Early Adventures in Homeschooling

I'm slowly recovering from the horror that has been the past 5 days of stomach flu, and am beginning to get back to normal life. Mrs. G has inspired me to post about some of our early adventures in homeschooling/afterschooling (since the kids do go to preschool, but it is a co-op and is a completely play-based, whole child philosophy - no worksheets here!).

Other than using the books from the Core Knowledge Series, we have started using the Sonlight P4/5 program.

There are qualities I like about the Sonlight program, namely their science curriculum, and I appreciate that for preschool the sequence is primarily read-aloud books with suggested activities. There are elements I am not as fond of; I plan on modifying most of the Social Studies curriculum and substituting more "boyish" stories for some of the obviously female titles. Somehow I just don't think "The Hundred Dresses" would cut it around here! After all, the beauty of homeschooling is you can customize it to your child!

I plan on sticking with Sonlight's Science program next year, but I think we will be going in a different direction for other subjects. I've downloaded the Robinson Curriculum booklist and it seems like a good place to start, since Sonlight's literature program doesn't include enough classics for my liking.

I've previewed what feels like a million reading and phonics programs and right now I am leaning in the direction of The Phonics Road to Reading and Spelling, although the program is expensive. I don't think we'll start this part of our education for another year and a half (age 6), so I still have a bit of time to scour material and stress :).

That's where we are at right now, and it is still very much in the research stage, so it may change as I find different sources and get inspired by those of you who homeschool/afterschool! Education really is a lifetime of learning, especially when you begin to explore the daunting responsibility of passing it on to your child!