Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Free Homeschooling Resources

A few years ago (yikes...more like 7!!!) I was entranced by the free homeschooling resources available on the internet. I'm exploring them again and am just amazed at the amount of materials available. Hopefully I'll be able to list a few over the coming days and weeks. I have an obsession with buying new homeschooling materials...something I need to overcome. There are an amazing variety of resources out there that people have kindly taken to list that are just as valuable as the ones that I spend so much money on.
Here is my favorite for today:

Scott Foresman Math and Science

Thursday, April 23, 2009

What kind of homeschooler am I?

One of my favorite things to do is explore curricula, read books on homeschooling, and design plans for my own homeschool. I'm not so great at implementing them, though! I consider myself a neo-classical homeschooler, but we diverge from this pattern in a lot of ways. I allow my oldest to choose what he would like to do in Science, and in some other subjects.

Recently I've spent a lot of time looking into the Montessori method. I think if I had known more about it when The Orator was younger I would have started educating him this way. I may do it yet with The Smiler.

I've also spent a lot of time looking at the Charlotte Mason method. It doesn't work for us because it breaks readings down into such small segments, and we prefer a more experiment-based science program, as well as history chronologically rather than using two streams.

Right now I'm sitting here staring at three bookshelves full of homeschool supplies and books and trying to figure out how I can make better use of them. I need to add activities and projects back into our homeschool. I love to do them, and the oldest thrives on them.

This year we're going to continue on with ancient history and move into medieval history. I'll be using Mosaic's Myths, Marvels, and Legends as my base (www.bringinguplearners.com), but adding several other components into the program. I'll probably use some of the projects from WinterPromise's Hideaways in History.

I find it hard to weave Orthodoxy into our daily homeschool life sometimes. It had always been my goal to write a curriculum that does this, but it's very hard to pin down what people really want.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Who knew I'd ever be blogging? But since I let my website go, I had to do something!

Hopefully, I'll get most of the stuff up here that I had on my old site.