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As far as resources go, I keep my eyes and ears open, sift through what I believe to be the best stuff, and order every July or August. We also buy lots of good books and computer games all year. We spend our days informally scheduled. A schedule can be easily and guiltlessly interrupted by a phone call (though we do try to avoid this), bread baking, a field trip, whatever.

Here’s a typical day:

Get up; do chores; eat breakfast sometime before 10 A.M.

Then Bible reading (TJ reads stories to the girls and me), math, any phonics work, writing, literature (we’re working through a book where one day TJ may narrate a story back to me and another day write a paragraph or memorize a poem), history (reading and time line work). Science is done with Dad on weekends.

By noon or so, we’re usually done and tackle more chores (the girls have effectively destroyed the house by now), eat lunch, run any errands, go to the park, or hang out and veg. With any luck, TJ may pick up a book or magazine at some point. I don’t watch and don’t always want to know.

I usually fix dinner while making lunch, so that’s put away so Tim can throw it in the oven after he picks the girls up from the pool, where I usually stay with TJ while he works out (sometimes I swim, too). That’s from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M. Then home, dinner, reading aloud, and so on. Network TV for me and Tim from 9 to 10 P.M. Bed if I’m fortunate enough to have Phoebe and Bekah both asleep. (Otherwise, that’s my job, because Tim has to get up at 5 A.M. and I can sleep until … well, 8 A.M. or so, if I need to.)

Doug and Patricia live in a California suburb. They mix and match their homeschooling styles for their eight-year-old daughter, Emily. Patricia works outside the home, and Doug is a stay-at-home dad. Emily has never attended school.

Our homeschooling is relaxed. Emily does a lot of reading in many areas—nature, animals, science, and some biographies. She watches a local PBS station that has shows on science and literature.

We are in the vast territory between either extreme in terms of structure. We are soon to be using a math curriculum to see how she responds to it. We’ve heard of a good English curriculum that we will be checking into also. However, having said that, we don’t have Emily sit down on a regular basis and do a certain number of pages each day. Our daily schedule is very flexible. Sometimes we focus on math or writing or art or spelling or geography. It depends on how she’s feeling and how I’m feeling. We also go to the library, take trips to museums, park days, and art and gymnastics classes.

We have enrolled her in a local charter school. This is so we can have access to the funds they offer for educational materials. The school is designed with homeschoolers in mind, and we are not forced to follow any set time line or curriculum.

As the at-home parent, I’m the one who initiates most of the “homeschooling.” However, my wife is a big influence in that she offers many ideas for projects and for keeping Emily’s interest engaged in various areas of learning. It is clear to me that we are a homeschooling family. We all—including Emily—give input into Emily’s homeschooling.

Tina and Fred have been homeschooling for almost two years. They have a six-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter.

We’re a bit of both unschoolers and structured schoolers—we definitely use a piecemeal approach. We have Alpha-Phonics for reading, plus we pieced together reading material for him to practice on, like first readers, a couple of used A Beka books, and so on. For math, I got a workbook from Bob Jones and borrowed the teacher’s guide from a neighbor who had it already. We’re almost done with it, and I’m going to look into Saxon math next. For science, we subscribe to a monthly newsletter, we have all kinds of science experiment books, and we have several science CD-ROMs, plus some in history and geography. We pretty much use