If I could only ask one question before buying anything new, it would be this: what does this need from us on a bad day, not a good one? Every curriculum purchase I regret failed that exact question, and I just hadn’t thought to ask it yet.
Where This Question Came From
A boxed language arts program needed forty-five uninterrupted minutes of me every day to work as designed. Our house didn’t have forty-five uninterrupted minutes most days, good or bad. It went back within a month. A “complete” science kit, around sixty dollars, needed supplies we didn’t keep on hand, and the ordering moment always passed before we got to it. Neither of those would have survived even one bad day, let alone a bad week – I just never asked in advance.
What It Would Have Caught
Our first boxed curriculum was in heavy rotation for a month, then down to about a third of its material by month three, and it’s still sitting in a closet. If I’d asked what it needed from us on a rough day, I would have seen it needed a level of daily consistency we simply didn’t have yet.
Why I Trust One Question More Than a Long Checklist
A long list of criteria is easy to talk myself past. One direct question, asked honestly, is harder to argue with. It cuts straight past the packaging and the reviews to the only thing that actually predicts whether we’ll still be using it in a year.
That question, and a place to actually answer it before buying, is built into The Intentional Homeschool Planner.
More on what’s survived that question and what hasn’t is on our Homeschool hub.
