I use packaged curricula and other people’s lists for a pretty big chunk of my homeschooling, but sometimes I like to design it myself when I can’t find exactly what I want. (Maybe that’ll stop when I have more children and less time!) Since they’re for my own use I don’t have to polish them, just sort of hammer it together the way I want and tweak as I go along. I designed my own reading curriculum for Oscar, for example, based on the ideas of a curriculum developer that I happen to know personally but whose own phonics program wasn’t ready to use yet, and it worked fabulously for us. I designed a biography-based combination religion and social studies program for first grade that we’re halfway through, now, and that one was really quick ‘n’ dirty and there are things I will do differently with my next first-grader, but it still met my needs well.
I’m just about to design a sort of half-unit-study, half-curriculum for second grade library skills, and I’m going to blog it. I’m starting by going to the local library, five blocks away. See you there!
bearing blog 