National Novel Writing Month is over. So, I'm declaring December my Read-A-Lot month to balance out all the time I spent writing last month. Today, I started "Creating Standards-Based Integrated Curriculum"
by Susan M. Drake. I was attracted to the title because I feel like this is exactly what I've been doing for the past four years as our oldest prepares to graduate from high school and I have to write a transcript that accurately represents her academic and extracurricular experience.
Drake supports the development of curriculum that is both relevant to the learner and accountable to required standards. This is basically the concept that we used in the creation of Vacation Education Epcot and Vacation Education Magic Kingdom, as we developed educational unit studies based on the exhibits in the parks (relevant) that included all the core subjects (standards).
Of course, as homeschoolers we do not have to meet the same hard and fast standards that are required of Drake's audience of teachers in traditional schools. We have the freedom and responsibility to establish our own standards based on the needs of our students.
The standards for classroom teachers are frequently changing, usually at the whim of an administrator who has had limited if any experience teaching children. As homeschoolers, our standards are ever changing as well, as we discover the gifts, talents and challenges of each individual child.
Drake promises a backwards approach - rather than creating a curriculum and then hoping it meets these ever-changing standards, she offers a method of analyzing the standards for their true meaning and applying them to any curriculum. I've just started to read this text in hopes that it will help me to accurately write course descriptions for the credits on my daughter's transcript.
When she started high school, we looked up the Indiana Core 40 and used this as a template. Filling in the basic academic credits were easy. It's the courses such as "Pregnancy, Childbirth and Newborn Care" that we did in place of Biology or "Personal Finance" that replaced a semester of Integrated Mathematics. And, I still have to come up with a creative name for the course where the student learns to do their own laundry...
So, I'm curious to hear from other homeschooling moms: How do you develop curriculum to meet your standards for education? And, how do you determine what those standards are?
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