What Your Child Needs To Know Series Book Review

Have you ever wondered if your child is learning everything they need to know in school? Or maybe, you’ve wondered if there is an easy way you can do something to supplement your child’s education? Perhaps you are a homeschool parent, and you are wondering if you are doing an adequate job? If so, then What Your Child Needs To Know Series Book Review is for you!

Last month I ordered What Your Child Needs To Know Series books for first, third, and sixth grades. A couple days after they came I had another sleepless night (common for me-especially when I’m in the nursing baby season). It was around 2 in the morning so I decided to try to read myself back to sleep and I picked up the sixth grade book. Don’t laugh at me, but I enjoyed reading parts of it so much that I couldn’t put it down and I stayed up most the rest of the night reading (history has always been a favorite for me)!

I was impressed first by the English section. I think Charlotte Mason lovers would eat it up. It was chock full of poetry. Next I went to the Social Sciences section. That’s what I could not put down.

Since then the kids and I have all been enjoying to books, and I’m slowly collecting all of them in the series.

What Are They?

These books were created for parents with children in public school and who are concerned for and want to supplement their children’s education. They cover Pre-6th grades.

In these books the author (educator and academic literary critic E. D. Hersch) gives some helpful guidance to parents on how to help assure kids from preschool through 6th grade get a solid education, but then the books move into subject specific sections with chapters which are meant for kids to read through-or parents to read to/with their kids.

Why I Got The Books

At some point I’ll write about the beginning of our homeschool journey, but for now I’ll just leave it with this; My first child straight out of the shoot struggled badly with inattentive ADHD, so it took awhile to learn how to teach him, but it also took awhile for me to find a curriculum that truly worked for all my children, (I was entirely unsupported and alone for my first few homeschooling years). All of this combined with a challenging living situation and babies that were born every couple years + a traumatic miscarriage equaled out to our first years homeschooling being very rough!

In case you haven’t guessed, I purchased the What Your Child Needs To Know books as supplements because due to our challenging beginning, I’ve always been concerned about “holes” in my kids education.

What Your Child Needs To Know Series Book Review- A Surprising Intro

Years ago I was researching KONOS for my kids and called one of the authors to ask some questions. She emphasized that in every single curriculum there are going to be holes. I’ve learned since then that it’s ideal if a person can find the curriculum that works best for their kids early and stick with it, because this just assures there will be less “holes”.

I’ve been told before that the public school education system is no exception, but I guess I didn’t realize the “holes” in the public school system could be as vast as they are. I was completely shocked when I read the intro to these books and learned that these books were created because of the massive holes that can exist in the public school education (see Page XIX- I highly recommend every parent with children in public school read it-you can find it to read on Amazon HERE.)

Here’s an excerpt;

A parent of identical twins sent me a letter in which she expressed concern that her children, who are in the same grade in the same school, are being taught completely different things. How can this be? Because they are in different classrooms; because the teachers in these classrooms have only the vaguest guidelines to follow; in short, because the school, like many in the United States , lacks a definite , specific curriculum.

Many parents would be surprised if they were to examine the curriculum of their child’s elementary school. Ask to see your school’s curriculum. Does it spell out, in clear and concrete terms, a core of specific content and skills all children at a particular grade level are expected to learn by the end of the school year?

Many curricula speak in general terms of vaguely defined skills, processes, and attitudes, often in an abstract, pseudo-technical language that calls, for example, for children to “analyze patterns and data,” or “investigate the structure and dynamics of living systems,” or “work cooperatively in a group.” Such vagueness evades the central question: what is your child learning in school? It places unreasonable demands upon teachers and often results in years of schooling marred by repetitions and gaps. Yet another unit on dinosaurs or “pioneer days.” Charlotte’s Web for the third time. “You’ve never heard of the Bill of Rights?” “You’ve never been taught how to add two fractions with unlike denominators?”

When identical twins in two classrooms of the same school have few academic experiences in common, that is cause for concern….. 

What Your Sixth Grader Needs To Know by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

In addition to gaps within the same school, the author also wrote of gaps should a child switch schools.

I didn’t realize this would be such an issue.

I guess I always thought that there was a complete curriculum that teachers had to cover across the USA in every school. I didn’t realize they had so much room for interpretation.

How I’m Teaching From The What Your Child Needs To Know Books

These books are designed as supplemental education for kids to read through pretty much on their own. Nice huh?!?

I’m basically using them as part of the kids library, and we read from them during our group time. With the younger kids sometimes I’ll have them draw pictures or narrate from what we learn.

I’m also trying to use them to supplement their current lessons.

Do You NEED These Books?

As I am going through these books I will be honest with you. If your kids are in public or private school I would absolutely use them! That is, after all, who they are made for.

If you are homeschooling, I’m not sure. In my case, my kids have already either learned a lot of what is in them or else it’s in the scope and sequence of their curriculum and they are going to learn it. I’m not finding holes in my children’s education as I thought I would.

So maybe you would benefit from them, maybe not, it will depend entirely on your current curriculum choices. Something I’ve learned through the years is that many homeschool curriculum’s are created by educators who create them to be as good or better than what kids are getting in public school.

These books are proving to be mostly a comfort blanket for me as well as a fun supplement for the kids.

With that said, they are a lovely supplement! With the exception of the history and geography portions, we are finding parts of them very enjoyable (we are very partial to My Fathers World Exploring Countries and Cultures method of teaching geography and Around the World in 180 Days which is a Charlotte Mason approach so every other geography teaching method pales in comparison to us)!

My favorite thing about these books, and the main reason I would recommend them are as follows:

• they are perfect for the kids home library
• they will be really nice to make the kids read from when I’m sick-or if I need a break, and on teacher planning days-or in our off weeks
• they are fun and very easy to make unit studies and random lesson plans from
• they might (fingers crossed) help kids test better (this could be especially nice for homeschoolers who live in states that require standard testing like we do)
• if you are like us and have had rocky periods in your homeschool these books can help you fill in gaps-or/and help you realize you are doing better than you thought you were
• If you wanted you could probably use these as a guide from which you could create curriculum for some subjects. You would just simply need to go online and find printable’s and unit studies to go with them.

The only downside of these books is they can be a little dry for kids in places. And we all know dry books are never remembered. That’s why I love to use them primarily a fill in and reference and for teaching inspo.

Disclaimer; So two things. One is I’m very particular on the early years for my children and I’ve not seen the pre-k books in this series so I do not know if I would recommend them or not (I’m a fierce believer in protecting those early years and taking things at the child’s pace with a gentle education).

Secondly, I’ve not read through each of the books entirely-as mentioned this is our first year going through them. I’ll update this post as we finish the books.

Here are some links where you can learn more and purchase the first through sixth grade books in this series. *

I hope this post has been helpful to you! Be sure to check out my other posts including;

How To Create A Multi Grade Homeschool Schedule
9 Steps I Used To Plan Our Home Highschool
25 Tips For How To Plan A Homeschool Year

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