Ideal Curriculum (TOS Review)

Treehouse Review Week

This will be our last Treehouse Review Week, as our year on the Review Crew is almost at an end. I'll post some thoughts about that at the end of the week.

Ideal Preschool Curriculum home page
Ideal Curriculum info and order page for Transportation Theme
Homeschool Curriculum Page

"Some people want to start early teaching academic skills, while others want to keep the preschool years free for discovery and play. In either case you can help your children gain a strong foundation for learning. Done in the right way, a structured preschool time, can be a fun and engaging way to teach new skills. New skills can also be modeled and practiced in a very informal way through play and discovery."--Ideal Curriculum Website

Recently a homeschooling friend of mine (whose children range from upper elementary through early high school) wanted to increase the family income by doing some daytime childcare. She applied to our region (next level of government up from municipal) to be one of their approved childcare providers, and she also advertised privately. What she heard both from the region and from individual parents was that it isn't enough any more to be a "babysitter," even an experienced and caring "babysitter." Out of fears that childcare providers will just plunk children in front of the T.V. , the requirements for home daycare providers now equal those of any institution. It isn't enough for the care provider to work the children's needs into the life of the family; everything must be scheduled, everything must be planned, including walks and circle times. Even parents responding to the advertisement expected a full-bore preschool program.

Needless to say, my friend decided that she did not need to disrupt her always interesting but fairly relaxed homeschooling day just to sing Eensy Weensy Spider at predetermined times.

However, those who do find themselves in the position of having to answer to someone in that way may appreciate the pre-to-K packages offered at Ideal Curriculum. There are different options for print or downloadable materials, and various curriculum threads (or whole packages) available, some of which are more suitable for formal daycare situations but some of which may work for homeschoolers. You get very thorough daily plans, songs, e-books, suggestions for more books, suggestions for incorporating the curriculum objectives into informal activities (such as looking for vertical lines while taking a walk), and advice on things like guiding dramatic play time. In fact, it reminds me a lot of some of the Sunday School and VBS curriculum I've been given, except that here you're expected to be working on early language, math and science/social studies concepts instead of Bible stories.

Since I do not have little ones around, I was not able to test-drive any of the plans or activities from the Transportation unit. However, looking through some of what's there and remembering how our own children learned, I have to say that I don't think it would have worked well at our house. That's not so much because I didn't like the alphabet marching songs or the e-books about wheels, but because, in my mind, the learning concepts are just broken down too much. It would never have worked for us to break down pre-reading skills (which quickly became just Reading) to just one concept per day or per week, or to know so far ahead of time what that concept was supposed to be. Our own children, as toddlers and preschoolers, learned a lot of different things at a time, but gradually--kind of like the way babies grow all their different parts at once, not eyes-then-ears-then-feet. In defense of the curriculum writers, I'm not sure that they do expect experienced parents or childcare providers to have to do everything in order of X, Y, Z; their general advice sounds a bit more relaxed and realistic than the specific lessons would suggest; but my feeling is that somebody out there does, or at least wants to see everything chopped up like that, and what's being created reflects that demand.

Is all this scheduling practical or necessary for most homeschooling parents of preschoolers? No, not for most situations where a lot of real-life learning is already going on, although you might get some ideas for stuff to do, like pulling a heavy bag of something (or maybe another person?) across the floor on a mat to show why it's easier to move things with wheels. The website says, "One of the big benefits to homeschooling is to be able to speed up or slow down learning depending on your child’s needs. Our homeschool curriculum products were designed to meet individual needs of students. Our built in progress monitoring assessments, which is a big part of our homeschool curriculum, make it easy to determine exactly where a child is in learning concepts and when they are ready to move forward." It sounds like Ideal would like to work with homeschoolers, but the homeschool page just takes you to the ordering page for the monthly kit--I couldn't find any "homeschool curriculum products" there.

Cost: The other downside is that these packages are fairly expensive, in homeschool terms: each month is US$55 for the print version (plus extra for each additional child), or $30 for the downloadable version. Whole-year packages or kits containing only one part of the curriculum (such as the transportation activities without additional math and language) are also available.

Final Take: Unless you are in a situation where someone is demanding that you cover all the preschool bases, and you don't feel you can cover those bases with library books, online freebies, and everyday learning situations, you probably don't need this much of a spelled-out curriculum for a young child.

For more reviews of this product, see the Review Crew website.

Dewey's Disclaimer: This product was received free for purposes of review. No other payment was made. The opinions expressed in this review are our own.