A List of FREE Comprehensive Curricula

[mamajane]

Thanks for compiling this! Hope it can get stickied.

[ShiriChayim]

[jenny_islander]

I deliberately avoided free-with-registration sites such as Head of the Class, not because I suspect the safety of their database, but because I am just plain overloaded with passwords and usernames right now. If you have experience with a free comprehensive curriculum from a site that requires registration, please post it here.

[daughter_of_faith]

[KLin]

[Kiera]

[jenny_islander]

The Core Knowledge Foundation Lesson Plans

http://www.coreknowledge.org/lesson-plans

Years Covered: K-8 (plus preschool; see my thread in the Lesson Plans forum.)

Lesson Plans/Schedules Included: A complete list of core subjects and topics is given for each year. There are many lesson plans for some topics, fewer for others, and none for some. Besides the lesson plans, you will need to download the content and skill guidelines file, and the Biblical literacy file if desired, from this page:

http://books.coreknowledge.org/home.php?cat=314

Distinguishing Features: These lessons were written for use in a Core Knowledge curriculum. The Core Knowledge Foundation has identified the basic pool of knowledge that is intrinsic to U.S. culture; it turns out that this pool of basic, necessary knowledge is not that large. Teachers are expected to add lessons relevant to local culture (state, city, etc.). So this is not a complete curriculum, but a checklist of basic knowledge with lesson plans, for you to expand as needed. The free lessons were written independently by educators working with the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is why you have a lot of choices for some topics and just the checklist of important knowledge for others. If you want to use this curriculum, you will need to write some lessons.

Additional Cost: Moderate if suggested books and CDs can be checked out and the necessary Core Knowledge and teacher-developed PDFs can be read from the monitor.

Gentle? The question doesn't arise.

[jenny_islander]

Here is a K12 Great Books curriculum for the Western canon, presented with a secular American conservative perspective. The content is irreligious, but the designers take the influence of Christendom on Western history into account.

What Kids Do: This being a Great Books curriculum, kids do a heck of a lot of reading or listening to reading, plus discussion of books and reporting on books read. They also do art, science projects, math practice, etc.

What Kids Learn: Reading, writing, math, geometry, science, art, music, history, geography, economics, civics, and at least two languages other than English.

Cost: High. Recommended textbooks and multi-media materials must be purchased and the long list of children's fiction and nonfiction for each year is supposed to be purchased as well, in order to build a library for each child.

Teacher Beware! While I do think that it's important to keep the Western Canon in our culture, the curriculum designers link to an article by Sophia Cochran about "Cultural Marxism," which is "an offshoot of Marxism that gave birth to political correctness, multiculturalism and 'anti-racism.' Cultural Marxism maintains that all human behavior is a result of culture (not heredity/race)[.]" The designers also dismiss Spanish as a "low-brow" language in which hardly anything that belongs in the Western Canon has been written, and even crack a joke about Spanish only being useful for outdoor manual laborers. Check up on any unfamiliar title in the booklist, especially anything to do with history, before you buy! See also the "Great Books Reading List," which inserts categories of writings from Patrick Buchanan and others of his general viewpoint next to the likes of Xenophon and Cervantes. If you don't agree with this grouping, treat this curriculum with caution.

(On a lighter note, the designers also recommend the animated Lord of the Rings movies as a multi-media supplement. Anybody who has ever suffered through the things will understand why I say, "Gondor has no pants. Gondor needs no pants." Try the BBC radio plays instead!)