What cirriculum do you use in Homeschooling?

[mrscoyote]

We use Sonlight and love it.

 

[rhoda_bruce]

I use Seton Home Study. If I was a stay at home mom, I could think on coming up with my own curriculum, but Seton makes that easy. It is a Catholic home study program and is pretty tough, but we are strict about certain things so thats Okay.

 

[Shiloh Acres]

There are so MANY good resources out there that it can be a full time job to assemble something. Different things work for different kids at different times too.

We started with Saxon for math, which was SO repetitive (good for some kids) that it bored my dd. I switched to a workbook style (silly me) that was worse. Then we went to Abeka, which was fantastic for her fir math through elementary grades, because it introduces an entirely new concept (or at least builds) every 1-3 days. But there is frequent enough review of lesser used skills (like Roman numerals) to keep her from forgetting anything. I still think it's an excellent math program for most kids. When we got past 6th grade we switched to Saxon, which was "boring" by comparison but I felt it offered a solid grounding. We supplemented heavily with a book called "Painless Algebra". She loved the entire Painless series.

For history I did use some outline texts including Abeka, Streams, The Light and The Glory series, and others, but mostly we read biographies. Some are better and more interesting than others. She loved ones with personal little tidbits about the people. I think that made it more real to her and more memorable than the facts we are all expected to know.

Literature was easy. She loved to read. I bought a few lit based unit studies when she was small and from that got used to discussing the story and ideas and how it was presented. We often listened to books on tape while driving. They can illustrate the stories, write mock newspaper articles about them, diary entries from the point of view of a person in the story, or someone who knows them who does not appear in the story. Great learning opportunities and lots if interaction, as well as teaching them how to think and what shapes our thinking can come from this.

We liked Writing Strands for writing and soon developed alternate lessons from them. A good curriculum can teach you how to teach, and if you are willing to tailor it to your child's interests, I believe they enjoy it more, learn more, retain better, and by becoming more involved in their own educational process they are more motivated to keep learning.

For science, I liked to pull from a lot of good experiment books. We did a little explaining but a lot of showing. I followed her interests there (a big tsunami in the news resulted in a semester of earthquakes, tsunamis, branching out into erosion, caves, rocks, etc.). When she was smaller I had her make models and 3-d posters of things to put in the schoolroom to remind her. We would ocassionally review terms oral exam style.

Spelling power was by far the best spelling curriculum for us (a weak area for dd in lower grades). She disliked handwriting so I didn't push her in it. People said she'd never learn but she has beautiful handwriting now and the fact that I let her type her lessons resulted in strong typing skills.

She took piano lessons, went to performance art day camps. Gymnastics lessons and some PE classes with the local homeschooling group. We played basketball and sometimes other sports. We also had a coop for lessons and social time, and a friend taught them art. I used other art programs and learn to draw books. She studied several languages included basic Latin. We studied Bible, used several critical thinking programs, mapping, used a number of grammar programs (Shurley, Abkea, and the one using diff colored workbooks each year were favorites). She learned to make a website and maintained her own. We went on many, many field trips with the local hs group and joined several other groups for parties, crafts, holidays, etc. She also went to a regular school based program one day a week.

I guess we were very eclectic. We made heavy use of the library, the Internet, bought used curricula, and borrowed from friends. We did a thousand things I forgot to list. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I think dd did as well. She always compared very, VERY favorably to publicly schooled kids academically and had a bigger variety of social interactions than they possibly could, as well as having a number of same-age friends that she saw quite regularly.

Ah too long. And I think it's hard to tell anyone "what's best" ... because so many good resources exist. I think it's more about tailoring it to the child and involving them than anything else. I didn't do that perfectly -- I kind of doubt that's possible. But I think I did a pretty good job and she turned out great academically and socially.

I'm very proud of her.