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Frugal Curriculum Choices

© Teresa Higginbotham

How do you choose and purchase your curriculum for homeschool? Recently overheard at a discussion of homeschoolers, someone said: "You know you've graduated to becoming a serious homeschooler when you don't teach from one package of curriculum only." Sometimes using one curriculum works beautifully for a child, but sometimes the speaker was trying to say, you have to try different curriculums. For instance, you may find a curriculum excellent in math with it's step by step approach. Then you switch over to their English book and find it goes way too slow in grammar and your kids are bored with it. Maybe you look at a curriculum and order the whole set and find out it's unworkable for your teaching style or your child's learning style and your stuck not only in one subject but in all.

Speaking from a frugal standpoint purchasing curriculum outside of package deals seems to be cheaper for the most part. You can buy used curriculum which saves countless dollars and if you do find a certain book doesn't work then you may feel free to try something else. A teaching kit within a package can be great. You can reuse that kit possibly for many different children, or you can assemble your own. A good example of this is Saxon Math. They will sell a teaching kit, but look at the contents. You can buy these elements separately often for less than a catalog will sell them to you together. A clock? Don't you have one? Geoboards? I picked one up for $5 at our teacher supply store. Counters? We used pennies. Tangram shapes? We bought them separately from a catalog. I assembled their kit for much less than if I had paid for it as a part of a package. I didn't catch on I could do this until another homeschooler filled me in on how much she had used different elements of the kit. She pretty well told me what I didn't need and what I had to have.

Now there are also some pitfalls at not buying things prepackaged. One problem I've run into has been different editions of books. I picked up a used Bob Jones University Heritage Studies Text only to find out it was their old curriculum. I couldn't make it work for my kids because it didn't really follow suit with what we had already covered. It was covering the same material again. If you order anything off of an internet bulletin board make sure you're square on what edition of the book you are receiving. If you have a teacher's guide but no student text, then you want the two to match. I had one teacher's guide that was close, but the pages were slightly off. I spent the entire year fishing through the book for the page my child was doing. Sometimes I found the page had been created in the text and wasn't even covered in the teacher's guide.