Six Smart Questions to Ask Before You Buy Curriculum

Pam Barnhill [00:00:01]:
Are you ready for homeschooling to feel joyful again? Do you long for support as you learn alongside your kids? Welcome to Homeschool Better Together, a podcast about building a homeschool experience that works for your family. I’m Pam Barnhill and it’s time to step out of the overwhelm and into the wonder. Let’s do this. Hey there, everyone. It’s Pam Barnhill, and I’m coming to you solo today to talk to you about six smart questions to ask before you buy homeschool curriculum. Yeah. This is all about being a smart and savvy shopper when it comes to buying homeschool curriculum, and I want you to avoid curriculum regret. And in order to help you do that, I wanna walk you through six key questions to help you choose what is actually going to work for your family.

Pam Barnhill [00:00:59]:
Because, you know, shiny curriculum is fun, but at the end of the day, it has got to work for you and your family, not just the lady doing the unboxing video on YouTube. Right? So let’s start with question number one. We’re just gonna dive right into the questions you should be asking yourself as you evaluate each piece of curriculum. And the first question is, do I have more time or do I have more money? Because it is always a trade off. You can actually homeschool very cheaply, very frugally if you have lots of time, if you have the time to DIY your curriculum, if you have the time to search on Pinterest, if you have the time to find all the freebies, and if you have the time to build your own plan. And I love using AI. This is a new tool. I’ve talked about this particular topic for years, the kind of DIY doing your own curriculum.

Pam Barnhill [00:02:02]:
And Hey, now you can get so much help doing this AI and chat GPT will actually give you great results, but you know what? You still have to sift through the garbage. Let’s just be Frank. Like a lot of times there’s a lot of stuff you have to sift through, even with AI output. It’s very helpful. It’s not 100% helpful. So even if you’re using something like chat t p t to help you save time in building your own plan, you’ve still got to sift through it all. Use your discernment, make sure things work. So it doesn’t take quite as long as what it used to, but there is still a pretty big time involvement in just saying, like, I’m gonna find some stuff on Pinterest.

Pam Barnhill [00:02:47]:
I’m gonna put together my own little course of study. So that’s the time aspect. On the flip side of the coin is the money aspect. You can save yourself a lot of time by buying tools that very specifically save you prep time and save you energy, right? Like the whole curriculum is scripted. Everything is laid out for you. All the little pieces are in there and available and you have everything you need. There’s just not a lot of work for you to do as the homeschooling parent. This is not about being rich.

Pam Barnhill [00:03:22]:
This is just about the fact that of money and time, you have just a little more time than what you have money. So how do you decide? Well, check your pocketbook, check your calendar. That’s the way you make the decision. If you are a mom who is working from home and homeschooling, there’s a very good chance you’re gonna be willing to spend a little extra money on a low prep curriculum that is gonna be like gold for you to save yourself all that time. And you’re willing to part with a little more money to do it. So there have been times where I have just spent hours pulling things together for my kids. I did this a lot when we were involved in co op. I would make, like, this great Shakespeare class or something of that nature.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:04]:
And it was just a lot of fun for me. This was actually a way that I got joy was pulling together those classes. And, actually, a lot of those things have kind of ended up in the shop, and now you get to benefit from them as well. The language arts together plans that we have, that was something I just had fun doing and making. Then there have been times where maybe I had some really young kids, the year my husband was in Afghanistan, the year that we moved to a new house, those were the years where I didn’t wanna have anything to do with putting things together. I just bought something that was already done. And maybe I tweaked it a little bit, but honestly, it was laid. Like all the the bases were covered and I didn’t have to worry about it.

Pam Barnhill [00:04:52]:
So ask yourself, do I have more time or do I have more money? Is this curriculum, is it a little more expensive, but it’s going to save me a lot of time Or is it a little more work intensive, and it’s going to save me a lot of money? That is just one of the very important things you need to know and be aware of as you look at each curriculum. The next thing to ask yourself as you evaluate a piece of curriculum is how much hand holding do I need? Like, give yourself a confidence check. Do I know how to teach this thing? Could I take a resource that there’s just not a whole lot to it and, you know, wing it myself or do I need some extra help? And let me give you a real concrete example. There is this book that I love to use with my high schoolers. It is called The Lively Art of Writing. It is the book that I used as a senior in high school with the lovely miss Anne Stanley, who sadly is no longer with us. She was my writing teacher. Loved her so much.

Pam Barnhill [00:05:56]:
And she used this book to teach me how to write. Now I am not the world’s greatest writer, but I do a more than adequate job of getting my point across. And I really do feel like this book is the thing that helped me to do that. And it’s funny. I’m going through the book now with John, and I’m thinking, you know, if I remembered a lot of these lessons, I could really be a better writer. So I’m actually loving going through it with him. Olivia kinda did it by herself. I’m going through it with John.

Pam Barnhill [00:06:22]:
I’m just having so much fun with it. It is kind of a slim down resource. It would be harder, not impossible, but harder if you were like not a writing person to pick up this book and make it into lessons for your kids. Now there are some activities in the back for them to do, but I really have to be the one to evaluate his writing. I really have to be the one to give him suggestions. I have to go back and dig back into the chapter and say, look, see here, she talked about this and here was an example she gave us. How can we model our writing after this example? So I feel like the fact that I was taught through this book and just kind of my own strengths as a writing teacher and the fact that I’ve been teaching writing for a long time, it really helps me to take kind of this slim volume and turn it into something that my kids can use. I can give them feedback.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:17]:
It’s really not a problem. I don’t need a lot of hand holding. I’m fairly confident teaching that. Phonics, on the other hand, I know this sounds crazy. It’s like Pam, you obviously know how to read. I do, but you know what? I never learned phonics. I was one of those kids who was taught to read using sight words and I never learned phonics. I never learned how to sound words out until I started teaching my kids how to read.

Pam Barnhill [00:07:46]:
And I was like, woah, there’s so much here. I don’t know. It really comes in handy too when you’re playing Wordle, because I can like use phonetic rules to guess like which letter is going to come where it’s like, you know, these little things come in handy. You teach your kids to read and you get to be pretty good at Wordle, but I didn’t know anything about phonics. And so when I started teaching my kids phonics, even though I knew how to read. I just didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know all the things. And so I used all about reading as a curriculum and all about spelling as a spelling curriculum.

Pam Barnhill [00:08:22]:
This was fabulous. I learned so much. And the fact that it was scripted, that meant I didn’t have to know anything. The curriculum laid everything out for me and made it absolutely perfect for me to use in teaching. It really saved me as a first time phonics teacher, and then it made it super easy to go back again. I will tell you with my older kids, I read more of the lessons. As I got to Thomas, we just really kinda skimmed through the lessons. I didn’t need the script quite so much.

Pam Barnhill [00:08:56]:
I was able to just kind of express what needed to be expressed, but it was so handy to have at first when I was teaching that. So ask yourself, how much hand holding do I need as I’m teaching this subject? Is it something I need a lot of hand holding? Does this curriculum provide that? Or is it something where I don’t need very much hand holding at all? And so therefore, I can choose something that is just a little more loosey goosey when it comes to the hand holding. The third question in our six questions to ask yourself is how much teacher involvement is necessary. How much stuff do I have to do with my kid? So when your kids are in early elementary, I’m gonna tell you there is a lot of mom at elbow helping your kids. Like reading and math, a lot of times when you have a first grader, a second grader, even up into third grade and possibly even into fourth grade, you need to be giving them your full attention. It’s gonna be the rare kid who doesn’t need mom sitting very close by and helping with those subjects, especially the learning to read, the teaching phonics, the teaching of spelling in the first few grades. You kinda have to be there. Right? And I mean, that’s just the way it is.

Pam Barnhill [00:10:20]:
It’s not a bad thing. There are other programs though that remain kind of teacher heavy as you move along. And so this is really good. A lot of families love these kind of very teacher involved programs and it works great unless you’ve got multiple kids. So if you have a math program that requires you to sit there, even with older kids, working through the manipulatives, playing games, doing all of the projects and everything, you can’t just watch a video with them and then give them a worksheet to go off and do on their own. If you’ve got to sit there with them and do the activities well, that’s going to be really tough when you have lots and lots of kids. If you’ve got one kid, great, Keep doing it. But if you’ve got lots of kids or if you need to be working, maybe you’re not gonna be able to do it.

Pam Barnhill [00:11:08]:
Maybe it’s time to switch to a math program that is a little less teacher intensive. So you always wanna ask yourself, how much does this require of me, especially as my kids get older and then ask yourself, can I really do what’s being asked? You know, for example, let’s take science experiments or crafts or glitter. Like, do you love those things or is that kind of a hard pass for you? And I want you to be realistic about this. I want you to pick what fits you and your days. And sometimes you have to kind of reach a compromise between what your kids really love to do and what you’re actually willing to do. So for example, your kids might want to do really fun, messy science experiments every day of the week, but if you loathe them or really don’t want to do them, you will put off doing science over and over and over again. And since we always say that the best curriculum is the one that gets done, that science curriculum is not going to work for you. So strike a balance like, Oh, we’re going to do like one fun science experiment every four days or once a week or once every two weeks, pick what you’re going to do and then you will do it.

Pam Barnhill [00:12:28]:
So that’s just kind of a side question to how much teacher involvement is necessary for me to do this. Sometimes you’ve got to pick the thing, very little teacher involvement necessary so that they can just strike out on their own. Question number four, does this curriculum require lots of blank that my kid hates? Now everybody needs to learn how to do things like read, write, and do math, right? It doesn’t matter how much we hate those things. We need to reach a minimum level of proficiency in those skills. And that’s just the way it is. Like those are the hills you want to die on when you’re standing there going, do I want to die on this hill today? Reading, writing, math. Yes, you do. Hills you don’t want to die on coloring, cutting, pasting, long videos, lap books, things like that.

Pam Barnhill [00:13:28]:
Notebooking pages. If your kids don’t like them, if your kids loathe those kinds of things, those are the hills that I would not die on. Right? So lap books, this was something moms, whole school moms love lap books. We had this big thread in our community where all the moms were talking about their love of lap books, and it came up again and again. I love lap books, but my kids, they don’t love lap books. The kids are just not fans. And so I’m not gonna fight that fight every single day. I’m going to choose a different curriculum.

Pam Barnhill [00:14:07]:
Couple years ago, I found this writing curriculum. It will remain unnamed. I mean, it is a great curriculum. It was actually recommended to me by a very good friend, and I take her recommendations very seriously. And I thought, oh, this would be perfect for Thomas. And so I sat Thomas down and I’m like, I want you to watch the sample videos and see if you like it. And he watched like the first sample, which was no more than fifteen minutes or so. And he looked at me and he says, mom, I can see what they’re trying to do here.

Pam Barnhill [00:14:36]:
They’re trying to make it fun, but it’s just going to be torture. He just wanted something straight and simple. He didn’t want all of the bells and whistles to try to make things fun that felt like torture to him. So we just marked it off the list, even though it came very highly recommended. I’m like, no, not so much. We chose a more simple, straightforward writing curriculum, and the kid writes great. So you want to avoid curriculum that drains your energy because you are fighting with your kid every single day just to get it done. Question number five, how does the curriculum developer support me? Because support really matters, especially when it comes to some things like math and writing, where we don’t always feel so strong ourselves.

Pam Barnhill [00:15:30]:
And some of the best curriculum providers out there do things like provide teacher training for you. I know with our language arts together, we have a whole webinar you could watch to kind of see the philosophy behind why we teach language arts in this way and the methods that you’re supposed to use and, like, some different tips on how to do it with your kids and what the expectations should be for, you know, a seven or eight year old who’s narrating to you, things like that. So you want support teacher training placement tests. I know all about reading has a placement test that they use live help. So you can call on the phone and actually talk to somebody. I know Matthew c has that. I w has that. Easy returns.

Pam Barnhill [00:16:14]:
Like, if you get this and you try it for a couple of months and you’re like, this is not working for my family. I cannot believe I spent almost $200 on this. Can you call the company up and explain to them what’s going on and actually send it back? There are some great companies out there that will allow you to do that. Mr. D math, which is one of our favorite math programs for middle and high school. We use that in math. You see, but Mr. D math has a weekly zoom homework help.

Pam Barnhill [00:16:44]:
So my kids do the self paced classes. So they’re not in a class with a live teacher, but if we needed to, we could actually call up the homework help, not call up. Like they could go to the zoom meeting and there’s a teacher in there who would help them with their homework. And I tell you, we love the self paced classes because I’m just gonna let you know a little secret. We sometimes take longer than a year to finish a math curriculum. Like, it it sometimes takes somebody longer than a year to do algebra or to do geometry, and that’s okay. So support, how much is provided by the curriculum developer? Do they have a forum? Do they have a community like our free community where you can go in and you could say, I’m really struggling. Actually, it’s funny because just this morning, a lady had posted in there that she was doing teens on track with her 15 year old daughter, and the daughter did not like the writing.

Pam Barnhill [00:17:40]:
Should she force the writing? Well, the daughter was actually doing writing with her writing curriculum. There was really no reason for her to do writing with the teens on track. She could just have these conversations with her mom. So I’m like, not a hill I would die on. The daughter’s doing writing somewhere else. She’s learning how to write. You don’t have to force her to write with this particular curriculum. And finally, question number six.

Pam Barnhill [00:18:07]:
Will this curriculum fit in our season of life? Because life changes, and so should your curriculum. Sometimes you have a new baby or you’re moving or there’s an illness in the family, you’re having to give some care to older family members. Maybe you’re working and your work schedule shifts. Can your curriculum flex with you in those situations? There are some years where you need an open and go curriculum. And other years you might be able to do all of those projects. You might love a deep dive in a slower pace. And here’s the thing, a program that worked great one year might feel impossible the next. We often talk about, I can’t just buy one program and use it with all my kids because I have different kids and different needs.

Pam Barnhill [00:18:59]:
And the same thing goes with, I can’t just use one program and use it for every year because some years are going to be harder than others. Something that works great one year might feel impossible the next. And that is normal. We don’t beat ourselves up over that. So if you do have a season of chaos, it might be the time to use a simpler curriculum just to save your sanity. Don’t commit to something intense if you’re kind of in this high stress, high demand season. It’s funny, I was talking to a mom about a new baby not too long ago. It’s actually coming up on the podcast in a couple months.

Pam Barnhill [00:19:39]:
She was talking about having a new baby and now she has a 14 old. And she was like, the first year was so easy. Having the 14 old in homeschooling is a totally different thing. And so even like you have the year you’re pregnant, then you have the year that you have an infant, and then you have the year that you have the toddler, the the one who’s moving and into all the things. Those are three separate years, and they’re all very different than the year when you don’t have that going on in your life. And so they’re going to be different energy levels. They’re going to be different needs. They’re going to be different abilities for all four of those kinds of years and to expect to be able to do the same thing with the same intensity, the same kind of stuff, the same curriculum every single year is really kind of insane when we think about it is it’s like, that’s our expectation.

Pam Barnhill [00:20:36]:
But when we really, really are honest with ourselves, that’s a really unrealistic expectation. So ask yourself, can I see myself using this curriculum next week or next month? Or is it wishful thinking? Because we get these things and we’re very excited about doing them, but can I do it for the long haul? And give yourself permission to pivot. Curriculum is not a lifetime contract. So even if you have to take something that you actually enjoy and put it on the shelf for a few months and maybe use it with the next kid or something like that, it’s okay to do that in order to, you know, make life great for you and your kids. And that’s what you want is you want to be using a curriculum that is getting done on a regular basis. So maybe here’s a bonus question seven. Can I be consistent with that curriculum? Whatever curriculum it is, can I be consistent with it? And if the answer is yes, then that might be just the curriculum you need. So just as a quick recap, do I have more time or money? How much hand holding do I need? How much teacher involvement is necessary? And am I willing to give that level of involvement? You know, does this include anything that my kid is absolutely going to hate? How much does the curriculum developer support me? And will this curriculum fit our season of life? And here’s what I want you to know more than anything else.

Pam Barnhill [00:22:07]:
You can’t mess this up. Find what fits, use it consistently, and stop looking. Stop looking until next March or next April. Skip all the drama that comes from second guessing yourself. If you are doing that curriculum on a regular basis, you are winning and I’m here for it. Thanks for joining me. That’s our show for today. Be sure to follow, subscribe, and leave a review so you never miss out on the wonder of homeschooling better together.

Pam Barnhill [00:22:43]:
To stay connected and learn even more about the homeschooling better together resources and to join our free community, visit hsbtpodcast.com. Until next week, keep stepping out of the overwhelm and into the wonder.