Unless it is Teaching Textbooks! That curriculum was the only one that was used by all of my children with different skill levels and struggles.
God did not create robots. He did not give us the ability to clone our kids. Each one is a different combination of the genetics that are brought together by that child’s mom and dad. There are also the God-given skills and gifts. These are given to help your child make an impact in the word for His kingdom. Education is not, when it is done well, a copy and paste situation.
I am a textbook learner. Give me a giant book with lots of black & white words in it; I will read it all and I will learn what is in the book. It won’t really be a struggle as long as it is logical. I grew up thinking I was not good at math because I did not love Algebra or the higher-level math in high school. I actually did do Accounting and Business Math instead because I was interested in them. And then ended up finishing my Accounting degree at 39, because I am actually good at math (the math that uses numbers, not letters)!
When we decided to home-school in 2012, I ordered ALL of the A Beka Homeschool curriculum for my three school-age children going into 6th, 3rd, and 2nd grade. And I mean ALL! It was over $2,000 and came in 8 boxes, and I was immediately overwhelmed! We went to Ikea and purchased desks and made our dining room into the school room. And later my 3rd grader told me it was the worst year of her life! (Not dramatic at all)
That started my journey into figuring out what is the best way to teach each of my children. How did they learn? What is their individual struggle and what is their individual strength? As I said above, Teaching Textbooks is the only curriculum that all four of my kids ended up using all the way into high school. English was different for each, history was different for each, science was different for each and you get the picture.
What I settled on years into the process, is that is actually the beauty of homeschooling. The flexibility to help each child learn. The flexibility to do language arts right away in the morning with one child and then send her off to practice her cello, because that was good for her brain after the stress of reading. The flexibility to let a 6-year-old only color one picture a week. Why do we force kids into busy work? He didn’t want to color, but he wanted to read tractor magazines and dream about his future line of equipment. The models and specs he learned on tractors and could rattle off at 5 years old was impressive! Even when it comes to the books they read, the only one we all read together was the Bible. Otherwise, they could pick books and topics that were more interesting to them.
When you force learning, are they actually learning and internalizing? Or are they remembering enough details to pass a test, and then promptly deleting it from their internal hard-drive and moving on. Are we creating a love of learning, or associating learning with angst? It isn’t about what we teach them, it is about what they learn!
More to come….