For all those well-laid plans and carefully selected homeschool purchases, it happens. You get into the homeschool year and realize that what you have and who you are teaching just aren’t a match. What do you do? Do you throw out all of that curriculum and start over? Is it possible to make adjustments to your homeschool year that will actually make a difference? Sometimes the problems warrant starting over from scratch; there’s just not enough going well to make a curriculum worth keeping. But many, many times it’s possible to modify your homeschool curriculum to fit your child’s needs. Here are five steps to help you customize your homeschool curriculum.
How to Customize Your Homeschool Curriculum to Fit Your Child’s Needs
Take inventory of what you have to work with.
Check your game closets, craft areas, toys bins, and bookshelves. Even items that aren’t necessarily “curriculum” can help you supplement and customize your homeschool curriculum to fit your child’s particular needs. Buttons, pom poms, board games, hot wheels—all of these bring possibilities and fresh life to homeschool challenges. Have an idea of what you’ve got to work with. Even if you don’t know what you are looking for, let your eyes scan it all. Then when you sit down to plan, an item you saw earlier may come to mind.
Look at individual skills
Throw out the idea of “grade level” and look at individual skills. It’s easy to get lost in the big picture of whether a child is capable of a particular grade level rather than looking at the specific skills that are taught at each level.
- Look at the individual skills your child currently has and is currently needing to work on. What’s the next step for your child in each area? Again, don’t worry about grade level. Instead, focus on the next thing.
- Look at the particular skills covered in the curriculum you currently are using. Do your child’s skills mesh with the skills being taught in the curriculum? Maybe you need to retrace your steps and go back over earlier skills. Maybe your curriculum moved on before your child was ready.
- Look for learning gaps. Your child may be struggling with your current curriculum because there is a particular skill missing. Maybe borrowing is giving your child trouble because she doesn’t understand place value. Maybe reading is a struggle because he can’t remember how to sound out a word.
Pick and choose assignments
Your curriculum is your tool, not your master. The assignments and activities are there to help you teach your child, not to boss you around. So, feel free to pick and choose the assignments that match the skills you see your child needs to work on. If an assignment is not a good fit, skip it. If an assignment two lessons back or five lessons ahead is a better fit, choose to teach your child and let go of some of the “curriculum expectations” that often enslave us.
Create your own activities
Sometimes an activity or assignment isn’t a good fit for the child’s learning styles or presents challenges to other skill areas. For instance, my first grader struggles with writing. He’s slowly gaining momentum in his reading skills, but very far behind in his writing. The first-grade phonics workbook that we have matches his reading skills; however, the line spaces and fonts are often far too small. Rather than have him circle, mark, or write in his workbook, I will copy the lesson on 3×5 cards and let him feed our tissue box monster, shoot the cards with nerf guns, or toss the completed card into a bowl or basket. The curriculum guides me to the next concept he needs to work on, but I pick and choose which activities we do and which ones we create ourselves.
Use your child’s strengths
Particularly if you are teaching your child in an area where he or she struggles, using that child’s strengths will help to boost confidence. If a child is good at building or creating, incorporate that as much as possible into your day. Have him build words, sentences, or math problems. If your child needs movement, incorporate lots of movement. If your child is artistic, use creative projects to teach your subject area.
My fifth grader hates writing, but she loves to create. When she is given a display board project where she can plan the design and layout, she will eagerly type out 3 or 4 strong paragraphs for her board—something she would have rather died than written if I had assigned it any other way. My oldest enjoys technology but isn’t too excited about learning tedious research skills, so I assigned him a multi-media slide presentation. The result was that he willingly researched above and beyond even what I had expected of him.
While there is no perfect curriculum, there is a perfect curriculum plan as you make adjustments and take charge of what, when, and how your child takes the next steps in his education. You are the teacher. The curriculum you choose may help you plot out what needs to be covered in a year and give you ideas and resources to pull from as you present those lessons, but you have the freedom to customize your homeschool curriculum, make adjustments, or step away from that curriculum to teach your child.
When your curriculum isn’t quite cutting it, make a few adjustments. Teaching your child successfully doesn’t rise or fall with the success of your purchasing decisions at the start of a year, and you won’t fail your child as a homeschool parent simply because a curriculum wasn’t all that you hoped it would be.
