As homeschoolers, do you ever give feedback to the publishers whose curriculum you use? If you’ve ever read my Learning to Love the Red Marks post, you know that I’m a proponent of learning from the things I do wrong and trying to do better in the future.
In my current role in education, I work with a homeschool publisher to design online video courses primarily for the homeschool family. I spend many hours a day reading feedback from our customers. Much of the feedback is positive, but some are honest criticisms of what worked and what didn’t. Wow! I wish you knew how helpful that was to me in my current role!
When you look for curriculum for your individual family’s needs, what do you look for? What do you most like about the curriculum that you use?
For me, I always wanted something that was easily adaptable to my individual children’s learning styles. I also wanted something that matched my somewhat eclectic teaching style. I’m a big proponent of using real and living books (as opposed to textbooks) in most courses. I love some of Charlotte Mason’s educational philosophies. I also have a pretty strong bent toward some of the classical methodologies and I love how it leads to higher-level critical thinking. But, I admit, that I’m also a fan of unit studies and we enjoyed many unit studies - especially during the middle elementary years. We studied The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Marguerite Henry's books, and The Little House on the Prairie books. If you'd like more information on how we used unit studies in our homeschool, you can read about them here.
Those unit studies were fantastic memories for my kids. I used different curriculum for each of the ones we did and heavily adapted them for our environment, but those were a great learning journey for our family. At the time, I never thought to send a note to the publishers to let them know what I loved the most about their curriculum, and what would have helped me use it even more effectively for my situation.
Obviously, not every publisher can adjust to everyone’s likes and dislikes, but it is really helpful for any organization to know the areas that they might be able to improve. Again, if you have read my Learning to Love the Red Marks, you also know how satisfying it is to reach a point where the finished work was so good, no red marks were needed. For me, in our homeschool, we found a couple of publishers who produced material for our needs that I didn’t think needed even one change. They were red-mark free!!
Those publishers met every one of my crazy eclectic homeschool needs. As a lover of history, I give an A+ to Linda Hobar's Mystery of History curriculum! We LOVED her books and used them all the way through elementary and junior high history. I could not recommend them more highly.
What's your favorite curriculum? What do you most like about it? What would you change if you could?
As homeschoolers, we are experts at thinking outside the box. Can we make our voices known to the publishers of our favorite curriculum and help them provide even better choices for our children?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
PS: If you haven't checked out my little curiosity shop lately check out some of our bestsellers below.
Disclosure: Bear in mind that some of the links in this post are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you. Please read the full disclosure here.
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