There is a nice article on the textbook we used in our capstone homeschool course on the history of the United States. The name of the book is A Patriot’s History of the United States. It is truly a stellar resource for homeschoolers or anyone else who wants to understand the true history of the United States. Dependence on undersourced screeds written by the likes of revisionist historians like Howard Zinn have played havoc with the public’s understanding of Amercian history.
Day: December 25, 2014
The sun is shining, the air is crisp and the sky is blue on this beautiful Christmas day in Raleigh. We have had snow and rain on Christmas day in past years. I like them both, but this is very nice, too. I am getting a little nostalgic. This might be our last holiday season in Raleigh. The picture above is a view from the screen porch. The leaves have all fallen from the deciduous trees so we can see through to the blue sky a little better. The picture below is a view from the bonus room where my “work at home” office is located. If we go, I will miss it all. A lot.
This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.
Once we decided to bail on the traditional schools, we needed to make some decisions about how to homeschool. The way we did it three years before when Kelly was in the first grade was too much work. I explain that here and here. We wanted to have assurance that whatever we did would cover the material needed to perform well in high school and college. The reality is that we had somewhat of an idea of what should be covered from our previous experience. We hoped we could find a program with similar content and focus, but that did a lot of the planning for us.
Part of the challenge is that Lorena would be at home with the kids during the day, but even though I worked all day, I would be the principal teacher. That was why it was so critical to find a system that included detailed daily plans. There are lots of great programs out there. We looked at Sonlight, A Beka, Bob Jones, Charlotte Mason, Beautiful Feet and a lot of other programs. We liked the idea that the books in the Literature curriculum were coordinated with the History curriculum. We wanted a program that included extensive day-by-day plans and all the required materials and books, but that also provided some flexibility.
After looking at a lot of programs we determined was that it was going to be difficult to find all the things we wanted in single program and that whatever we did, we were going to have to pay a good chunk of money to do it. It would be a lot less than private school, but because we started from scratch and needed two complete programs we figured it was going to cost us about $5000 for the first couple years. After that, Christian could use Kelly’s program from two years previous and the cost would drop a little. I believe it is possible to do this for a lot less money if more time is available for planning and materials searches, but we did not have that luxury.
In the end, we arrived at a method for buying materials and daily planning that served us well during the entire trajectory of our homeschool with only minor modifications. I will walk through our decision process for each of the different subject areas for which we bought separate materials. This is the thing that got us off on the right foot, provided the structure we need to make homeschool tractable given our circumstances and assured we covered enough of the right stuff so the kids would be prepared for high school and college when the got there.
This section will include posts on the curriculum and materials we selected for each major subject area, why we chose what we chose and how it worked for us over the course of the homeschool. The major subject areas include the following:
- History and Literature
- Writing and Spelling
- Science
- Math
- Philosophy, Religion and Worldviews
- Art, Music and PE
Betty Blonde #226 – 05/28/2009
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