Homeschooling With Depth and Complexity

As we consider homeschooling our child, I’ve been thinking about how I’d structure the curriculum and incorporate the Depth and Complexity framework.

Naturally, we talk about rules and patterns as we spell and work with math. We highlight the specialized language of any discipline (a key component my pal Lisa writes about here). Using the 11 prompts of depth and complexity while homeschooling is not much different from how I’d use it in a classroom.

But I’ve found Universal Themes to be even more useful (and easier to pop in on a whim). Universal Themes give me a way to connect any topic to a larger idea. Power has always been a favorite of mine, but often Change is equally interesting. These are ideas that my 6th graders grappled with – yet my 6-year-old can also handle at his own level.

• We’re adding and subtracting. Now we can also talk about which operation is more Powerful. We can talk about how adding and subtracting undo each other. Perhaps they are equally Powerful, just in opposite directions.
• As we learn to read, the vowels pop out as particularly Powerful.
• We noticed that ‘H’ has a unique Power to Change the sounds of other letters, giving us TH and CH and SH.

I’ll be updating as we progress!