Homeschooler |

Our Homeschool Journey

One of the wonderful things about homeschool is we can craft our own curriculum to suit our children’s needs, and based on what we value educationally. Our homeschool is a blend of Charlotte Mason methods, arranged on the Classical Education timetable. Our values also reflect much of the thinking behind a Thomas Jefferson Education, also known as a Great Books education.

We began our homeschooling experiences with Sonlight, and I still refer to their list and many of their principles, but Sonlight ceased to be a good fit for us when my older two children were in grades 1 and 2. We suddenly found Sonlight to be too much work, and I found their suggestion to spread the curriculum out over a longer period took away the convenience of the daily scheduling for me. That year, we finished a year of study about Ancient Times, and at the end of it, my kids said they still didn’t understand the way ancient times as described in the Bible fit together with what we had studied. They also wanted more creation science in our science curriculum than Sonlight had to offer at the time.

For the 2010-2011 academic year, I planned our own curriculum using A Child’s History of the World as our “spine,” since we had already purchased the book through Sonlight, we liked it, and I was shipping our materials to China.

For the coming year, 2011-2012, I have switched to Story of the World for our spine. Many of my curriculum choices for the coming year reflect practical considerations as well as educational–as much as possible, I have tried to choose curriculum that is downloadable and from which I can print only what we will use. This is to reduce the price of shipping, since we will spend at least part of the year in China. So far, we`re really enjoying it.

For next year, we`ll probably choose a curriculum company who will package everything for us, since we won`t have the option of shopping at different retailers. But I think we`ll probably stick with Story of the World as our core.