn’t I cover that?

She embedded some structured learning into their projects. Early on she used a book teaching writing called Rip the Page. Next, she tried a writing curriculum called Think Write that introduced the essay. And finally, as her fears rattled her nerves more regularly, she purchased a classical curriculum called The Well-Trained Mind that takes a more systematic approach to history and the classics. It encompasses logic and Latin and rhetoric.

We all worry about our children’s success. No matter how much we love homeschooling, and how excited we are watching our children learn, higher education casts a deep shadow over our joy. A belief that a standardized curriculum will best serve students in treading the path of learning often calms one’s nerves. It takes courage to wander off the path.

Photo by Louisa C. on Unsplash