What is a Family-Style Homeschool Curriculum?

The Global Explorers Club is an “Around the World” family-style homeschool curriculum. Family-style learning is an approach that involves teaching children of different ages together as a family, rather than separating them by age or grade level. Using a family-style homeschool curriculum can be an enriching educational experience and offers many benefits over a traditional homeschooling curriculum.

Learning together fosters family unity.

With a family-style homeschool curriculum, you’re easily able to foster a sense of belonging and connection through shared learning experiences.

Multi-age learning offers many opportunities for collaboration and leadership.

Let’s face it, social and emotional intelligence is critical these days. When children work together to complete a project, it allows them to practice critical leadership and social skills such as collaboration, communication, and cooperation. In a supportive family learning environment, everyone, regardless of age, is encouraged to share their knowledge and skills with others.

It will save you both money and time.

A family-style homeschool curriculum can be cost-effective for families with multiple children since most of the materials and resources can be shared. Similarly, since you’re able to combine lessons among your children, you’ll free up a lot of time as well. One of the greatest benefits to homeschooling is the freedom it allows your family, so finding a curriculum that doesn’t encroach upon other priorities such as outdoor time, play groups, or extra curricular activities is important.

A family-style homeschool curriculum offers you flexibility.

A family-style homeschool curriculum can be customized to fit the needs of your family. It will often incorporate lessons that are appropriate for multiple ages, such as hands-on activities and games. Here’s just one example of how to easily adapt a Global Explorers folk tale lesson for multi-age learners:

• Together, listen to the suggested Circle Round folk tale for each country
• While you’re listening, learners may either draw a picture in their learning journal or color in the provided coloring sheet.
• Afterwards, lower elementary learners can provide an oral narration of the folk tale, while upper elementary learners can work on a written narration.
• If you’d like to work on writing skills, younger learners can complete the Writing Revolution sentence strategies orally. You may transcribe their sentences into their learning journal along with the picture from the folk tale.
• Older learners can work on their sentence strategy sheets independently, first writing and then revising their sentences. As they grow more comfortable writing, encourage them to begin writing paragraphs and add on from there.
• Each Circle Round folk tale also includes a journal prompt. This is a wonderful opportunity to engage in a family discussion and share one’s thoughts and feelings. Children can then be encouraged to either draw and/or write in their journal, then together complete the suggested activity.

Best of all, learning together encourages lifelong learning.

If you’re looking to cultivate a love of learning and curiosity among your children and your goal is to have them become self-directed and self-motivated learners, there’s no better way than by setting the example yourself. Pick a topic you’re passionate about and share it with your children. Take notice of what their interests may be and share in their enthusiasm. Together, challenge yourselves to learn a new skill. Allow your children to see you make mistakes, persevere, and grow.