What Should a Good Homeschooling Curriculum Contain?


When choosing a homeschooling curriculum, you want to choose the best. First of course for the sake of your child and then for yourself – you are sort of going against the grain here, and you would hate to discover later that the school curriculum you chose wasn’t the best.

So how do you identify the best homeschooling curriculum? There are several things that will tell you that you are getting the best education for your child:

  1. Identify home school curriculum’s that will support your child’s learning style. Children are all different and they all learn in there own unique way. Make sure that whatever you choose helps your child to learn faster and that they don’t have to slow down to understand it. If they are rather young and a curriculum includes a lot of texts and very few pictures for example, it could mean that your child is not really learning much because most young children learn through imagery.

  2. Choose a homeschool curriculum that is integrated. You may find that some curriculums focus so much on schooling itself, that they take all the fun out of learning. Kids learn more when they are having fun than when they have to sit for long hours and study. Let the curriculum have activities, for instance asking the child to go to a park and identify flowers and trees or go to the zoo and identify animals and so on. Of course these will change as they get older, but they are an integral part of homeschooling curriculums.

  3. Does the curriculum you are looking at include sections that help to build a child’s character? Teach them how to behave with and around other people? Teach them about emotions, caring, respect, love, helping and all the other aspects of character that form a well-rounded person? Look for this in any school curriculum. If it’s lacking, you may want to keep looking. A lot of home school curriculum’s are Christian based and so this element comes out strongly, but you can find some that aren’t Christian based and which will still teach your child about the finer things on character.

  4. A Curriculum should be able to eventually lead the person teaching the child (usually a parent) to know what the child’s strengths are. This usually comes as support notes for the teacher and the teacher in a way is also learning themselves. They will work with the homeschooled child for some time and they will able to know what interests them most so that they can build on it.

  5. The curriculum should be able to send you all necessary kits and you shouldn’t really have to pay extra if its part of a mainstream lesson. They can deliver at your address or they can have a place where you can go and collect, but if you need a kit for certain activities and experiments, it should be provided.

  6. Lastly, look at the cost. When it comes to homeschooling curriculum’s, the most expensive may not necessarily be the best, but if it’s really cheap take a good look at it first before you buy it. Remember you’d like as much as possible to stick with what you started off with so you want to be able to continue to afford it over the years.

Homeschooled kids seem to have many advantages over kids who go to regular schools, but the kind of homeschooling curriculum that you choose will be a big factor in helping them gain any advantage from homeschooling.