Choosing the Best Home School Curriculum
Doesn’t Have to Be Hard…

…but you do need to know where to start looking.

Are you on a quest to find the best home school curriculum, always searching yet never finding? Do you find yourself continually asking other home schoolers what curriculum they use, hoping you might hear of some home school curriculum treasure that has eluded you up until now? Perhaps you feel like choosing home school curriculum is like a treadmill: buy this, try that, buy this -- when will I ever get off?

I’m sad to say this describes much of my home school journey early on. So much wasted time searching for something that would work better. So much frustration wondering what was wrong – was the problem with my teaching? With the home school curriculum I’d chosen? With our discipline techniques?

What I cam to realize was that I needed to think about some deeper issues relating to our home schooling. I needed to start looking at some issues like how we want to pass on our faith, how much I should be involved in teaching, and what kind of structure to offer our kids. The answers to these questions were where I needed to start on my search.

Out of my frustration I developed what I call the Home School Curriculum Pyramid as a visual aid to help navigate through the process of making really great decisions to find the best home school curriculum. You can think of it like a flow chart if you’d like, starting from the bottom up.

Let’s go through this Home School Curriculum Pyramid and see how it can help you in some specific choices you may be thinking through right now.

First, if you start looking from the bottom up, you’ll see that you need to look at your worldview or faith. You may not consider yourself a religious person, but for our purposes here, your worldview would include issues others would relate to faith (e.g. in the basic goodness of mankind, or in the uniqueness of individuals, and such).

How your worldview relates to choosing home school curriculum is that, for instance, if your worldview leads you to believe that you should be open to various faiths, you may find that the best home school curriculum for you is really Sonlight Home School Curriculum , even though it is a Christian curriculum because it raises honest questions about different faiths and practices around the world.

Another example is that if your worldview leads you to believe that there are certain truths that you want to pass on to your children, you will naturally want to make those part of your child’s education. But how? You best home school curriculum may include those beliefs kind of like Truths To Be Learned (such as with ). Or, perhaps you see them more as Truths To Be Discovered (in which case Sonlight Curriculum would be more like this). If you are wondering about the answers to these questions you’ll want to read the page on incorporating faith in your home school curriculum.

Once you understand how your faith or worldview influences choosing home school curriculum, you can move on to the next level of the pyramid: examining your core values and beliefs about how to home school.

I am convinced that answering these types of core questions can help you save hundreds of dollars and hours of frustration in choosing the best home school curriculum for your family.

Ready? Great. I'll be uploading information on the next stage, your Core Values and Beliefs, shortly.

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