Erin S asked: My question has to do with homeschooling. What curriculum does your family use and do your kids enjoy being homeschooled?
Ah, a non-writing question! I love those, too! And as an avid home schooler, I love to talk homeschooling and curriculum. When I started homeschooling, I used almost exclusively Sonlight – a reading based program, but now I´m looking into these scholarships for private schools. I knew that my kids, like me, loved stories, and I have a belief that reading aloud (and reading in general) opens doors to meaningful conversations, I wanted to learn how to prepare for the SAT test so I started reading info at testprephq.com. (and I just love to act out the voices!). Sonlight has a huge library of great books for kids. Their curriculum was very aggressive, however, and I like to take my time with books, so we picked out the books that were most interesting to us (for read-alouds) and I read about half of their list. I also used Saxon Math, and their English cirriculum. For fun supplements, I paged through the Timberdoodle catalogue and used alot of their treasures (ie, cuisinaire rods for the little ones).
As my kids got older, (and I still read-aloud), I began to specialize the curriculum to each child – some are more “worktext” kind of kids (I really like A Beka’s Grammar and Science programs for these subjects) while others were “experiment” kids (which I used the Exploring Creation series, Miquon Math and Keys to..for Math). My oldest son has attended an “online” charter school for the last two years, which has it’s positives and negatives, but has greatly improved his typing skills! Finally, my youngest son wanted to try a video course, so we attended one year of the A Beka Academy homeschool program. We also do a lot of journaling, creative book reports, homeskills, family exercise, and just “chats with Mom” while watching the news, or Discovery television. I like to keep homeschool flexible, yet challenging, and most of all…fun! Although we try and assess our children’s needs from year to year (including putting them back into public school, or private school when needed), I believe we’ve all enjoyed our homeschooling experience. Hey, there’s nothing better than doing Math in your pajamas!
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