Christopherus Curriculum: Update

I wrote the following for the February issue of our e-mail newsletter and realized that it would be good to share this information on the blog too! This is a progress report concerning the new Christopherus Curriculum.

Second and Third Grade

We’re right on schedule with the new second and third grade curriculums. I am so pleased with them I could burst – and I really think that if you like our other materials you will be thrilled with them: they are deeper; contain more step-by step instructions for artistic work; and are more user-friendly, more doable and more complete than anything we’ve produced yet! I have just finished our two third grade Native American blocks. I have given full lesson material so that you can share beautiful living pictures of the People of the Desert, People of Snow and Ice, People of the Woodlands, People of the Swamps, People of the Rice, People of the Plains and People of Water and Mist with your child. The theme for third grade is Practical Work – and the main thrust of the Native American main lessons is how the people lived – how they lived in harmony with their environments and how the different ways the different people hunted, farmed and built their homes was/is an expression of this. Thus part of the Building theme for third grade finds expression in an exploration of how different Native American peoples lived/live and built their homes.

Building is also picked up again in two Practical Work main lessons where I suggest a host of practical building projects. Measuring, the main topic for third grade math, is presented and then picked up again through practical building work. And creating a Three Sisters Garden comes out of the Native American main lessons and is a large part of the practical work in the latter part of third grade.

Weather is the main science topic for third grade (see here for more on how we have developed our Christopherus science curriculum for all 8 grades) and is woven into a number of lessons as well as its own mini main lessons.

So you can see how the third grade curriculum in particular is really one integrated whole (there’s more than I have mentioned here as well). This is one reason why we have only made one component of the third grade curriculum available separately (Old Testament Stories) as opposed to three in second grade (Animal Legends, Saints & Heroes, Second Grade Math).

Please see here for a simple overview of our second and third grade curriculums and here for answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the new curriculum).

Fourth and Fifth Grade

The fourth grade curriculum lends itself more easily to being split into components and we will probably have at least two main lessons available separately (Fourth Grade Math at the end of the summer or early fall and then Man & Animal at some later point.) We also plan to have a fifth grade Ancient Myths book available (perhaps early 2009) to join the fifth grade Botany which is already available.

At some point after the third and second grade curriculums are available, we will have a page up on our website to help homeschoolers bridge the current gaps in our curriculum. This will be a How to Put Together Fourth Grade page similar to the current How to Put Together Second Grade page. Parents of 2008/09 fourth graders will have our fifth grade curriculum ready for them when they need it! And then the intention is to start producing the middle years curriculum.

Sixth through Eighth Grade

At the moment my thoughts on that are to put together 6th – 8th grade books by subject so that parents can customize, depending on the needs of their middle years children. In other words, we will, most likely, have Middle Years Math, Middle Years Science and Middle Years Language Arts books (this latter volume being the second in the series of Living Language Language Arts books, the grades 1 through 5 already available).. These will be joined by a selection of various main lesson books (like the current Roman History and Middle Ages unit studies) so that there is a lot of flexibility in how one sequences the work. In our Waldorf Curriculum Overview I discuss how the middle years curriculum is much more fluid than the earlier years curriculum and how one can work with that at home. Anyway…. more on this later next year!