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Curriculum
by Cheryl Lewis

Planning a curriculum can seem daunting to parents. I know that the first time I thought about planning a curriculum of any kind for homeschooling my children I didn't think it would be that difficult. After all I had taught preschool for many years, but homeschooling seemed totally different to me. When it came down to sitting down and actually doing the planning I panicked. Suddenly I was concerned with making sure every area of their entire education was covered. I suddenly felt really overwhelmed and full of self-doubt which lead to my panic.

After a couple of days of immersing myself in curriculum reviews, skills lists and article after article, I was overloaded with information. Then it finally dawned on me when I looked back at the goal statement I had written, my child doesn't have to learn everything in one year. By grace, we will be given many years to teach each other.

I finally put the curriculum issue into perspective by comparing it to a cake. The outcome of my children's homeschooling career for the year of curriculum I wanted to plan, was the whole cake. How do you eat a whole cake? One piece and one bite at a time. That's when I realized I wasn't focusing and keeping my thought process organized. In order to eat the whole cake, I needed to cut it into pieces and eat it one bite at a time.

The whole cake was made up of the different areas that my child needed to learn. Those areas were the pieces, but what pieces were they? I listed the pieces like this:

Basic Core Subjects

Math
Writing
Reading
Social Studies/Geography
Science/Health

Extras

Arts & Crafts
Music
Physical Education
Spiritual / Bible

Each of these were what I considered my pieces and I basically followed a unit theory to develop the bites of each piece. I would pick a theme; weather, seasons, letters of the alphabet and numbers, a classic story book, etc. I would then take that theme and develop an activity or activities in each area of study. I would try to concentrate on the basic core subjects daily and then the extras one or twice weekly. I would follow the theme until a thorough study was done either finishing the book, examining all the seasons, the whole alphabet, etc.

Now this may sound more structured than what a preschool parent wants and I would agree that this is more for a kindergarten or primary student. The same theory can be applied to the preschooler in a less structured way to allow for more child led learning. Even with kindergarten and primary aged kids you need to allow for some child led learning. They just might lead you into a direction with a theme that you never thought of but enables them to learn the unit or the concept more accurately and easily.

For more homeschooling information visit my Homeschooling Preschool and Primary web page.

© 2003 Cheryl Lewis. All rights reserved. Re-printed with permission. Originally published on Suite 101.

A homeschooling mother of four, Cheryl Lewis has nine years of professional preschool experience and is a Founding Dean, Dean of Arts & Crafts, and also the Acting Dean of Education at Suite University. She also manages the Teaching Computers to Children topic at Suite101.com.

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