After much research and contemplation, I finally decided on a program to begin our homeschooling journey. As a school teacher, I could have spent plenty of time planning my own program, however, that would have taken a good amount of time. I prefered to find a good quality program where they had put all the effort in and was something that I could follow with little preparation. If needed I could always adapt along the way. There’s heaps of homeschooling programs out there which can be quite daunting.
I have really found the forums to be a great place to get some insight from homeschooling families who have been at it for a while. I have only joined two forums at this stage, the Rockpool Homeschool forum and the Perth Homeschoolers forum. Rockpool is a forum for Australian and New Zealand homeschoolers and the Perth site is naturally more locally driven. On these forum’s you will find homeschoolers from all kinds of backgrounds. Since I was after a more Christian based program, I found the Rockpool site a bit more useful for finding out information on programs I may be interested in checking out. The Well Trained Mind forum was also another informative website I quite liked.
Anyone contemplating homeschooling needs to work out what kind of program would suit their family and go with that. It was quite amazing to find such variety in methodology from unschooling to very rigid programs based solely in bookwork. The literature based learning method really took my fancy and focuses on literature to drive the learning. Sonlight Homeschooling Curriculum first took my interest in this approach and then I came upon Winterpromise.
Winterpromise describes their approach in the following way: ‘This “Experience Approach,” then, relies on wonderful literature, fantastic do-able activities that support intelligences goals, repetition that is exciting (not simply repetitive!), and a “joy of learning” approach’. I particularly loved the theme approach of Winterpromise and we are going to beging with the program ‘Animals & Their Worlds:Global Habitats’. We’ll be doing the combined set which will cover both Isaiah (Kindy age) and Noah (grade 2). We can’t wait.
You explained this wonderfully.