With RC you really only have to teach the younger ones. They’re the ones that are incapable of being self-taught until they grow into it and mature into it. And if you would like special help with that, other than the Course of Study and all the resources you find on our website and so on, then what I recommend is purchasing the RC Course for Littles, by Karen Rodriguez. She just finished it and she’s put a lot of time and effort into it. It really goes into a lot of detail about how you take those little ones, get them started and then get them to the point where they are self-taught. She’s taken the outline that Dr. Robinson has laid out and just filled it in with a whole lot of detail. That might be very helpful to you.
The beauty of the Robinson Curriculum is that, as the kids use the curriculum, get used to being self-taught, and grow to being self-directed, active, independent learners, they’re going to become more mature and more self-taught over time, and you’re going to find yourself with less and less to do besides just reading through what they write everyday and marking it for any errors, and printing out the materials for them. The beauty of that is that, unlike a lot of home school paradigms, whereas the students get older, the material gets more difficult, the job of mom gets harder and harder, because she’s got to be the teacher to all these increasingly difficult subjects for all these multiple different grade levels, with our curriculum and our methodology, your job gets easier and easier as the children get older and more self-taught. Because they’re going to be learning to solve problems with the math, learning how to express themselves in their daily writing, and that’s one of these practice makes perfect type of things.
With their vocabulary and their reading, they’re learning how to absorb the knowledge out of a book. They’re learning how to meet that author half way. And the author of a book becomes their teacher, because they’ve just got such a high skill level of absorbing the knowledge out of a book and being able to comprehend what they’re reading, what this 6,464 word vocabulary system that we have. So it’s kind of virtuous system in that everything reinforces everything else and your home schooling gets easier and more successful as time gets on.
The Robinson Curriculum has a very simple structure that starts with the math, then writing, then a couple of words of vocabulary and then their reading. And yet within that structure, we cover all the different subjects that you could name. There’s a wide variety of different subjects covered under the reading. And then with the math, they’re really not just learning problem solving, but they’re also learning the language of science so that when they’ve done their math to a certain point, they can start doing applied math, which we call science, where you take the math you’ve learned and you apply it to the real world, in chemistry and physics and thermodynamics and statics.
With RC you’re really setting them on a course where we don’t know what the future holds for them, but you’re going to give them these super valuable skill sets of solving problems and being able to think clearly and absorbing the knowledge out of books. That whatever course their future leads to, they’re going to be well-equipped to pick up a book on a subject and get up to speed on it very quickly. They’re going to be able to solve problems that we don’t even know exist yet and I think it’s the best way to prepare these kids for life and higher education if you go that route.
A lot of RC students are able to cram for a couple of weeks and take the Advanced Placement Exams for courses and just test out of their first one or two years of college if they want. That saves you a lot of time and money as well.
The Saxon Math that RC recommends was originally made for remedial students, and to be used in a school. But Dr. Robinson found out the hard way because he lost his teacher, his wife, for the kids that those Saxon Math books are so good that they are the teachers of the math for the kids. And so, over time, the books are structured such that there’s always a little number in italics in the margin. So if the student is reading this problem, and they’re not getting it, they can refer to that italicized number in the margin and that is the lesson where that kind of problem was originally taught. So they can just flip back in the book and review that lesson.
And then RC uses techniques where if you read it out loud, you involve more of your senses, right? You’re reading with your eyes. You’re speaking with your mouth. You’re hearing yourself with your ears. And it just helps your whole mind focus on what it is you’re trying to learn. And Dr. Robinson has a thing where you’re supposed to do one or two lessons a day, but if you get stuck on something, you’re allowed to just skip that particular problem until the end of the lesson and then you go back to it. And meanwhile, your subconscious has been working on it. And so you go back to it and you try it again at the end of the lesson and then you review the lesson where that kind of problem was originally taught by referring to that number. If you still don’t get it, then you just spend the whole next math period of just that one problem. You re-read the lesson. You read it out loud. You read your problem out loud. And you just work on it for an hour or two, depending on the age of the child. And then if you still don’t get it, you’re allowed to skip that problem and just move on.
The reason RC encourages self-teaching is because we never want to teach the child that, “Well, when you have a problem and you reach a certain threshold of frustration with a problem, some nice person’s going to come along and do it for you,” and give them that crutch. We don’t want to do that. We want to leave that brain thinking subconsciously through the night for that next day, “What have I missed? Where did I go wrong?” And as it turns out, the way our brains work, we can train our brain to become a problem-solving machine. And the beauty of that is that once you learn how to solve problems in math, that skill is transferable to any other area of life where you need to solve problems, because it’s kind of a universal skill in that way.
The RC self-teaching methodology is explained in our Course of Study that Dr. Robinson has written. And the other thing I wanted to explain to you, too, because you’re the parent, when you sign up for the Robinson Curriculum, you get the 12 Course of Study documents written by Dr. Robinson that explain to you as the parent, here’s how you set up and run a self-teaching home school. And the part on math and science is one of the big ones like 23 pages. And then we have our 13-part video course by Karen Rodriguez from a mom’s point of view exactly how you use this curriculum and print things out and so on. And then you’re invited, when you buy our curriculum, to join our Robinson Curriculum Official Group on Facebook with over 5,000 members, and those 5,000 members represent centuries of experience with this curriculum. So you’ll never face a situation or have a question that someone hasn’t already been there, done that, is more than willing to help you. Plus you get to search the tens of thousands of past messages that are already there in that archive.
The Robinson Curriculum also comes with a 60-second, zero-frustration support policy, and that means you never let more than one minute go by of any kind of frustration before you pick up the phone and they are going to make it easy for you. If phone support can’t help you, the Robinson family, which is like six PhD’s, which have all used, are all trained, and grown up with this methodology and now using it with their children, they’re there to help as well. And so it comes with a very rich support system to just help you make sure you’re successful with your family using this curriculum. And for a dirt cheap price. It’s our way of making sure that we’re true to our motto: “We Prevent Mom Burnout.” Meaning we don’t want home schooling to be a high stress event in your life, and we don’t want the expense on your finances to be a high stress event either. So we’re low stress coming and going here.
Another source of stress is to have so much material that you essentially become a curriculum developer yourself, and RC tries to remove that, too. They are very, very conservative. They’re very Christian. They’re very conservative in that you won’t find hardly anything in the Robinson Curriculum that isn’t a selection of the best books by the best authors, proven over time, usually more than a century, as being one of the best books out there. So your child is always being fed academically from the rigid diet, the best of the best, de creme de la creme of what our language and civilization has to offer. And that way, their minds are always being lifted to a higher plane of thinking and values, and so on. And that’s because RC wants you to have confidence that it is the very best. With a lot of curriculum, sad to say, they’ll hire people to write their curricula, and then they have a proprietary hold on that material. Well, RC is not interested in that. They use copyright-free material that is just the best out there. And just charge a whole lot less and just make sure they budget on a shoestring so that you don’t have to.
RC has Saxon Math Placement Exams available. The links are right there on the Order by Internet page, and near the bottom of the order form you’ll see a link for the Placement Exams. Administer that to your students and that will tell you exactly which Saxon Math book would be the appropriate one for them if you wanted to use that. If you can’t afford it, if money is tight, we do provide Ray’s Arithmetic — it’s a great math curriculum — in RC Online’s Bonus Materials section. Dr. Robinson used Saxon Math very effectively with his kids, and so we know it works with our methodology and that’s why we recommend it. We don’t recommend the early Saxon books, K through 3. We start with 5/4 and go on from there, because we want them to get into problem solving right away. As soon as they know how to count to a hundred and they know their math facts, using randomly ordered flash cards, then they’re ready for a three-digit addition and subtraction once they know how to read. So that would be Saxon 5/4.
RC starts them learning to read with Alphaphonics. Public schools often use Look-Say where they are taught to look at words as if they are pictures rather than phonics. It has the effect of being easy at first but gets harder and more frustrating as the material gets more advanced. The Alpha-Phonics book in our Bonus Materials section was made to help remediate students exposed to Look-Say. You want something where there’s no pictures involved, where they’re taught to look at words as groups of sounds and so they sound everything out phonetically. Stay away from Look/Say, which is associating words with pictures, looking at words as if they’re pictures. So they could look at the word “horse” and say “pony,” or something — no, no, no. We have to sound them out.
Learning your math facts is really important, because once you know your math facts, that forms the foundation for a child’s life, for all their quantitative thinking of any kind they’re going to do for the rest of their lives. It’s all going to eventually break down to simple math facts. So knowing your math facts, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, through the 12’s by rote memory is a really good foundation for them. RC provides those flash cards both digitally and printed on heavy card stock.
With RC this is their day: math, writing, vocabulary, and reading. To start the math they learn to count, then they learn the math facts. Then it’s 5/4 through Calculus. And then after that, applied math where you’ve got chemistry and physics and thermodynamics and statistics. So that’s the whole math, problem solving side of things. Then with their writing, they just write a page every day and you mark it for any errors. They can write on any topic in any style that they want. But they have to fill up one page. When they’re younger if they can’t think about what to write about, you can give them copybook writing out of scripture. Say, “Here’s the Psalms.” Start with one then work your way through copying out one full page’s worth each day. And then with the vocabulary, no matter their age, we want them to start at the beginning. There’s 6,464 words so they just start at the beginning and study. They have to learn what those words mean and how to use it in a sentence and how they’re spelled. RC has flash cards for that. Again, you can print your own out or you can purchase them. With the reading, there’s 150 books in the Core Read Order, and so the younger ones just start at the beginning and work their way down, an average of a book a month, as fast as their capabilities allow. With the older ones, you just take how many years of school they’ve completed, multiply by 12. That’s the book number you can start them in. It’s really straight forward. It’s as simple as they can make it, and yet very high quality.
(Specific to our family) RC is flexible about how much time you put in. Some people want to do four days a week. RC recommend six. Our family did five days a week on all the subjects, and then Saturday we just required the math. Then, instead of taking a big break off for the summer, you take lots of little breaks throughout the year. So long weekends, visits, traveling. Then they don’t get cold on the math, which if a student quits math for two months, it takes two months to get back up to speed again. You have lost a third of the year, four months. And so better to keep up with the math as much as you can. Our kids just tested wherever they were in the math, with the Saxon. But with the reading, they were all post-college graduate level.
For many moms, their biggest problem is they have this inferiority complex that, because they’re a stay at home mom, they must not be as good as “teachers” are, when in fact, they’re far superior and they just don’t realize it. Nobody knows your children better than you do. Nobody understands them more than you do. Nobody loves them more than you do. Nobody has their best interest at heart more than you do. Guess what? Those are the things that make you best qualified to be the teacher in their lives. No, not some degree from some college or something. And nobody has a stronger interest in your child’s well-being and their education than you do, as their parents, and so never feel inferior to officialdom and people waving around a certificate and basically usurping parental authority. God gave parents all the authority over their children, not bureaucrats or government officials.
