Teaching Your Own Children

I recently was contacted by several friends who plan on homeschooling their children. I have never homeschooled my own children so I couldn’t recommend any curriculum. I have had some friends who successfully homeschooled their children for all twelve years. Here are the curriculums they recommended:

Sonlight

Saxon Math

Memoria Press

Raising Little Shoots

In my special education self-contained classroom, I taught multiple grades in multiple subjects. I felt like I was homeschooling in a public school.

Most of the time I had to structure my own curriculum to fit everyone’s needs.

The best way I found to do that was what I always called “The One-Room Schoolhouse” approach and now is called Project-Based Learning (PBL).

I would create a project that dealt with current state or local issues and plan my lessons around that central theme. First, I figured out what my goal was and what I wanted the students to learn.

Then I figured out how I would be able to know if they learned the skills that I planned for them. Once I had that framework, I could build the lessons.

Using the state standards, I worked to see what instructional levels in reading and math my students were working on. This takes a few days, but it is essential to know these levels before beginning lessons. I didn’t want the students frustrated by making the lessons too hard, but I wanted to challenge them so that they weren’t bored.

After deciding on the instructional level, I could plan lessons based on the central project theme. I could incorporate reading, writing, math, science, and social studies around the main project and it would all tie together. By doing this, it will help the student learn the relevance of the skills being taught. It will make learning meaningful.

I like that the students could work at whatever level they were on to accomplish a goal. There may be several students on different levels so I would just adjust their lesson and assignment to meet their needs.

By doing this, I was able to keep students engaged and had very little discipline problems.

I reviewed a book called “Project-Based Learning Made Simple” in a previous blog post. You might find it interesting.

Do you use Project-Based Learning (PBL) and in what way? Please share.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash