When a homeschool family finds themselves overwhelmed and burned out, it is wise to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum. Is your curriculum meeting your student’s individual needs, or is it forcing the student to adjust to a rigorous plan that exceeds their physical, mental, and emotional development?
God, the Father of all, made each child in His image and yet each child is unique. Homeschooling provides the opportunity for you to honor God by celebrating your student’s distinct skills and challenges. You have been given the privilege of partnering with God to help them soar.
At Master Books, we are intentional about helping your children become confident students who love to learn. The Master Books Method uses a whole child approach to learning which helps you consider your child’s readiness for the subject matter, their attention span, and their ability to retain information.
A developmentally appropriate homeschool curriculum will work wonders for your family! When your curriculum takes your child’s developmental needs into account, these three things will happen and you will experience more educational success than you expected!
1. A strong foundation is created for a lifetime of learning.
Learning for each child requires a symphony of mental, emotional, and physical work. Their attention span for listening, motor skills for writing, capacity to retain the information, and so many other details impact their confidence and their love for learning. We consider all these details as we develop the lessons, the learning activities, and the suggested daily schedule. Our unique approach may cause our curriculum to appear less thorough, when actually it is setting the groundwork for a lifetime of learning success.
2. Lesson-related toxic stress is eliminated.
Reducing toxic stress is imperative to helping a child desire to learn. Long lessons, writing fatigue, and a rigorous schedule are just a few of the curriculum issues that can lead to the child and the family experiencing an unhealthy level of stress and burnout. Master Books considers all of these issues when developing the curricula. One way we work to eliminate stress is to focus the education on the student’s skill level instead of forcing them into an age-based grade level. This allows your student to work at their own pace based on their unique learning strengths and challenges.
3. Performance-based learning is eradicated and learning retention goes up!
When a student feels the pressure to learn for the purpose of passing a test or performing at a specific level, they often experience retention problems. Helping a student love the process of learning is essential to helping them enjoy a lifetime of learning. As a parent and educator, you have the greatest opportunity to explore their learning styles and craft their education accordingly. Master Books lessons offer many types of learning activities, so your child’s needs are met. The length of the lessons is purposefully shortened to meet their attention spans and to give you time to add other learning opportunities that will reinforce the content in a way that helps the student thrive.
In this video Carrie Bailey, the author of Stepping Stones, Simply K, and Catch on to Cursive, shared the following about teaching to the individual child’s needs: “When we stop trying to teach to the masses, we don’t just improve our children’s self-esteem, but we improve their overall outlook on life, on learning, and we reduce stress for them.”
Join the Master Books app to learn more about the Master Books Method of education and to get your homeschool curriculum questions answered. We are here to help you create a lifestyle of learning that everyone enjoys.
