Spurred on by Merrys' post about her CM planner, I have once again done the rounds of the curriculum sites.
Thinking about why a curriculum appeals to me, I'm sure it must be somehow connected to all those years of nanny training and day care management. You have to have yearly, termly, monthly and weekly plans done, so that it can be easily seen what the children will "learn" in relation to the ELG's each day. I also guess it would appeal because then I can say to myself "right Charlie has learnt about x,y and z because we did a,b and c".
At the moment I am very much child led (with the exception of workbooks for maths,science and english) in that Charlie literally started us off by pulling out his Romans book the week before christmas and asking to do a project on that. This is something I would like to continue, but I am just not that creative enough to suggest to him "what" to put in the projects if that makes sense.
So that led me to thinking that a mix of child led and curriculum based would help. Following something like FIAR or AO, and also continuing with his projects along the way, which would satisfy my feeling that all the curriculums out there are US based and so this way I can help to guide along more UK/World based lines as well.
FIAR seems to me to be more US specific than say AO, where because it has its origins in England, there seems to be more flexibility there about how to guide at least some of the content. The thing about either of those though is the reading aloud to Charlie. I'm sure he'd far rather read to himself, and to be honest I really can't bear the idea of reading long stories out loud.
So, in conclusion, I don't have a conclusion and will continue to go over and over this in my mind. Makes it worse that I am the one that will have to make the decision as well!
2 comments:
I can really identify with your thinking on curricula from all points of view.
However, I beg to differ on the 'we did a, b, and c therefore Child learnt x, y and z', because it just doesn't work like that! Well, it doesn't in our house anyway. I'll ask about something they *should* have learnt from an activity and they'll give me blank looks ... and then they'll regurgitate what they have learnt and it turns out to be from the Barbie website [rolls eyes].
I've tried and tried to enjoy reading aloud to my lot but I simply don't (in fact I hate it) and I'm not sure they enjoy it all that much either ... reading the same books individually so that we can both (I'm talking about Anna here mainly I suppose) discuss them has worked much better for us.
Anyway, interesting to read your thoughts ... after two years I've given up thinking about it all now and just do whatever happens to come naturally, with a few workbooks thrown in now and again, and it seems to be working ok, I think ;)
I was just about to questions the a/b/c leads to x/y/z, but see that Sarah beat me to it. We don't use any curriculum (although I had a look at the NC for E+W today, which freaked me out rather - I'll blog about this later) So I am sympathetic to your dilema, have probaby asked myself all the same questions, and don't have any satisfactory answers really. Reading aloud - I hate it, but Hannah needs rather a lot of it becuase of her dyslexia. Fortunately her dad enjoys it. But I HATE the way I am still reading the first para with one eye, while the other is already itching for the page to be turned so I can carry on reading ahead.
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