natashag76 said:
So I've been considering homeschool since last year, but since I also have 2 others at home I hesitate just b/c I don't know if I'll be overwhelmed or not.
How do you all do it? Especially those of you with children of different ages? What resources do you find the most helpful? I have to state that we aren't Christian, we're Jewish, so our faith based resources will probably be different from the majority of folks on here. However, any help and guidance you all can offer would really be welcome!
Thanks!
Welcome to the thread Natasha! It's a nice group of people here.
Your story sounds a lot like ours. We started our older son at our town's public school and by the end of first grade, we were being told that he had left-right confusion and that they'd like to do a full evaluation in the fall. In the meantime, we'd had no end of trouble dealing with the teacher and administration (How the heck does a 6 year old get his hand burnt at the classroom faucet when you only have 15 kids in the class? And the teacher really didn't know how it happened. And so on.)
So we pulled our son out, along with two other families and sent our children to a local cooperative school. It was like the best of both worlds - parents were involved but certified caring teachers did a fantastic job of teaching. Then, the economy started to tank, families needed 2 incomes (no volunteering during the day) or simply needed to not pay private school tuition and the upshot was that the school closed.
The middle school simply wasn't a choice for an all-day approach. We'd interviewed the guidance counselor and it was clear that there were going to be significant challenges so we ended up homeschooling. I tried that first spring to mix-and-match materials but it became clear that I needed help. After that, I searched through an array of boxed curriculum, found a subset that I liked and said "Pick one" to the kids. Our younger son ended up picking one that didn't match well with his preferred learning methods and we changed again in January of that year.
When our oldest was at the end of eighth grade, he really needed to get out, explore more, push boundaries, etc. so off he went to public school for ninth grade. Disaster. Since then, our younger one has done two classes at the middle school and now both of them have done high school classes at home and with outside providers.
Just as in a classroom, there might be one group doing silent reading while the teacher is working with another group on spelling, you'll learn to sort your time with multiple children. It does help when they're more independent!
We ended up using K12.com for middle school courses. I remember also liking Calvert but for some reason didn't go with them. My younger son tried Oak Meadow, and if he'd liked writing, would have been a much better fit.
Hope this helps!
NHWX