Homeschooling

[fantasia]

Question: Have any of you homeschool alums ever done either Story of the World OR Mystery of History OR (Bonus) both of them? Just curious as to what you thought of the curriculum.

A couple weeks back I got to meet my current homeschool hero/fav speaker, Andrew Pudewa, who is the head of Institute for Excellence in Writing. (fledge1, look up his videos on YouTube and take notes. ) I talked him through where my oldest two kids were at and he recommended a few things which I went ahead and ordered. Once I get them I'll decide whether I want to incorporate them this year or save them for next year. A good friend of mine has the same stuff I do and she alternates semesters where she uses Logic of English for phonics and IEW for spelling/writing. I might look at that too as we totally burned through LoE last year.

[SnowAngel]

We didn't, for our history curriculum we had Abeka, Drive Thru History, and the American Heritage series plus library books. Those sound slightly familiar, so might have had friends that used them.

Congrats on finishing the year, fantasia!

SnowAngel

[mm1991]

We did not use either, but from a quick glance, I really like that The Story of the World seems to be specifically created to be enjoyed together as a family, rather than that being an after-thought. I haven't seriously looked into either though!

[fantasia]

Two more weeks until we start up again. What??!?

Has anyone seen the latest Drive Thru History series Acts to Revelation? I'm requesting the public library get it and trying to decide if it would good to go ahead and purchase it regardless of the price. We've really enjoyed all of the previous DVDs, and have recently been rewatching The Gospels.

Somehow I missed this post of yours Snow. No, I haven't heard of them but they look REALLY interesting. Did you get a hold of the DVD set? And if so, did you watch and were they good?

Back in April, I discovered a site called Homeschool Summits, where about every 8-12 months, a young couple hosts an online homeschool convention. It's free to watch for about a week, and then if you pay for it, you can have lifetime access to all of their videos. This in turn led to my finding a whole lot of audio recordings of my new favorite people at homeschool conventions, which I bought and have been listening to repeatedly all summer long.
I tell you what, I have learned a phenomenal amount from listening to these giants in the homeschool movement (like the importance of teaching a Christian worldview if that's what you believe, as well as teaching to mastery rather than just flying through things without understanding, just to name a few). And (bonus) I also learned about all sorts of curriculum that's out there which gives me more things to research and look into as my kids get older. This is certainly going to change my focus on how to handle school in the future as my kids get older.

But back to two weeks from now. I'm doing Sonlight as my primary curriculum again; that covers most of history, Bible, science, poetry, etc. We'll pick up with Shiller math, though I did do one lesson a week (minus a week here and there) to keep it fresh in my son's mind so he wouldn't forget his lessons. And then for phonics we'll continue on with Logic of English where we left off, and that's mixed in with Institute for Excellence in Writing. I did end up getting that curriculum because Andrew Pudewa (mentioned him above) suggested to go ahead and start my son on it because he's ready and I might as well do so.

The IEW curriculum is very interesting because they don't send stuff for your kids per se (though I did order one book to get started with and make my life easier), they send stuff for you, the parent. Then they teach the parent how to use any curriculum the child is using (or even things that the child is most interested in and passionate about) to develop writing skills. So I've mixed it in a little bit with my schedule and I'm curious to see how my kids do.