Robinson Curriculum: Help Your Children Become Well-Educated
While Bringing Peace to Your Home

You may not ever have heard of Robinson Curriculum. However, it may be just what you need if you find yourself:

• exhausted trying to juggle all your kids' home schooling needs -- trying to stay one step ahead of your kids, while trying to correct worksheets, assign reading, discuss history, review math, and plan for the next lesson?
• afraid that you are holding back your older kids while neglecting your younger ones?
• feeling like home schooling is like a black hole draining away your creativity and time needed to refresh your soul and be who God created you to be?
• wishing you could have everything you need -- truly a complete home school curriculum -- at your fingertips, without the hassle of spending hours poring over catalogs or searching all over the Internet to update your home schooling needs year after year?
• wanting books that don't bring up a lot of controversial issues, and want them at a budget price?
• longing just to be your children's mom or dad, and not have to be their academic teacher and corrector too?

How about your children? Do your they:

• feel overwhelmed with the amount of school subjects they are expected to get through each day as part of your current complete home school curriculum?
• keep so busy doing the “extras” that they don't have a firm grasp of the basics?
• waste a lot of time because they have to wait for you every time you are busy with one of your other children?
• need your help, yet resent you for teaching them and hovering over them?

Or maybe you are...

• a single or working parent who would love to home school, but you need some type of complete home school curriculum that your kids could use without you actually teaching them?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, Robinson Curriculum is definitely an option you may want to consider. Before examining this in more detail, though, I do want to mention a few other options you may wish to consider. You may want to look into our review of Switched-On-Schoolhouse CD-ROM curriculum or read about online homeschool curriculum.

On this page I will try and go into some potential benefits and disadvantages of Robinson Curriculum. Let me encourage you to discover your own values by signing up for our free eCourse about how to choose home school curriculum. You'll come away with a much better sense of what you are looking for in a home school curriculum and how you want to deal with the stresses I listed above.

So, let's say you realize that you want a self-teaching home school curriculum using books rather than the computer. What next? Let me share a bit about our family's journey with Robinson Curriculum along with some more objective information.

Feeling Overwhelmed? I Felt That Way Too

I felt the joy of home schooling seeping away. Sigh. Not what I had envisioned when we started out home schooling.

Then I came across the Robinson Curriculum Being a book-lover, the fact that it was literature-based immediately caught my eye as I read about the classic literature that it includes. The simplicity of the program made me take a second look since I was definitely looking for something to streamline our home school.

What made me actually buy it for our own home school curriculum was hearing the stories of users just like me who have seen their family's homeschool change for the better -- their children's attitudes transformed, academic scores improve, and the freedom and joy of home school learning came back into their home. I read comments like:

RC [Robinson Curriculum] is soooo easy to implement with a large family. It is also easy to adapt to the children's various skills, interests, weaknesses and personalities. We modify and supplement the reading list and writing requirements to suit each child and the math is perfectly self paced. Colette

This was the biggest 'seller' to RC for my family. My kids needed a mom, not necessarily a teacher. We also realized that we were holding them back.....they sat and waited while I disciplined the younger ones, or while I changed a diaper, or while I fed a baby, etc., and while I was "teaching" they waited for me to tell them what to learn. They now have a mom who can enjoy free time WITH them instead of pulling together lesson plans or searching for curriculum. AAAhhh, life is good. Tami

What is Robinson Curriculum?

• Level: K-12, though not grade-based. Students work at their own pace,
• Format: Literature-based, with over 250 classic books and other materials on the CD-ROMs. Although it comes on CD-ROMs, unlike Switched-On-Schoolhouse, it is not a computer-based curriculum. Your child learns mostly from reading the literature you print out from the CDs, not by interacting with the computer. Math is not included, but it is strongly recommended to use Saxon Math as it is well-suited to the self-teaching method.

Also included are:

• Vocabulary exercises (about 6500 words) -- computer-based self-teaching quizzes, printable crossword puzzles, and wordsearches.
• math flash cards,
• examinations, -- over 50 SAT-like examinations with answer keys.
• grammar and spelling books,
• handwriting practice sheets, and
• Bible, 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, and Noah Webster's 1913 dictionary.

The Process: The basic process is that you print out the books, have your children read through the materials at their own pace, and write about what they read, taking vocabulary tests on the books read. There are no grade levels. As your children read, write, and progress at their own pace, they will develop habits and skills that will help them master the material and really understand the material for themselves.

Sound simple? Sometimes we forget that home schooling really doesn't have to be complicated to be effective.

Potential Advantages

Since this is a “self-teaching,” complete home school curriculum, many of the benefits are obvious:

• your children will be on a process to learn to think for themselves and discover how to find the answers without needing handholding throughout the day,
• you won't have to rush around trying to teach each child at various levels,
• each child can work at his own pace,
• the materials on the CD-ROMs are classic, well-written literature that have stood the test of time. You can read more about the educational results for yourself.
• You can read some comments from users or scroll down to see more.

Some other benefits of using Robinson Curriculum as opposed to the more teacher-directed type of complete curriculum are less obvious but still important to consider:

• your children may, hopefully, develop self-confidence and discipline as they take responsibility for their own learning,
• many children often become more creative and inquisitive,
• you can spend very little time “teaching” your children and have more time just being their mom (or dad!).

Potential Disadvantages

Because the Robinson Curriculum emphasizes self-teaching and creating a learning-rich environment (as opposed to an entertainment-rich environment), it really is a holistic approach to life. Below are the suggestions from the Robinson Curriculum Course of Study about how best to create a learning-rich environment:

• no television,
• no sugar,
• no computer until age 16 or so, and
• you do about five hours of school a day, most of it for the child to do on his own without any help from the parent.

When I first heard read this as part of Robinson Curriculum, I thought, no way! This sounded impossible for my family. You might think this too. However, I would encourage you to look at some unofficial FAQs about Robinson Curriculum to see how people handle these lifestyle issues (I can tell you there are a lot of people who see this as a goal, not a starting point).

As for other possible disadvantages, they seem to center on one of several categories:

• The Philosophy of Self-Teaching:
  • you want to be directly involved in more aspects of your children's education, mentoring them or participating in learning with them,
  • you feel uncomfortable in giving them the reigns to teach themselves,
  • you assume you would miss out on learning with your child and doing read-alouds together.
• The Fear or Letting Go of Other Subjects:
  • you feel there will be "gaps" in your children's education,
  • you wonder about all those other wonderful books and subjects not covered in Robinson Curriculum. How will you get to cover them if you are focusing only on the basics?
• Other:
  • the program sounds rigid or harsh as it is described on the Robinson Curriculum website, like it isn't much fun,
  • printing and binding the books sounds like a bother.

Dealing with Potential Disadvantages

Your first thought after reading this may be, "I could never do that!" or "My kids would never do that!" "Two hours of Saxon math? No way!" "No sugar? Are you for real?" However, as I researched Robinson Curriculum, I learned that there are numerous people who felt the same way who are now having a great home school experience with the Robinson Curriculum. As with many things that may seem overwhelming or impossible at first, you may need to see your goals as part of a process.

Our Family's Experience

As I mentioned above, several years into our home schooling journey I was feeling burned out from more formal home school curriculum. It didn't help that I was trying to buy books from overseas and moving around a fair bit. That added some stress! Four kids at different levels also added to my busyness.

We tried Robinson Curriculum and there were some good things that came from it. My kids did learn to be more self-motivated and organized. But I honestly missed not getting to learn with them and interact with them more about the books they were reading. I also missed having more variety of literature and help for discussing important themes.

Just as a side note, we are now using the redesigned version of Tapestry of Grace and we've never been happier. You can read more about our journey using Tapestry of Grace here.

So for us Robinson Curriculum didn't ultimately work out. Does that mean it wouldn't work for you? Not necessarily. A lot depends on what your goals and core values are.

I hope you find this information about Robinson Curriculum helpful as you consider various options for your home school journey. Above all, may you and your child find joy and success in your home school adventure.

Looking for something? Search for it here:
Enter your search terms Submit search form   Web this site

---