Free World U

I found something really neat last night. It's called Free World U and it's a complete curriculum for the each grade level preschool through high school. It's a flash card style of curriculum in which the child (or in our case, the child and the teacher) evaluate when the flash card has been mastered.

We started on a few of the flash card sections for second grade today. My daughter really seemed to enjoy it! We sat together and clicked through the digital flash cards and she gave me the answers verbally. I think she really thrives on one-on-one attention.

One of the sections we covered today was about maps. It was particularly interesting to me that although she'd covered this material in her public school education, she hadn't retained even half of the material. It seems to me that this offers some depth to the topics that might be missed otherwise.

I have begun to subscribe to the notion that memorization of rote facts is particularly important for the elementary years - as seen in classical education models. I'm looking forward to spending some time with this website for my two younger boys too. It'll be interesting to see how quickly they begin to retain facts.

Being very new to the whole homeschool journey, it's very exciting to me to discover things that will work for my children and customizing a curriculum to get the most value for each child. I'm surprise by how much I'm learning myself and how passionate I've become about education! It's just a fun and joyful place to be. I only hope that my passion and enthusiasm continues for the duration.

On one of the pages of the Free World U site, I found the following quote.

"Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." - William Butler Yeats

I find the quote to be relevant to my little blog.

If you'd like to visit Free World U to see if it's a fit for your family, check them out at freeworldu.org.

Cheers!