Is there a curriculum for that?

Dear Reader,

I have for a while been scornful of those loud baby and toddler toys which claim to teach little ones their ABCs, colors, numbers, etc. They make me wonder how children ever learned these things without annoying electronics? Did their parents perhaps have to actually interact with them and teach them things?!

But it occurred to me recently that as our kids get older, we tend to have the same acceptance of curriculum to help them learn more advanced concepts. Take grammar for instance. You learn an awful lot of grammar just be speaking and listening to your native language. My kids automatically know things like subject/verb agreement.  And yet you can by endless workbooks that ask them to circle the correct verb form in sentences like: Johnny had/have a new puppy.  Some concepts may not be so easy to pick up, but can still be learned through must reading or being read to. There is no need to make everything a curriculum with fill in the blank answers. I am not at all convinced that these sorts of things help children learn the concepts anymore than just reading books.

Our state has its curriculum frameworks online. When I first looked at them when my oldest was beginning homeschool, I was shocked to find that the only science they required for the early elementary years (through third grade or so) was to learn things like what is a magnet and what are different things made of (wood, metal, etc). Again I wondered is this something I have to teach my child?? I have never sat down with my children and said, “Look, this is made of wood but this is metal” and so on. This is something kids pick up on their own.

Now I can understand in an institutional setting that there are many kids from many different backgrounds. Some may have parents that are not native speakers of English or that are very poorly educated themselves. And so schools must make sure there are no gaps and that Johnny does know to say “have” or “has” or what it means to be made of metal. But we do not need to do this at home with our own kids. I think too often we homeschoolers give into a kind of paranoia that makes us think our kids will be behind if we don’t teach everything the schools do in the way they do. But those ways are designed for a larger setting with a lot more diverse population of children. Most of the time, I think we just need to sit back, relax, and interact with our kids. Maybe some of the time spent filling in worksheets could be better spent reading together or just having a conversation or playing a game.

Sadly, I think the homeschool curriculum makers feed into our paranoia. They are our friends sometimes. I love that there a lot of resources out there to be used these days, But they can also be our enemies. They make us think that we need this or that curriculum, that we must have  a grammar book by third grade or our child’s education will be incomplete.

What do you think? Are there things you have managed to teach without a packaged curriculum?

Nebby