Choosing a Home school Curriculum: Part 1

"Hi, I’m Sharon Wilharm on behalf of ExpertVillage.com. And I’d like to talk about selecting a home school curriculum. Now the best way to select a curriculum is to actually look at it and in order to do this you really need to find a nearby home school curriculum store so that you can look at the materials, you can put it in your hands and see if it’s going to work for you. If you can’t do that you need to find a home school resource catalog, there are many online that you can order for free or you can just go to their websites and they’ll give you reviews of the different products. Now there are basically two types of home school curriculums, there are which will hold your hand and help you do everything and then there are those that are more independent. The hand holding type tells you exactly what to do, it will include the materials that you need to read, it will have the worksheets, the tests, the answer keys, and it will even tell you what to say when you’re teaching. Examples of these are Abecca or Bob Jones or some of the dvd or video curriculums. The disadvantages of these is that they can be rather expensive and actually that’s probably the worst, it could get kind of boring a little bit if you like to be more adventurous you might feel stifled. The independent will give you guidelines and then you decide where to go from them. An example is unit studies such as patchwork primers and these will give you a guideline to follow. You select the books from the library or books that you already have and then you teach it in the way that you see fit. You can make up your own worksheets or tests, or you may decide that you don’t need worksheets or tests. It’s all up to you and the advantage is this is going to be much less expensive, but it’s going to require more work and a little bit more time on the part of the teacher."