Anyone who’s read about our adventures for any length of time knows that we’re quite eclectic homeschoolers, far to the left on the spectrum towards unschooling. Different periods find us using different methods and materials, and sometimes we’re not doing anything at all schooly. We’ve never used anything approaching a comprehensive curriculum before, and I certainly didn’t go looking for one! But Leigh recently swapped a Winter Promise package for a Moving Beyond the Page package (roughly, anyway) and offered to share with me.
I’d never explored MBTP before. It’s a multi-age, multi-level comprehensive program aimed at gifted kids. Each age group (we’re using 6-8) contains four “Concepts,” each Concept has three Units, and each Unit has about three weeks worth of lessons, activities and a final project. Each Concept should take roughly 9 weeks. Because the “year” is broken down this way, the materials for each Concept are completely separate, and so Leigh let me borrow Concept 1: Community while she starts with another Concept.
Yesterday I was paging through the parent’s guide and activity book and JediBoy came up to sit with me and wanted to talk through some of the activities, including “Limited Resources” where he was presented with a situation: you have a new dog and only $15 for supplies, which of these tagged items do you buy? He thought it was fun and the conversation sparked by that one activity was a good one. So I asked if he’d like to do a little of this every day, and he eagerly agreed.
Today we looked at Lesson 1: Exploring a Community. We talked about community buildings and maps and read The City Mouse and the Country Mouse, and discussed the words rural and urban, and he decided he’d rather live in the country because “It’s safer there, and you can smell the beautiful flowers and sit by the rushing stream or maybe go swimming in it in summer, and there would be so much peace and quiet.” He drew a picture of himself in the country and a map of a made-up neighborhood, including a police station marked with “a picture of a robber crossed out.” There are some worksheet-type activities (The library is useful because _______.) but because he’s not a strong writer, I encouraged him to just finish the sentence orally.
I hadn’t planned to find a CURRICULUM, and once Leigh offered me the use of this one, I hadn’t planned to start until July, which is when I’ll officially start homeschooling JediBoy, according to the state. But JediBoy found it interesting, and he’d started to ease off on his interest in a small daily dose of Math U See as we came to the end of Alpha. I like to have something to do with him one-on-one for a little while each day (I think we spent about 45 minutes on this lesson, plus the extra time he took to draw his map). We’ll see where this takes us! In the meantime, if any of you have experience with MBTP, I’d love to hear it!
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