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By Root 362 0

dressing, and diddling about. I write a weekly schedule for each child on the computer. They are allowed to work at it at their own pace but must get through Monday’s work by the end of Monday. In the past I tried listing a week’s worth of assignments and letting them choose when to work on them. They would leave the least liked subject for last. Fridays became torture days. So we switched back to daily schedules. They are allowed to work ahead and take the next day off if they want to. We usually stop our school work for lunch at 12:30. We usually spend an hour on lunch. The kids fix their own lunch and clean it up. After lunch, they do schoolwork until they are done. Usually that is no later than 2:30. The rest of the day is theirs to pursue their own interests. We have lots of computer games, books, and other games. They also like to go outside and play with the neighbor kids. Once a month we go to homeschool group followed by roller skating. We also attend a play once a month.

We use a certain amount of curriculum, and the rest is good books or other resources. The only curriculum I don’t tinker with is their spelling program and their vocabulary program. These are both workbooks they enjoy doing; if they didn’t enjoy them, we wouldn’t be doing them. For math we use Saxon with lots of other stuff thrown in. Fridays we do either mental math or math games. Science and social studies are done as units.

During the summer I choose books, kits, or projects on the subjects I plan to teach. We read the books out loud and discuss them. The kids work on the projects or experiments as independently as possible. They keep science notebooks to write definitions of terms and to write about their experiments.

This year we are studying world geography. We spend six or seven days exploring a region of the world. The children select a country to study in depth. I write questions that they can answer when writing about their country. They use the CD encyclopedia, books from the library, and the Internet to find information about their country. They are learning to take notes on note cards and use them in writing a report. We also use the Internet to find music files and recipes. Each day we read about a different cultural group in the region we are studying. When we do history, we do it as a combination of biography and other books. We’ve used the Greenleaf Press Famous Men series for studying Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages.

I started out teaching separate science and social studies to each of the kids. After one year of doing this, I came to my senses. We have since done all science together. My second daughter is extremely bright and had no difficulty working on the same level as her older sister. My son as a second grader was just along for the ride. I required no written work of him. This year he has his own science notebook and is required to write reports for geography. I expect a good deal less from him in terms of a report. He is learning to read a paragraph and then write a sentence that restates the main idea of the paragraph. He writes these sentences on index cards that we sort and then copy to write his report. By the end of the year I expect him to have a good facility with this.

Next year I will have a kindergartner who will probably be getting his first dose of American history from biographies. I have a number of famous American biographies written on a second-grade reading level with extra activities to make the story come to life. With his older brother also studying American history, we may decide to act out some scenes from American history.

We also do a variety of extra activities. For example, now we are reading stories by Shakespeare from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. We use this reading to practice the kids’ narration skills. We are also learning Spanish using the Learnables tapes. We select a composer of the month to study. For art appreciation we are studying architecture this year. I have a number of children’s books on architecture that we are reading, and later