The Best Homeschooling Curriculum

You can find the best homeschooling curriculum for your family. Look at your child’s needs and your families goals. Find materials that will teach to your child’s learning style. 

Today there is material that is written for homeschooling families. Some of the curriculum is written by families that have educated their own children. Most is easy to use.

Geared for Families

The best homeschooling curriculum is easy for the parent to use. Solutions to problems should be thoroughly explained.

I also like materials that can be used with multiple age ranges and abilities. This is one reason that I used a unit study approach when my children were younger. We like doing history, science, and literature together.

Non-consumable materials are also a plus. Non-consumables can save you money. Before you make copies of worksheets please check the copyright. Some venders would like you to buy a book for each child. Other companies are okay with you making copies for your family.

Spiral vs. Mastery

There are different ways to teach the same information especially in math and English.  Some products are spiral and others are mastery. With the spiral approach the child will review a concept while learning something new.

With the master approach you will teach a concept until your child understands it before moving on. If you are teaching addition your child will practice math problems until he can do the addition problems with 80% accuracy. When he knows how to add then he can move onto learning how to subtract.

Geared for the Child

The curriculum needs to be interesting for the child. They may not like history but way tolerate it if it is in story form and not just facts.

 You can also make leaning more fun when the materials used are written in the child’s learning style.

Visual Learners

Visual learners like materials that have a lot of pictures. There are some math and language arts programs that use pictures. Worksheets that involve matching terms to pictures would be good for visual learners. Flash cards would also be a good choice.

Usborne books have a lot of pictures. We have used the books for reference. There are Usborne books on almost any subject.

We also used workbooks by Milliken publishing company. The workbooks were reproducible and had colored transparencies. Most of the books are written for seventh grade to twelfth grade. Because of the pictures I used the workbooks with my younger children.

One of my son’s favorite history books is Kingfisher History Encyclopedia. Each page has lots of pictures.

For a time we used Developmental Mathematics when my son was learning addition and subtraction. The workbooks focus on individual skills. The beginning lessons have pictures. Your child can count the items and get the answer. In later lessons you need to read the words. Developmental Mathematics has workbooks for basic skills from number concepts through beginning algebra.

Graphic organizers are also good for visual learners. When I was a teacher’s aide I used Four Square by Judith S Gould and Evan Jay Gould to help children write essays. The child writes a complete topic sentence in the center box. Then he writes two more sentences about the topic. In the last box he writes how he feels about the topic.

If your curriculum does not have a lot of diagrams you could use graphic organizers to present the information to your child.

Educational videos are also good for visual learners. They can be found at public libraries, some video rental places, and the internet. Some families use YouTube. Previewing videos before showing to your child is always a good idea.

Auditory Learners

The best homeschooling curriculum for this learning style would use songs. Most of us learned the order of the ABC’s with the alphabet song that we sang when we were two or three. There are other facts that can be learned with songs.

We used a phonics tape to teach the sounds of the letters. The song began “a, a alligator, with your big mouth open wide, put an A inside.”

Your child can also learn;

• Math facts
• Grammar
• Geography and

• History facts

You can find songs online and on YouTube.

Another way to teach auditory learners is to have them listen to audio books if they are having trouble reading. Then can listen and follow along in their book. Some e-readers such as the Kindle have an audio feature.

Hands-on Learners

Some children learn best by doing. Most unit studies have hands-on projects. Some textbooks are now adding projects to their lessons.

You can also add hands-on projects for each subject. In math have your child use a manipulative to solve problems. In science do lots of experiments. For history do crafts.

One of the reasons that there are so many different materials is that we are all different. Even in the same family, children can have different needs and learning styles. Some of the curriculum that has worked in my family has not worked for someone else.

The best homeschooling curriculum is easy to use and teaches to your child’s learning style.

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