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Homeschooling, continued

About a month ago, I blogged about the challenges of finding homeschooling curriculum and recommended a book that I liked. Here are some other websites that I found to be interesting:

This website talks about the common teaching approaches that homeschoolers use: http://www.homeschoolmarketplace.com/e-zines/ejournalapr2706.htm

This page says there are essentially four different educational philosophies people subscribe to today. It discusses what they are and how to know what yours is:
http://www.homeschoolmarketplace.com/e-zines/ejournalmay0406.htm

This book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Trained-Mind-Classical-Education/dp/0393067084, is one that I bought quite a few years ago and have consulted quite a few times. I find the "Classical Approach" of homeschooling to be very appealing. However, its main drawback is the huge amount of time and effort it requires from the parent. I have not ever completely implemented it although I tried a few years ago when I pulled my second grader from school. I wish I had the energy and time to do this for all my children...but I don't.  And I'm not sure how well they would cooperate if I did!

Currently I'm homeschooling my 7th grader in English and here is the curriculum I chose:

For grammar (sadly lacking in many English classrooms), I chose Rod and Staff.  I thought my daughter knew more grammar than she actually does so I started at the wrong level.  I wised up after about a week and actually went down two levels for review.  We'll finish that level up before Christmas and then we'll move on to the next one.

For writing, I chose Writing with Skill by Susan Wise Bauer.  I'm pretty excited about this fairly new curriculum.  So far, it has worked well.  The instructor's manual tells me exactly what to do, my daughter has been able to complete the assignments independently and they seem to take just about the right amount of time.

I made a book list from suggestions I got out of The Well-Trained Mind so she's reading from that and doing short book summaries.  In addition, I have a book called Word Roots which teaches Latin and Greek roots, prefixes, and suffixes.  She does a few pages from that each week.

I'll have to report back in six months or so as to how it all worked out!

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