#1 FAQ: What curriculum do you use?

The short answer is simple:

We use the world.

It is the most common question I get, and the honest answer takes longer than a sentence.

Most publishers answer it with a scope and sequence chart: a grid of topics by grade, which tells you what will be covered and nothing whatsoever about what a child will actually do. So instead of describing the program, I am going to walk you through one real week of it, page by page, and let you judge. It is most definiteely a curriculum I, personally, would have thrived upon as a lad instead of the mindless piecemeal junk I had to endure.

The short version first. I build my own. Six weeks make an arc. Four subjects sit inside one question rather than in separate boxes. Nothing is ever taught twice, so week twelve assumes week six and does not go back over it. Every task comes at five levels of difficulty and the student picks. And every arc ends with the student explaining, out loud and on the record, what they now understand.

Here is what that looks like on the page.

The week opens with a story, not an objective

The week I will walk through is Lower Division, Arc 1, Week 1. It is called Reading the Forest, and its motto is printed at the foot of every page: look first, then ask one good question.

The cover names four things. The theme is the Amazon forest and how we learn what is true. The thinking styles are observational, source-critical and evidence-based. The disciplines are mathematics, social studies and science. And the global challenge focus is knowledge and sensemaking, alongside biodiversity.

Then, before any work, there is a short scene. A girl named Bemoro looks at the forest from a river and sees a place with no story in it, wild and empty, untouched. Her grandmother tells her otherwise.

That is the whole week in miniature, and no child needs it explained to them.

Four days, three subjects, one question

Days 1 through 4 each carry three pages, one per subject, and each page names its own thinking style at the top.

Day 1 introduces. In mathematics, two counts of the same forest: the Kayapó named 650 species they use, and a scientific survey recorded 3,200 species in all. In social studies, a sixteenth-century traveler's journal describing crowded towns along the river. In science, the difference between what your eyes can show you and what they cannot.

Day 2 extends. Counting one small square to estimate a whole forest. Three different ways of knowing the same place, each true and each incomplete. How scientists move from watching to measuring to testing.

Day 3 tests. A fair test in numbers, using leaf-cutter ants offered three leaf types, which produced counts of 12, 7 and 3. The same place described as huge and crowded by one person and small and quiet by another. And the rule that a fair test changes one thing and holds everything else steady.

Day 4 builds the case. Adding up evidence so that the count, the dark earth and the fair test point the same way. Claim, evidence, reasoning as three separate things. And the point that "people shaped this forest" stays a guess until you can name the soil, the fruit trees and the count, and explain why they fit.

Notice that the mathematics is not a mathematics lesson that happens to mention a forest. The 650 and the 3,200 are the same two numbers the social studies page is arguing about.

The part that matters most: one page, five levels

This is the piece I would most like a skeptical parent to look at.

Take that first mathematics page, the two counts of the forest. It carries a figure showing both bars, 650 and 3,200. Underneath it sit five tasks, and they are not five ways of asking the same thing.

Lhasa, worth 1 point. Look at the two bars. Which count is bigger?

Basecamp I, worth 2. The survey counted more, but the Kayapó list named only useful species. In your own words, why is the bigger number not always the more useful one?

Basecamp II, worth 3. How many times as large is 3,200 as 650? Show your work.

Ascent, worth 4. Give two reasons two careful counts of the same forest can be so different.

Summit, worth 5. Use the two counts to answer: which one would you trust more, and for what question? Name one thing even the bigger count cannot tell you.

One figure. One set of numbers. A nine-year-old who is struggling can read a bar chart and answer the first question honestly and correctly. A twelve-year-old ready for it can be asked what the data cannot tell her, which is a graduate-level habit of mind.

There is a rule underneath this, and it is the load-bearing rule of the whole program: difficulty grows upward and never sideways. The first rung is exactly as easy in the final arc as it is in the first week. What increases across a year is the distance between the bottom rung and the top one, never the height of the bottom one. Nobody gets locked out of the question.

The student picks the rung. They declare it before they start.

Friday is not a test

Day 5 pulls the week together, and it explicitly does not start the week over.

Plant Your Flag poses the week's big question: what is the Amazon forest really like, and how do you know? Three levels again. Use three sources and say how each helps your claim. Or use four and show a place where two sources disagree. Or use five, put the count and the soil and the test together, and say what your sources still cannot tell you.

There is a frame to fill in: the forest is really blank, my best evidence is blank, one thing we still cannot know is blank.

The Evidence is a two-page source bank, and every source is labeled with what it shows and what it misses. Carvajal's river journal from 1542 sits next to the leaf-cutter ant test. A traveler's tale and a controlled experiment, on the same page, treated as different kinds of thing.

Three synthesis pages, one per subject, each pulling that subject's week into one task.

Prove Its, four short tasks where careful thinking matters more than length.

The Harkness circle, called The Forest Circle here. One big question, and four instructions that tell you what kind of conversation is expected: bring evidence, let others finish and ask a question before you argue, change your mind if someone has a better reason, and end by saying one idea you will carry.

Then a key words page carrying four terms into next week, and a closing page.

The math supplement

At the back of every week sits a component called Oxygen Math, and it exists because integrated curricula usually go soft on arithmetic.

It runs in six parts. Part One names the four skills that week used and, crucially, says which day each came from, so nothing is new. Part Two gives two worked examples of each. Part Three is called Now You Try, and it does two things: one item where the working has been started and the student finishes it, and one item where somebody else has already worked it and got it wrong, and the student has to find where.

That second kind is called Find the Slip, and it is the best single thing in the program. Here is one: ants took 12, 7 and 3 pieces of leaf, how many in all, and the working reads 12 plus 7 equals 19. The student has to notice that the third number was quietly dropped. Spotting where a chain of reasoning broke is the core move of the entire curriculum, and this is where it gets practiced on arithmetic first.

Part Four is pencil and paper drill with no stories attached. Part Five takes it back out to real problems tied to global challenges, with four moves each time: read it, pull the numbers, work it, then put the answer back into the story.

Part Six is the answer key, and it lives in the student's own book rather than in a hidden parent file. It shows the working, not just the number. The page says why: getting an answer wrong and finding out why is worth more than getting it right by accident.

What the adult gets

This is where most curricula leave you, and it is the part I have spent the most time on.

What Good Looks Like takes real tasks from real weeks and prints a weak answer beside a strong one, with a line explaining what changed. Every weak answer in it is one that looks fine at a glance, which is the only kind worth studying, because an obviously bad answer teaches nothing. It also names the six ways an answer stops early, so once you can name them you can see them. And it names the two things that make an answer strong: it points at something specific, a number or a phrase or a line on the figure, and it says what it is unsure about or what would change its mind. A short answer doing both is finished. A long answer doing neither is not.

The Feedback Pack is seven blocks of text, one for each rung plus Plant Your Flag plus the Defense of Learning. They are not rubrics. Each one is a complete instruction you copy and paste alongside the work, and it already contains what a weak and a strong answer look like at that rung. It takes about a minute once you have done it once.

Printable response sheets, so the work happens by hand rather than on a screen. The rung gets declared before the work starts. There is a line at the end for what would change the student's mind.

How an arc ends

Two things close every six weeks, and neither is a test.

The Brain Bowl is a voluntary team quiz built from the arc just finished. Around forty questions, teams drawn fresh each time, and a private moment for a team to agree an answer before submitting it.

The Defense of Learning is the one that matters. The student explains what they built and what they now understand, out loud, recorded, answering questions they were not warned about. Six weeks of work becomes a spoken account of their own thinking.

What this is not

Worth saying plainly, because some of this will be a poor fit and it is better to know now.

It is not a spiral. Spiral curricula return to the same topics at greater depth. This one does not return. It assumes and moves on. That is why the arcs have to be taken in order, and why you cannot drop in at week nine.

It is not scripted. There is no lesson script telling the adult what to say. There is a week to read and tasks to run.

It is not self-paced worksheets. Everything is designed around discussion, argument and defense. A child working silently through packets alone would get some of the value and miss most of it.

It is not graded in the usual way. Tasks carry point values, and the student chooses their level. There is no percentage, no letter, and no class rank.

What it asks of you

The honest part.

You have to read the week before you run it. Not a script, but you do need to know where it is going.

You have to understand the material well enough to see where a student's reasoning broke. What Good Looks Like and the Feedback Pack are built specifically to narrow that gap, and they narrow it a great deal. They do not close it. No document can.

And you have to be comfortable with a child producing an answer that is short, specific, and ends by naming what they still do not know, rather than a full page that sounds finished. That is the shift most families find hardest, and it is the entire point.

So, what curriculum do we use?

Our own. Built one week at a time, four subjects to a question, five rungs to a task, six weeks to an arc, nothing taught twice, and every arc ending with a young person defending their own thinking out loud.

Nothing in it is a secret. That is on purpose, and it is printed on page one of the home guide. Any teacher can lift the five rungs. Any parent can steal Find the Slip. The difficult part was never the idea. It is the thirty-six weeks a year that have to hold together afterward.