Choosing Home School Curriculum:
Knowing How To Evaluate Your Child's Learning
Can Help You Choose

One of the fundamental differences between various home school curriculum options is the way they approach evaluating the learning your child is doing. This is such a key point to recognize before you start. It will come up day in and day out, as you either have your child take tests, fill out worksheets or do projects. Must your child do one of these for you to feel like he is learning? As you read these pages, think about which method of evaluating learning you think will fit you and your child best at this point in his or her life.

Which Method to Evaluate Your Child’s Learning?

In looking at the different ways of evaluating learning that home school curriculum choices offer, you may find that you want a little of all of them. Why not? If you have the desire and resources of time, energy and money, by all means, do so. You can certainly incorporate into your home school curriculum some or all of these ways of evaluating home schooling and the learning your child is doing.

However, there are good reasons why you might want to focus on only one or two methods of evaluating learning, at least for a certain season. For one, it can help you see progress your child makes in that area over time. I could see my son’s specific progress in math computation when he did timed math drills. And though he hated worksheets, he loved a tool like Flash Master.

Another reason to give priority to one or two of these ways of evaluating learning is to help your child learn skills related to that type of evaluation, such as learning how to take a test, or how to narrate a summary. For us personally, I found that focusing on narration for a few months really helped my 9 year-old-daughter learn to pay attention to what she was reading. She balked at narrating at first, but little by little, she grew to be able to retell what she read well. It probably would have been harder for her to make progress (and for me to see it) if we didn’t focus on it for an extended period of time. If you are always using different methods of evaluating home schooling, you may lose out on seeing growth in that area.

Specific Methods of Evaluating Learning

Let’s now take a look at several different ways of evaluating what your child is learning and see what potential benefits and disadvantages there may be with each. Within each category you’ll find listed various home schooling methods or home school curriculum that uses this type of evaluation. While these aren’t the only methods of evaluating home schooling and the learning your child is doing, most different types of evaluation can be grouped into at least one of them. (Note: I’ll be uploading them bit by bit over the next few days.)

• Worksheets

• Writing

• Hands On Projects

• Narration and Discussion

• Tests and Quizzes

Knowing what kind of evaluation your child needs at this stage of his or her life is really crucial to knowing which of these evaluation methods – and thus which of the different home schooling methods – will work best for you now.

Action Steps:

1. Read over the sections listed above on each of the evaluation styles and which home schooling curriculum emphasize which type of evaluation.

2. Take a few minutes to brainstorm what skills you’d like your child to grow in over the next few months.

3. Talk about your thoughts with your spouse. You will then have a deeper understanding of which home school curriculum will fit your family, as well as a greater sense of how you might want to adapt it to meet your child’s specific needs.

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