Screen Time

Beyond the curriculum: which of the library, the co-op, the outside class, and the online supplement add to a K-3 homeschool, and which only add to the schedule

The curriculum is chosen, the day is assembled, and the family can read whether it is working, which finishes the core of the early-grades year and opens the question of what to add around it. Four resources present themselves to every new family, the public library, the co-op, the outside class, and the online supplement, and each is sold as enrichment while each also carries a cost in time, money, and attention that the core program has first claim on. This issue takes the four in turn, names what each one genuinely adds to a K-3 home and what it mostly adds to the calendar, and gives the test a family can apply before saying yes: does the resource serve the curriculum and the child, or does it serve the family's worry that it is not doing enough. Plus the policy dispatch as the first Texas purchasing cycle closes.

The prior three issues assembled the core of the early-grades year, the curriculum chosen, the day built, and the progress read through observation rather than a school's testing machinery, and this issue turns to the resources a family adds around that core. Four of them arrive at every new homeschool and ask for a place in the week, the public library, the local co-op, the outside class, and the online or app-based supplement, and each is presented as enrichment while each also draws on the time, money, and attention the core program has the first claim on, so the family's real task is not whether each resource is good in the abstract but whether it earns its cost against the core. The library is the exception that is almost pure benefit, effectively free, deep, and directly useful to the early-reading years, and the issue treats it as the backbone of a K-3 reading life rather than a weekly errand, describing how a running relationship with a good library does more for early reading than most paid programs and how to build the habit that makes it work. The co-op is the resource most oversold and most variable, genuinely valuable when it teaches a subject well or supplies a lab or a discussion a single family cannot, and mostly a scheduling commitment dressed as instruction when it is really a weekly social gathering, and the issue helps a family tell which co-op it is actually joining before it commits a morning a week to it. The outside class, the instrument, the sport, the art or dance class, adds a genuine skill the parent may not be equipped to teach and a fixed external commitment the rest of the week must arrange itself around, and the issue gives the plain arithmetic of how many fixed commitments a K-3 week can absorb before the core lessons start losing the mornings they need, which is a smaller number than an eager family expects. The online supplement and the educational app are where the most marketing money and the least evidence meet, sold as adaptive personalized learning and frequently working as a screen that keeps a child busy while teaching and measuring far less than the interface implies, and the issue distinguishes the few tools that do a defined job well, a math-facts drill, a typing program, a single well-built reading app, from the many that occupy time without advancing the child. Running under all four resources is one test the issue makes concrete and repeatable: a family should add a resource when it serves the child and the curriculum, a skill the parent cannot supply, a book the home cannot hold, a discussion the family of one cannot have, and should decline it when it mainly serves the parent's fear of not doing enough, because that fear will fill an unlimited calendar and the early grades are the years when a crowded calendar does the most harm. Plus the policy dispatch, which carries the close of the first Texas Education Freedom Account purchasing cycle and what the opening cycle revealed about how families actually spend the accounts.