Cooking up a Curriculum

For a while now, the thought of starting formal lessons leaves me feeling overwhelmed.  I am making it too complicated.  In a series of email exchanges, I started using a cooking metaphor that really helped me.  My friend Silvia said I should blog about it since it might help someone else too.  She wrote a nice post on the big picture with curriculum using a food metaphor too since we both started talking in terms of food in our emails and it was helpful for both of us:  ”Gourmet, Homemade or Junk Homeschool.”

I already know we need a homemade curriculum because our family likes certain ingredients and I rarely follow a recipe without making some changes. My problem isn’t with which type of curriculum but with the actual cooking. This is what I said to her:

I have Story of the World and Math U See. I haven’t started them yet but Hunter is ready for more. I think he will like short lessons. I am tempted to buy the Simply Charlotte Mason Planning Guide and the Books and Things DVD…but the truth is I probably already know it.  I *should* know it after all the reading and processing I’ve done in the last two years. LOL So, I’m not sure about spending the money.

I will do things completely different from everyone else anyway. I haven’t read Heaven on Earth yet, but there might be some scheduling and rhythm ideas in there.  I need “pulling it all together” ideas.

I’m almost there…it’s like buying all the groceries for an elaborate Thanksgiving Dinner. Gourmet recipes with all the trimmings and new recipes I’ve never tried before. I get it all home and look at all the grocery sacks with ingredients all jumbled up and realize I lost the recipes. Now I have to figure out how to put it all together and make it work and make it good. And it seems overwhelming to do all this organizing and preparing and customizing, so I think about calling off the special dinner and uninviting the guests.

Instead of going to a store or restaurant for a pre-packaged Thanksgiving Dinner, I could just grab a *few* ingredients and spices, throw a chicken in the rotisserie and creamed corn in the crock pot (a really good recipe with cream cheese but SIMPLE), peel some carrots and steam them…and eat off paper plates.

So how do I take our 1000 children’s books, which are somewhat organized not like those groceries that need to be put away, and various manipulatives and things and turn them into a simple, delicious, wholesome educational meal on paper plates? Maybe I should take a look at Ambleside Online Year 1 again and make a few substitutions on the recipe ingredients.  Their Year 1 curriculum almost seems too simple, like it is not enough but they do progress rapidly to Plutarch (Year 4).

Food and farming metaphors seem to work for me. I just need to remember that I’m more like Julia Child than Martha Stewart. It’ll still taste good and be good, right?

Then we talked about one of the Ambleside Online recommendations, “50 Famous Stories Retold” by James Baldwin and my issue with this book is the stories are too short to be memorable.  Silvia pointed out that this book is for narration training.   Thinking of it as narration training makes it more appealing to me now.  I have Story of the World and I could use that for narration training.  Originally, I wanted to use SOTW as a spine with all these fabulous go-along books, because we need to get the most out of it.  Yet, I should not let this prevent us from getting started.  We can always read “the blurb” again later and do a more in-depth study of history another year.  The blurb will be a nice review. 

I’ve scratched the idea of creating a curriculum that is like a big dinner party and will think in simpler terms for book choices and content.  At this age, his main diet needs to be reading, writing and math.  The rest is side dishes and dessert and trying new things; or just diving in and making a big, happy mess.

I feel better already.