Homeschooling

Hi, mflower2053. My son is grown now (24), but he was home schooled from 4th through 12th grade. We were a part of an "umbrella school" and had to use the lessons they chose. We didn't mind. We used "paces" - each subject was divided into chapters and those chapters were the "paces". It made it easy to carry them to the park or to the beach to do lessons. Here's a link to the company where we got our supplies: http://www.homeschool.com/resources/AcceleratedChristianEducation/ And here's another valuable link: http://www.homeschool.com/new/ On that page, there are links for The Different Ways to Homeschool "The Ten Most Important Things You Need to Know About Homeschooling" Top Ten Homeschooling Books By using this curriculum (and since I was only home schooling one), we were able to finish formal classes in the morning. In the afternoons, my son studied what interested him most. He read a lot, and always got rewards for reading the most books and for doing the most book reports. We also used afternoons for computer lessons, karate, etc. I would definitely suggest finding out if there are any support groups in your area. Our support groups (in FL and TX - we lived in both places during his school years) were great places for socializing. As a group, we hired a Spanish teacher to teach all of our kids. We also had the kids get together for physical education. (Often, that was touch football.) And we did lots of field trips together. Good luck in your home schooling endeavors. It's sometimes exhausting, but always rewarding.

I'm homeschooling my 11 year old. We most use Ambleside Online: http://www.amblesideonline.org/ I use Enchanted Learning a lot as well, for downloading worksheets and supplements. What works best for us is to incorporate her interests into the curriculum. She's into Harry Potter, so we did a "potions" class of science experiments. She loves rocks and gems, so we studied those extensively for earth science. She was into birds for a while, we set up bird feeders and she kept a bird watching journal. We looked up the birds she saw and learned about which bird are more common in different areas.