Design your homeschool: pt 1 start with the end in mind

As an engineer I have learned that when you're designing something it's always good to have the end in mind and then you get all of the components to meet that in goal. Designing your homeschool is the same concept you want to educate your children with an angle in mind that way it doesn't matter what you do in the middle just so long as you do things to get to your end goal. I want my children to have a well-rounded education I wanted my children to have a love of reading. I wanted my children to be able to have conversations with anyone and everyone that they came in contact with on any topic. And honestly that's what a Charlotte Mason style hybrid thing that I'm doing is going to accomplish with all the materials that I've chosen it's going to ultimately end with them having a well-rounded education. I'm trying to get to how I put all of those things together considering that I had to think of what was missing in school and how to add it it took me I'll say about 7 months to figure out and I wish I hadn't lost those blog posts about that journey. Because right now trying to remember how I got to this point it's a little jarring but I think I can get there. When I originally started I kept watching YouTube videos going over this and that curriculum overwhelmed with the idea that I wanted to try every last one of them until I had finally gotten to that point where I said to myself I need to focus on the curriculum that will get me to my end goal. I don't want my children to have a lot of busy work. I do want my children to read instead of constantly writing nonsense. I want them to get concepts thoroughly before they move on to the next. In order for them to do that I had read in the well-trained mind about the Trivium and quite frankly that made so much sense well looking at the classical conversations curriculum and community I realized that they were doing the exact same thing. The only reason why I didn't go with classical conversations is because it was pretty religious. And although I enjoyed the community days I didn't enjoy the focus on religion. And then when classical academic press came out and their school leg groups I thought oh good it's a secular version but then they kept on talking about the liturgy and basically it was just religious without the religion. and I didn't want that at all so I wanted to build something that was like scoli but it was going to be 100% philosophy based. And then I realized I could build a schooling group that was completely secular but then you had fees and stuff associated with that but basically coming up with the name because scolay is Latin for school or the root word for school but it's more laid back and it's exactly what I wanted where it is a lifestyle and it seamlessly integrates into how you educate oneself or your children. And once I discovered that that's how I figured out how I wanted to get to my end goal I didn't want my children to have a whole lot of busy work I wanted my children to actually learn basic concepts and enjoy a lot of reading I wanted to be able to go outside like Charlotte Mason talked about and I wanted them to learn and appreciate art and music. So I had to find curriculum that did just that and I think I did a pretty good job. Considering that I wanted to take this from a philosophical point of view and I also wanted to make sure that they learned about history so that they would not be doomed to repeat it or associate themselves with groups factions or political ideals or what have you that would lead to the redoing of bad decisions I guess I can't think of a better way to phrase that I decided to go with DK books because while I was going through the well trained minds history curriculum story of the world I liked how they broke it down into bite-sized pieces I liked how it was story based but I also want to be able to have references and I wanted good as non-biased historical information that's possible and considering that it's kind of hard to find real good encyclopedias these days DK publishing is the best I could find at the time. So between story of the world and Geo matters for geography and DK publishing history books I had finally come up with my social studies arm with my social studies arm I would use my philosophy books that named places and people and I would tie that in we would do research on the person the place and what actually took place. Now in the story of the world they do have their geography maps but they were kind of awkward I didn't really like them which is why I chose Geo matters because it has its own maps and things that I kind of like better and it was secular. I often tell people to go to rainbow resources because that's how I found Geo matters it's not as popular as most people think and it has your elementary level as well as your middle-aged group level that is excellent it's actually good it has coloring pages and things like that that are great for younger children and it also has questions and the like for your older kids. So for somebody like me who has a 14-year-old now and 11 year old and a 5 year old I can still use those same pages that I used initially moving forward because repetition is key even though you learn the same thing over and over again as you get older you discover new things that you didn't discover the first time around. And as my older kids are learning the old history now they can find parallels between current events and the past. When you don't study the past it makes it easier to repeat gross offenses that took place in the past.

When I came to the realization that I needed to start with the end in mind I had seen a curriculum map on the well-trained mine website as well as classical academic press as they were rolling out there curriculum and I created one for my own family using all of the curriculum items that I was going to use for my children. When I was going to use them how long I was going to use them I didn't put all of the pages and stuff in there because I hadn't gotten that far yet but I basically made an entire curriculum map from kindergarten on to high school and we have been on track ever since. I was trying to add it in a picture here but I can't find it and I don't know which drive it then I thought I had migrated all of my homeschool stuff to this email account but I guess I didn't so I need to go back and do that. In the meantime I'll just leave this as it is and I'll probably add it in another blog post later as soon as I find it. But I definitely wanted to add it for people that subscribe to get it as a free pdf so they can start thinking about how to add or create their own curriculum maps for their homeschools.