In our homeschooling journey, we have gone through various curricula. Ambleside Online, Easy Peasy All In One Homeschool, piecing it together, to everything in between! There have always been hundreds of options, but I figure it is easier to stick to one thing and go with it.
When I first started, I was just doing little projects and Bible verses with my son since he was the only one. I also did reading lessons with him.
Then I learned about Ambleside Online and decided to try their program. I loved all the rich literature we were able to read together. Once there were three of them doing AO, I felt like it was getting to be too much! That was also the year we stopped halfway through and enrolled them in public school in Panama to learn Spanish.
When they got out of public school after a year, I decided to try out Easy Peasy. I just signed up for the classes as they were and let the kids work through the assignments every day. It worked really well, as long as they did what they were supposed to do. Most of them loved the "Thinking" class as it let them play games on the computer. I would often find them doing "Thinking" even though it was a once a week class!
Today we started another year homeschooling. My oldest is now in 6th level - I had them repeat the year that they were in Panamanian school. I started researching Christian homeschooling sites last night and found some that sounded interesting. The majority of their school this year will follow EP, but I am also adding some extras.
Each day, we gather together and I lead them in some classes. This year, I also added a few classes that each of them will lead us in (by reading the assignment). I will be responsible for Early American History, Old Testament, Spanish, and Know Your Bible. I also will rotate and read once a week from Story of the World, Under the Home, Let's Talk About, and Created for Work (or the female equivalent when we finish it).
The kids will take turns teaching us from Zoology, Art, and Music. Art and Music are just once a week, so that should be pretty easy to deal with.
I also found some great resources for workbooks and full curriculum studies from a few sites. Most of the kids now have their own grade level math workbook from and Language Arts from Plain and Not So Plain.
I also got a lot of ideas of things to do from Freedom Homeschooling. The amount of free sites that she has on her page are amazing. I know I will be back to check it again and again!
As with any year, we will make changes as needed. I think this is a great way to start, even though I heard that today was supposed to be the easiest day since it's the first day...but apparently it was really hard. Ha!
We usually do year round schooling, so we take off when we need to. We also just do schooling typically Monday through Thursday. Fridays are already crazy enough around here!
Maybe I'll add a weekly craft project for Friday or Saturday this year or possibly something else fun. I also plan to read more to them in the evenings and spend less time watching shows or YouTube! Dude Perfect is by far their favorite channel! I also want to play more games and take nighttime walks in the dark around our neighborhood.
I hope to add a missionary study to our day as well, but I haven't found yet what I'm looking for! I really like the Christian Heroes Then and Now series, but we've already listened to all the free ones we can through Libby.
I like "Freedom Homeschooling". It's a great site.
My son will enter high school soon. He is fluent in the local language and can attend a public high school. He is concerned that he will have to study too much if he goes to school. He is also concerned that he will not be able to meet with friends if he does home school.
It is a great site. I'm glad I found it today! We have some friends that sent their kids to school this year for the first time to learn Spanish - it's so hard to want to have meet ups with them and remember that they can't meet during the day due to being in classes. The struggle is real! Thanks for stopping in to leave a comment! 😊
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I'll have to bookmark this post here! It's chock full of great sites and I will definitely be checking it out. We are sort of starting the stuff at home, although it's not going incredibly fast but that's okay. Our son is a very active learner so we know we are going to have some challenges with that lol. We are thinking of sending him to school for a year or two to get the basics that we struggle to teach ourselves like reading but we've been doing more and more at home which is good.
My wife has some sites bookmarked and we have some apps on the tablet that we use but I've been looking for different resources, although not spending a significant amount of time looking. I'll have to check these ones out!
I think learning Spanish is going to be important for sure, not only for him but for me and my wife as well! We can understand a decent amount but communicating back is what's tricky.
I usually set the schoolyear at the start and don't do any more digging. That's what I was doing this week - figuring out what we would be learning! Some of my kids are pretty wiggly as well - that's the good thing about homeschooling. They can start working, move to a different place or subject and then finish at their own pace. Sometimes it drives me nuts, but it works out in the end. And with YouTube and other sites to help teach things that are more difficult, it makes life easier. Like my son just started some Algebra equations last week - I love math, but explaining that stuff might be difficult! Ha!
This indeed is an awesome project, this will really be a sources of blessing to our kids. thanks for being a blessing
I was glad to find all of the sites and hope my research helps someone else down the line in some way.
Thanks so much for digging out those sources, it amazingly helpful. Thanks for sharing.