Differentiated Curriculum: What does it mean?

Beyond multiplication tables or the life cycles of frogs, beyond the dates of the Punic wars or the names of the Presidents, the most important thing that we can teach our children as home educators is how to think. Thinking is more than memorizing or reacting -- it's making and recognizing connections in the world. Applying this idea to that situation, translating this concept into that context: that's thinking.

Prufrock Press is a fantastic publisher of curricula and learning materials for gifted children. The most impressive thing about their programs, for me, is the emphasis on teaching the children how to think, encouraging them to make connections, and stretching ideas across the whole spectrum of learning to show them how everything is related, how one idea can apply to many situations.

A perfect example of this kind of teaching is the concept of "differentiated curriculum." What does this phrase mean? Each differentiated program takes one broad concept and applies it to many different situations and contexts across the curriculum. Science, art, literature, history, geography -- all are linked by a common conceptual element.

The unit we bought is called Structures, and it comes in three parts. Here's the description from the Prufrock Press web site:


The Earth is a solid structure on which we live, but it is not unchanging. Forces inside Earth constantly change both the inside and outside of the planet we call home. When students consider the concept of structures, they will discover that the word has many meanings. The Structures Differentiated Curriculum Kit provides exciting activities to help students discover the structures that exist all around them.

The books in Prufrock’s new Differentiated Curriculum Kits employ a differentiated, integrated curriculum based on broad themes. This all-in-one curriculum helps teachers save planning time, ensure compliance with national standards, and most importantly, pique their students’ natural excitement and interest in discovery. By participating in the wide variety of activities in the Differentiated Curriculum Kit for Grade 5, students will discover the structures around them and gain a lifelong desire to learn.

In Structures Book 1: Geology, Expansion, and the Arts, students will learn that structures can be physical, natural, symbolic, and metaphoric. Students will explore natural bridges, earthquakes, erosion, Westward expansion, the Industrial Revolution, and more. In Structures Book 2: Cultures, Geometry, and Energy, students will explore the origins of popular nursery rhymes, racial barriers, and geometry and architecture. In Structures Book 3: Government, Cycles, and Physics, students will study cycles in time, business, monetary value, electricity, and magenetisim. Each book contains detailed lesson plans, reproducible activity sheets, and assessment tools.

Other books in the series include Systems, Cycles, Frontiers, and more. Here's a link to the page with all the differentiated curriculum. If you're like me, the very idea sets your brain to popping -- what poem, scientific concept, historical event, geographical phenomenon, piece of art, and political system could be linked with the idea of "cycles"? The whole concept of this curriculum is just magical to me, and it seems like an ideal, perfect, absolutely exciting way to engage a child over the summer, or as part of a really cool, integrated year of homeschooling.

Note: There are a lot of assessment materials and reproducible pages -- which makes it seem like it is more intended for classroom use. This would make the material perfect for use in a co-op or a group of friends all learning together. Ancillary materials are used a lot -- books from the library, or stuff you may have in your homeschooling library, to introduce the scientific and historical stuff.

Shurley English Teaches Itself

There are are some areas of the homeschooling curriculum about which I get excited. Literature, for example, really gets my blood flowing and my teeth chattering. I love to learn it, teach it, toss it up in the air and catch it, feed it cookies, babysit its toddlers, etc. History increasingly delights me too, although that surprises me -- I can remember saying "History is so over" to enrage my history major friends. I love working with the kids on music, art, writing. But one thing I do *not* enjoy, one thing I found galling and irritating as a child and feel pointless and tiresome now is GRAMMAR.

My nod to grammar with Benny has been to purchase some kind of floppy, grade-level workbook a few weeks before our yearly test. We mash through it with our noses pinched, and then he knows whatever capitalization or comma rules are appropriate for him to know, and we leave it for another year.

The one place where we have spent some time learning grammar, and the one context in which it seems interesting and relevant, is Latin. As you know, we use Latin for Children from Classical Academic Press, and in teaching the first level this year, I kept hearing about how Latin for Children is designed to fit perfectly with Shurley English, and how a lot of the methods employed are similar, based on the same research. Well, we LOVE Latin for Children -- maybe, just maybe, I could love a grammar program too. As I contemplated starting Sadie in first grade in the fall, I realized that Shurley English might be perfect for her -- so I bought the Level 1 stuff from their homeschooling-specific line, and had a look.

I have to tell you, this stuff teaches itself! One lesson I learned immediately is that unlike many programs, the teacher's manual in Shurley English is essential. It tells you exactly what to do, what to say, how to say it, what pieces of the workbooks and activity books to use, and more. There are chants, songs, and jingles, along with a very methodical approach to teaching elementary grammar. For someone who is uninterested in charting any new courses or blazing any new trails in teaching this particular material, Shurley English is perfect.

Explode the Code Blends Phonics and Fun

My mother taught first grade for a million years. In her career, she saw trends in pedagogy come and go, including whole word reading, context support, invented spelling, etc. She was a firm believer in the phonics method, and even hoarded old textbooks, saved phonics-based readers from dumpsters, and rebelled against her school system in order to continue teaching first graders to read with phonics. She believed that all other methods were, to use her word, "bunk."

I know my mother would have loved Explode the Code. It is not flashy, and it is not slick == it is solid, reliable, old-school phonics and it will teach your child to read. In this it reminds me of the Bob Books -- also hand drawn, also based on progressive phonics, also reliable as dirt. Now, for those who love learning on the computer, there's even an online version of Explode the Code, which translates the excellent phonics foundation to a fun, flash-based learning environment. Using the web site independently or together with the workbooks, it's a win win. Go here to explore this new online phonics curriculum.

My daughter Sadie has been struggling with reading for years. She is now six, but since she was four she knew all her letters and the sounds they make. She had the tools, the knowledge, to read first grade material, and yet she would look at a word and say "I can't read." This was extremely frustrating for me as a teacher. I am a book person, my older child is a strong reader, how could this be happening? I'm still not sure exactly what's going on in Sadie's head when she says "I can't read." I think it might have to do with her persistent suspicion that if she learns to read we'll send her to college.

Explode the Code workbooks and online games have been miraculous for her. The repetition, the spiralling returns to familiar material, the very very slow steps forward accompanied by many iterations of the words the child can confidently do, have made it absolutely impossible for her to tell herself she can't read. She can. It's undeniable. The words she knows with Explode the Code she knows inside out, upside down, backwards, and sideways. When she looks at me, shocked, and says, "I can read that!" it's amazing! Explode the Code works for us, and if you have a brand new reader that needs the confidence that comes from practice, I bet it will work for you too!

Dreambox Plays Well with Right Start

If you're a fan of Right Start math, you may be interested in checking out this new online curriculum: Dreambox, for K-2 math. Sadie is working her way through Right Start's kindergarten curriculum, using lots of visuals -- tally sticks, an abacus, counters and manipulatives. When we started playing around with Dreambox, she found many of the exercises comfortably familiar, as Dreambox uses these same tools, but in the context of Flash animation and games. Dreambox encourages kids to visualize numbers and think in blocks of five and ten, just like Right Start, and we've just found that the two systems dovetail extremely well.

Dreambox's online math curriculum is very interesting, in that it progresses at a variable speed, based on your child's performance. If something seems easy for the child, the software skips him/her along to something more challenging. If something is too hard, the software pulls back to spend much more time on that skill. This quality means that it's *super* important for you as a parent not to help your child. The software is meant to be used by a child independently, because it customizes itself to the student's strengths and weaknesses. I did make the mistake of directing Sadie a bit too much at first, and that resulted in her being skipped ahead too much. Dreambox fixed it for me, though, and now we're back on track.

Here are a few screenshots of the software:


This shot shows the three sections of the Dreambox world -- the house, the adventure park (where most of the math games are played), and the carnival (where the less academic, more fun games are played). Kids earn tokens in the adventure park which they can "spend" at the carnival to play and unlock games. In other computer math systems I've experienced, there is more difference between the "work" games and the "reward" games, with the reward games being purely fun and the work games being more purely work. Dreambox mixes it up a little -- the work games are contextualized in narrative and have little cartoons and characters to play with, and the reward games are also teaching math concepts. Here's a shot of the carnival. Yes, Sadie's avatar has purple hair -- a harbinger of things to come, no doubt!



You can play for free for two weeks, and then it's around $10 a month, depending on how many months you buy at a time. If you have a strong internet connection and a K-2 child who likes computer games, Dreambox is a great way to teach without worksheets, without pencils, without lectures. The learning is intuitive, the rewards are integrated, and the software is fun!