Why We are Returning to KONOS Curriculum

Picture this. New "homeschool" mom talks husband into attending a homeschool book fair. The mom is forty. The oldest child is three. Yes. Three. She is, of course, overwhelmed by all of the choices but one speaker and booth grabs attention like no other: KONOS. KONOS is a unit study curriculum based on character traits that is like no other. It is the original Christian hands-on character curriclum. I like the authors' philosophy, which is to use science and history topics to give homeschooled students active learning as much as possible. Many of the ideas in KONOS take no preparation at all. You can just look at the activity and do it. This is what I needed but had been lacking the past few years. And we have one very "Tigger-like" child, bouncing all over the house much of any given day. Need I say more?

Does it take preparation to do it well? Yes. Is it worth it? I can say that, yes, it is. We stopped using it a few years back and went to a more eclectic/classical approach, trying different things. But during the past year I found that I was drawn back to KONOS after evaluating what had made school seem boring and more drudgery than it had once been. I remembered that I really do like teaching them, mentoring my children in Bible and character training. The time I invited other preschoolers over for a KONOS bird activity session is one memory my now 13-year old son has stamped in his brain. He retained what I taught because it was memorable to him and he did something with it himself. It was fun. When we stopped to study Lewis and Clark while the re-enactors were in town in Louisville the pictures I have of our son and daughter dressed as Meriwether Lews and Sacajawea are priceless!

Fast forward to 2009. Now we are doing a one year strictly American History study ala KONOS and this week we begin learning about the Explorers. Our little group of friends is coming over to make adding machine tape timelines of the Age of Discovery, turn the back yard into a map of the world with the routes of major New World explorers, and who knows what else I will come up with in the next few days. And the interesting thing is these two ideas are not from the Konos volumes at all. We'll be doing those later.

The adding machine tape timeline idea I found elsewhere. Can't remember the source. Of course, first you need to find the adding machine tape. It took visiting a few office supply stores before I located mine, then bought several. (Adding machine tape is a paper roll (not sticky)used to print numbers on an adding machine, prior to the hand-held calculator.

Dear daughter, who was barely three when we did Konos earlier, will finally have fun doing school again. Will post pictures later.