Homeschooling

Question:
Those of you who homeschool can you share some links and where you get your lessons/supplies?

Answer:
OK, hold on to your hat, because this is going to be a long post. :) This is cribbed from a message I sent to a friend of mine, but updated with some new information.

First off, there are a lot of pre-done, out of the box curriculums that can be had, like Sonlight or A Beka, but most of them are religious in nature and in my copious net surfing, I've come up with these resources that we actually plan to use. I'm what's considered an eclectic homeschooler. :) Charlotte Mason gets good reviews, but I don't know much about it.

Saxon Math can be had at their website. www.saxonpublishing.com A lot of people don't like Saxon's "drill and kill" approach, but at least in the K-3 age range, we've found the repetition to be pretty useful, especially for our nephew who has trouble remembering things without tons and tons of repetition. We also use Saxon phonics for the kindergarten level.

CROSSROADS American History is a free curriculum you can get on-line, but it does require a lot of supplementary reading books, as it's a literature based program. http://ericir.syr.edu/Virtual/Lessons/crossroads/

Learning Language Arts Through Literature is a language program we are really enjoying using, as it covers all of the major components of the English language at once, and really it's been a lot of fun for us, too. You can read about it at the publisher's website, http://www.commonsensepress.com It can be purchased at any of these website. For the initial purchase, I suggest the third site, because they also sell the supplementary books as a package, which is convenient. http://www.homeschooldiscount.com/hsp2/CSP_LLATL_overview.htm http://www.homeschoolheadquarters.com/BOOKHTML/LANGUAGE/learnigl.html http://www.buildingthefamily.com/LLATL.html

There are two geography programs we're planning on using -- one by National Geographic that we'll be getting pretty soon here, when we have the free capital that starts at the first grade level: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/education/teacher_store/product_lin es/rt350.html

The second is Mapping the World by Heart; a program that teaches children to memorize the world by drawing amazingly accurate maps. http://www.mapping.com/index.shtml

A geography supplement based on the Peter's projection map, it has various maps you can use during unit studies of particular areas for world history. http://www.ncccusa.org/friend/maps.html

Some unit studies we're planning to use for both world and American history as the kids get older you can find here, at the National Center for History in the Schools. There are a lot of unit studies for both American and World history that just seem to be really interesting: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/nchs/

For science, grades K-8, the Common Sense Press folks (Learning Language Arts Through Literature), also have a program called Great Science Adventures. It will total sixteen books when it's complete, although currently they've published four. One thing I like about them is they are designed for homeschoolers and multi-level learning. So, you could be teaching the same lesson on meteors to your kindergarten and your eighth grader, but they would do different activities based on their level. The books are divided into four learning levels (K-1, 2-3, 4-6, and 7-8). The books are pretty inexpensive ($22/piece), and are divided into Life Science, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science. To make a full year's science curriculum, it's suggested to use one book from each category. I figured, if I kept the health book out of it (we use Steck-Vaughn Health workbooks as a science supplement), we could get each child through the other 15 books twice between kindergarten and eighth grade just by rotating the books around each year. I'm not sure that makes sense. Anyway, URL: http://www.greatscienceadventures.com

Foreign language: http://www.power-glide.com/ We have just started using the Junior Adventure Spanish course with Katrina and Zachary, and the three of us are enjoying learning the language. I never took a foreign language in school, myself, so I'm learning, too, but that doesn't make it hard to teach at all. It comes with a set of eight audio CDs to help. What's really fun is Gareth (the 22 month old) has already started incorporating Spanish words into his vocabulary, because he likes to listen to the CDs with us.

Art: http://www.artisticpursuits.com/ This is a really cool, hands-on art program that also combines a good art history course. We ran across it at a curriculum fair and were very impressed, as was a friend of our's who majored in art in college. It's more expensive that some we've found, but very complete.

Some interesting supplementary resources:

http://www.enslow.com/ Enslow Publishing. They do a lot of non-fiction books targeted towards the middle school age, including an extensive series on the Holocaust, a set on the Constitution which would be excellent for a civics study, and a set of famous people biographies that would be a great way to approach some world history. Read about Napoleon as the lead in to learning Revolutionary France, for example.

http://members.aol.com/amonco/amonco.html American Montessori Consulting, with all kinds of Montessori-oriented learning materials. Most of the stuff I already listed for you, though, takes a hands-on approach which is the heart of the Montessori philosophy, as far as I can tell.

For a Catholic religion curriculum, we do the preschool books from the Image of God series, and we're planning on moving over to the Faith and Life series after that, both published by St. Ignatius Press, but that may not be applicable in your life. :) http://www.ignatius.com

I also have a few other things tucked into my favorites list, such as a K-12 curriculum about breastfeeding, and a free curriculum about practical money skills and related stuff from Visa, but I'll leave those out for now.

I think that's either enough to get you started or totally overwhelm you. :)

> How do you schedule your days/lessons?

We try to keep it fairly free-form. I almost always try to get in at least a math and a reading lesson, which are central to our curriculum and our days. I also try to get in one or two lessons in our other subjects to round out the day. Sometimes I find myself going a couple weeks between history lessons, sometimes we get a bunch done in one week. It's sort of a "how we feel" thing.

> Also, how do you find other homeschoolers in your area?

Well, I bumped into one at the YMCA, who pointed me in the direction of the Cheyenne RECESS homeschooling group, which is a group that gets together at least monthly for a play/relax day, and also schedules pretty interesting field trips at various times.

> Keith and I have talked and we are leaning heavily towards homeschooling. > We have come back to the homeschooling discussion repeatedly. We know it's > going to take our serious commitment but from what we've read/seen it is > quite worth it.

That's how my husband and I came to it, too.

> Any words of wisdom?

Well, we started with a basic preschool curriculum workbook and our religion workbook, and just learning environmentally -- alphabet, reading out loud, etc. When she finished with that, we started on Saxon math and phonics, and then on our other stuff. We really got into homeschooling full swing when my nephew came to live with us and we had to get all his second grade materials. A lot of homeschoolers prefer the "unschooling" approach, but I'm just not comfortable with it, myself.

We definitely find it worth it, and most of the time I really enjoy the teaching, and not infrequently, I learn new things myself. To begin with, I learned that I had a really crappy history education, because I learned things in the second grade history curriculum that I was seriously embarrassed that I didn't know. Like, Magellan's CREW was the first to circumnavigate the globe, but Magellan himself didn't make it -- he died in the Philippines. I was all, "Um, how did I not know that?"