Even though we use more curriculum in our homeschool, I still find it valuable to enhance our learning environment with other activities, methods, and resources.  This allows us to keep the variety in our homeschool that we all need. 

Whether you home school full-time, after school, or teach in a classroom having a mixed bag of activities can do the learning environment good.  We can all probably agree that children do well with a basic routine and having some sort of idea of the expectations for the day, but children like adults also can benefit from having variety or surprises thrown into their day.