Why We Buy So Many Curriculum Programs

Over the past year or so I’ve been buying curricula that “spoke to me” and seemed like a perfect fit for our family. This had led me to buy at least ten different curriculum programs. This might seem excessive, but I’d like to explain in case you happen to have the same proclivity I have to getting that one new curriculum you just heard about.

First of all, preschoolers DON’T NEED ACADEMICS, so don’t think you must buy yours anything rigorous at that age. That’s certainly not what I prefer.

However, I kept on buying.. and buying.. and buying more programs because I wanted VARIETY. You know what kids don’t get in schools? Variety. You know what (most) homeschooled kids are blessed to have their parents introduce to help them learn better? Variety.

I use that simple reasoning to justify every curriculum program I’ve purchased and will continue to purchase.

But how does “variety” work? What do I mean?

There are a few ways it works for me.

Imagine you start one particular curriculum and you realize you hate it. I figured not only that that could happen to me, but that I’d also hate to waste days looking for a new program and start over weeks or months into a new school year. So having different programs at hand lets me easily switch to a new one in case the first one or two didn’t vibe with us.

That’s not all, though. The most valuable thing that having several programs available has done for us (well, me) is simply letting me introduce a new concept in different ways or simply decide that I don’t feel like having him do X, so we’ll switch to another activity.

I’ve found this to be so valuable, because while getting ready for a new week, I can go over a few curricula and their schedules, plus what each day calls for, and simply decide that I don’t want to do that something or this something else.

Having said that, which curricula have we purchased?

I’d like to do a longer overview of these in a future post, but for now I’ll briefly list the ones we have in no particular order:

1. Nobis Pacem (this one’s Catholic AND in Spanish!)
2. Catholic ABCs
3. Peaceful Preschool by The Peaceful Press
4. The Good Gospel by The Peaceful Press
5. Llamitas Spanish
6. Gentle Classical Preschool
7. Super Simple Languages
8. Play Preschool (probably my least favorite, to be honest)
9. The Good & The Beautiful (becoming one of our favorites!)
10. Let Them Be Little

And how do I know which to do each term/year?

Our days usually include activities from two to three programs, but I don’t choose from all ten+. Instead, before our new school year begins in January, I go over all the programs and skim through them all to see which contain activities that most closely align with what Boy (our oldest, since our youngest is too young for homeschooling) can do.

When we were unofficially doing homeschool here and there, we were working with Nobis Pacem and Llamitas. They were OK: I didn’t think they provided a lot of value to our school day, so I moved on from those to Peaceful Preschool, The Good Gospel, The Good & The Beautiful, and Play Preschool. I also preordered the new version of Gentle Classical Preschool , but it won’t arrive until February.

That’s five programs we can do at once each day. But I’m not a maniac so we don’t do that. Instead, I go with a couple of them that might seem the most fun (after all, a kid’s “job” is to play!) but would also teach him something, ensuring I always include The Good Gospel’s verse and Bible story for that week, plus some words to help him enhance his pronunciation in English and Spanish.

Believe it or not, I have two or three OTHER curriculum programs in my To-Buy list!

That’s right.. I’m not done yet, mainly because two of them are in Spanish (cue all the party emojis!)! And the beauty of having a bilingual homeschool is that I need a lot of resources in Spanish–from books to curricula–because they make my job teaching concepts easier. Plus, doing read-alouds in Spanish shows the kids that Spanish is a very important language to me–and therefore to them and our family in general.

What are your favorite curriculum programs?