Now that you are thinking through your educational philosophy and understanding more about your students learning preferences, now let’s think through curriculum.
Per Dr. Sherri L Wynn, Ed.D. author of How to Pick the Right Teaching Strategy for Children and Teens, (pg 24) the world seems to have accepted the term curriculum as an all-inclusive name for whatever content is being taught, I believe it’s important to create categories of curriculum according to type rather than subject matter.
I know for most moms starting into their journey of home education, their first concern is usually what curriculum to buy. My hope is that this process is enlightening you to the facts that “content” can be instructed many different ways and you can do it in such a way that your child thrives.
Dr. Wynn helps us think through categories of curriculum according to a type rather than subject matter. She states “For example, content in science and in mathematics is clearly different in terms of topics yet the essential core of these two subjects area is very similar. That essential core is what I’m calling a curriculum type – in the case of math and science, I call them a Type L curriculum. Type L refers to logical and sequential progression of content material to be learned.”
I developed the acronym PRIMAL to describe six definitive types of curriculum reduced to their essential elements. Dictionaries say the word primal means original, first in importance, and fundamental. All those words fir the meaning for what I describe as the six fundamental types of curriculum. by Dr. Wynn
Here is the chart of PRIMAL Strategies and the match to their relevant instructional practices from Dr. Wynn.
PRIMAL Strategies chart
| PRIMAL | Instructional Practice |
|---|---|
| Physicality | An intensely physical orientation toward learning |
| Rote | A memorizing process using routine and/or repetition for learning |
| Insightful | Perceptive; having a deep understanding of human behavior when learning |
| Morphing | To change; a continuous transformation of oneself while learning |
| Associative | A relationship between independent items discovered during learning |
| Logical | Analytical, deductive, and/or sequential conditions illustrated through learning. |