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What I USED to Believe About Supplementing Curriculum…

Over the years that I’ve been homeschooling (we’re now heading into year five!), my perspective on supplementing curriculum has changed a lot. 

At the start, I was firmly against it. I wanted to keep things simple and use a single resource for each subject. I spent a lot of time researching to find comprehensive, engaging, and well-designed curricula that was within our family’s budget. And for the most part, I found those!

As I gained more experience as a homeschool mom, however, I learned that even if you’re using a solid curriculum–in any subject–there are valid reasons to supplement. No curriculum is a silver bullet, and even the most well-written resource might not meet your child’s needs. 

Why We’ve Chosen to Supplement (Sometimes)

For example, here are a few reasons we’ve chosen to supplement our core curriculum: 

• We supplemented our math curriculum because my oldest needed more practice working through written problems. 

• We supplemented our reading curriculum because both of my older boys needed extra activities to improve their phonemic awareness. 

• We supplemented our Portuguese curriculum because I found that I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I wanted to practicing Portuguese with my kids. 

I made all of those changes in the middle of our school year, but I think it’s worth thinking about the issue of supplementing even before the school year starts. With a little bit of forethought, you can anticipate whether or not you might need to supplement your foreign language curriculum.

Who Should NOT Supplement (and What to Do Instead)

I’m all about saving time and stress, so I want to start by sharing my thoughts on who should NOT supplement. I think that this will let a whole bunch of you off the hook!

Here are a few situations in which I think its counter-productive to supplement:

• If your goal for language learning is simply to expose your children to other languages, then pick one good resource and just be consistent with it.

• If your child is taking a foreign language class to fulfill a requirement (without plans to continue) AND is not struggling, then don’t worry about supplementing.

• If you’re in an intense season of life, don’t supplement NOW—but know that you might consider it later, if proficiency is important to you. Focus instead on consistency—taking small steps faithfully.

Yet, if you find yourself—like many of the other readers of this blog—wanting your child to learn a new language REALLY WELL (or even just well enough to test out of college requirements), it might be worth adding some extra resources to your main curriculum.

Who Should Supplement?

Far be it from me to assign more work to homeschooling families, but I think that there are good situations in which it makes sense to supplement.

Is that the case for you? Consider these scenarios in which supplementing your foreign language homeschool curriculum will help your child be more successful:

1. Are you using an actual curriculum? Don’t laugh–I mean this sincerely! Marketing campaigns have blurred the lines about what “counts” as a curriculum. But any language teacher will tell you: Duolingo and Rosetta Stone are not comprehensive curricula. If you’re using either of these tools to learn a language, you’ll definitely need to pair them with structured practice in reading, writing, and speaking.

1. Does your child need or want to become proficient in speaking a foreign language–in real-life, unplanned scenarios? If so, you’ll want to provide lots of opportunities for focused conversation practice. You can find conversation practice in a few ways, but our family’s favorite is with an iTalki tutor—they’re affordable, professional, and available for all languages.  

2. Do you have the availability (and desire) to teach more or do you need to outsource your extra practice? Supplementing can take some of the teaching burden off of you, while ensuring that your kids get consistent practice in their target language. This is a BIG and GREAT reason to supplement—and it’s why our family outsources a good portion of our language learning!

What Can I Supplement With?

The best supplement for foreign language curriculum isn’t worksheets—it’s real-life practice with the language! I’ve written a lot about this on the blog, so here are my favorite posts where you can find these resources:

1. For listening practice: try using music in your target language, audiobooks during rest time, or podcasts in your target language.

2. For speaking practice: choose a family-centered curriculum like TalkBox.Mom, which uses the audio-lingual approach to develop vocabulary or or go for on-demand conversation coaching that pairs with a curriculum like Breaking the Barrier. Obviously, this helps with developing listening skill as well!

3. For writing practice: enroll your child in a Spanish co-op class, or look for an online course that includes writing assignments. For self-correcting grammar practice, I love the Practice Makes Perfect series (offered in many languages!).

4. For reading practice: for younger kids, pair audiobooks with familiar picture books (you can find these in my resource library) or, for older kids, I really like this series of books in Spanish and French.

As a language learner myself, I’ve used almost all of the above resources, and each really helped me to master the languages I was studying. They were worth the extra time and additional money investment (on top of my language courses), because they helped me cement the skills that I was learning in class.

With all learning tools, regular use can make a big difference, so if you do choose to supplement, make sure to schedule time in your homeschooling day to actually use these tools. Consistent practice provides a major boost to foreign language learning!

In Conclusion

Supplementing can be a great strategy for helping your homeschool student really grasp the vocabulary and grammar that he’s is learning in class—to the point where he can actually use it. So if that’s your goal, it’s worth looking into these additional resources.

Have you decided to supplement your homeschool foreign language curriculum? What’s working for you? I’d love to know!