Sunday, March 10, 2013

Favorites through the years.

We're almost finished homeschooling.  The big boy is off, doing well in college, with all As and Bs.  The girl has 1 1/2 years left and the youngest has 3 1/2 years left.  I just wanted to list some of our favorite curriculum choices, things that have worked for us well, thus far.  These do not include everything we've done over the years, just a few of the highlights.

For math, we've used Homeschool Math
Life of Fred and
Teaching Textbooks.

For English/Grammar, we've used Grammar with a Giggle and Daily Edits and we have read, read, read, read and read. 

For writing, we've used Jump In. and a couple of novel writing curricula which didn't produce novels only short stories, but I think made the kids believe that they can do it.  The two who are here at home are both working on writing fiction stories or novels depending on how long they get, which is not an assignment from us, but just something they want to do.  They spend a lot of time on it, writing, typing, editing, dictating, all on their own.   Also, the oldest got an A in Freshman Composition.

For Spelling we've used Sequential Spelling with everyone and with the youngest who has some kind of glitch in his spelling so that he can spell words like superfluous and not words like milk, we've used Dianne Craft's techniques. 

Lately, we've also been using a lot of Youtube educational videos   There are other educational video sites, but this is the only one I know of that lets us adjust the quality down to that they will play on our slower internet connection.
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My favorite in the early years was Konos and other unit studies.  That's a ton of fun and everyone should do it sometimes, if only in the summer or something.  I also think notebooking is really cool and wish we'd done a lot more of it, but my youngest son's dysgraphia had him protesting this a lot when he was little and so we did less of it than I wished. 

I've also filled in some of the gaps with things off the internet, searching for things like "How to write a 5 paragraph essay" or "poetry worksheets" or things like that.  Everyone's education has gaps.  There's no way anyone can know everything.  Finding out what your gaps are, and finding out how to fill them in yourself is the key to lifelong learning.  I don't worry about them much.  I know that my kids are very resourceful at finding things out and learning them, so in college, if they hit a gap, they know what to do.  If you worry excessively about covering everything, someone has written a book just for you.  It's called The Checklist.


1 comment:

  1. It's amazing how good youtube videos are for teaching!

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