Homeschool Materials

The only places I can think of off hand that might have non-Christian based materials would be amazon.com or ebay maybe. I think you have a great idea getting materials for helping your future children learn. However be careful because it might be outdated by the time your children are old enough to use it. Now the board games are a great idea too those will never be outdated. They've been around so long already. Good luck in your search for materials.

Shop around is my best answer. There is a great majority of Christian home-schoolers, so finding a boxed curriculum that isn't somewhat faith based is pretty difficult. But you don't have to go the boxed route, you can pick and choose per your child's strengths, weaknesses, and interests. I love Discovery they have a ton of hands on things, more for a little older kids, but definitely worth buying in advance. Things like robotics, engineering, and techy stuff. Timberdoodle has a lot of faith curriculum, but another great place to buy things individually and you'll find a lot of hands on activities and such. Even if a child grows into a visual or auditory learner, they all start out kinesthetic (hands on) so these type of things are great tools. And you could check into your local teachers store, there you may find grade appropriate text books, or supplemental materials such as base ten blocks, counting bears, tanigram pieces, beakers, bunsen burners, safety goggles, and things like that One more tid bit. You commented that you don't want to home school yourself, but you do want to home school your children. That sounds like a world of trouble if you ask me. I have learned three times as much through schooling my children than I ever did in public school myself.(and we're not even half way!) Each day is a new day to learn something. And I learn right along side my children. Heck, sometimes they even teach me things, its an awesome experience.

Another good way to get education material's that are not Christian based, is educational software. American Advantage, Encore, Dk and Topic are all good for educational software. Topic even makes a state standard testing software with all 50 states for each grade level, it has 200 different verison of the test for each state too. Its a really great way to see where your kid is at in their subjects. You might be interested in checking out my yahoo group. If you go to yahoo then to groups you can find us by typing in Paganwiccanhomeschoolers. Yeah I wanted to make sure the Bible belt stays away. lol

If you do a search for secular educational materials you should find lots of stuff.You can also do a search for secular lesson plans or curriculum and will find a lot of websites that are geared towards that. Don't be shy about looking for stuff that school teachers use. After all...that's what you're teaching your kids. I'm not sure if you're wanting online (where there's more teacher involvement), a particular style or just what you might like. I will tell you that if this is for future kids you might find that your kids have different things that work for them (even between kids) than what you have in mind.And even when a style works for a child one year that may change as they get older.My advice is to stay flexible. That said, for online schools check with internethomeschool.com or globalvillageschool.org Many states also offer online schooling options now too but they are still public schools.A really good general resource and place to learn more about the different styles in general is homeschoollearning.com Starfall.com is my favorite place for early reading skills. Enchantedlearning.com has tons of printables and craft ideas.If you like the way that kids can access classes on online classrooms but want to customize the materials yourself you can try hotchalk.com or moodle.com. Just come up for a name for your school to be listed under :) Some other stuff I've used (yeah, we're pretty eclectic here): http://homeschooling.about.com Books by McGraw Hill (they even have a book on life skills for kids) For high school many colleges are also starting to offer online options for highschoolers where some of the classes are counted towards college credit as well as highschool. Kids.gov has a list of government websites that are geared towards teaching kids. I really could go on for pages...there's a lot out there. I'm also working on trying to put together a curriculum where you can choose to get just an individual subject for a given grade level or the entire package. It's slow going though since I'm doing this while taking care of infants (twins) and homeschooling our oldest.lol! I just about have the preschool level done. There's just a lot that can be done and a lot of different styles available.Enjoy your journey!

I am a Christian and will instill those values in my children, but I have to agree with you that the Christian homeschool curriculums I've seen are not the best choice for educating. I can teach my kids Christian values outside of math and language arts. Have you checked out SAXON. They have an amazing math curriculum. I'm a former teacher and have looked over the curriculum because I am considering homeschooling. If you go to the website they have a number you can call to order a free sample of K-2 math. They even have a free assessment you can download and print to find out what level to start your child at.

This too was my dilema. As we are not "Christian", this is not to say we are not spiritual, I did not want my children recieving an education that was not of our beliefs and that would simply confuse them. I see someone else has already said one thing I was going to say and that is that you will probably not find a boxed curriculum set that is not Christian. My hope is that as more and more people begin homeschooling for reasons other than religion the makers of Curriculums will address this need for more traditional curriculum sets. Until that time we must pick and choose. Math is relatively easy to find. As it is difficult to bring religion into it, though I have found at least one that did. I prefer, right now, to use the Key-to Curriculums for our math. English was a challenge for us as well but not to bad. I use a lot of the books from Mr. Paperback. They carry a good amount of learning materials in their education section. Science and History have always been the most difficult. Sometimes you can find good materials for this on Ebay, which are usually older textbooks that are no longer used in schools. A lot of what we do is hands on, computer programs we have found, or online research and learning for these two subjects. As far as other subjects you can also add things as you like. We have been studying Spanish for a couple of years now. We finally got a really good program for the computer that makes learning a game. It's called "instant immersion. spanish v2.0". In my opinion it would work for any child age 10 and up. We also work on Mythology and use a lot of different sources for our material. Books about the history of Greece that we find at the library, online websites, and even movies like Hercules. All of these spurn discussions that lead to healthy learning. Anyway, it is alost a temporary full time job to find non-religious material to homeschool with but it is out there. Once you find something that works for you it stops being so frusterating. Good luck