More Homeschooling Questions Answered

>Well Karen you've got guts!!! I don't think i'd be able to home school my
>kids. That's wonderful that you have though. How do you know what to
>teach them? Do you have a book that tells you what they should be learning
>at what age? I would love to know more. I'm sure it would be much more
>fun for my daughter to learn at home since there's no pressure of the time
>just nice and relaxed and you can take a break when they seem to need it.

We use the books 'What your kindergartner needs to know' and the rest (What your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc grader needs to know) as a guidance and as core curriculum. For math we use Saxxon math, they have a full method for every grade, we use 3rd grade for Cees, 1st grade for Timmy. This is really easy, they have a lesson plan for every day, so you just follow that. For Timmy we use a phonics program, also Saxxon, kindergarten phonics. Although I think we'll wait a few weeks before starting that again, even when we start, because he has fluid in his ears again and is very very deaf. Kind of hard to learn phonics when you can't hear! That's another nice thing about homeschooling. In cases like this, I can just take a break. In school, he would miss weeks of phonics teaching, because he plainly can't hear it at the moment.

For the rest we follow their interests. They are really into Egypt and mummies at the moment, so we got lots of books about that for Christmas etc. Also the library is a great resource of course. Cees wants to learn more about astronomy, so we are doing an on line course on that now, and we check out books about it in the library. I also have found some great kids astronomy web sites, that he likes to look at. Cees would like to learn Japanese, so we are going to start that up soon too. Haven't got materials yet, just a cdrom, I would like some books too.

Oh, and we also took some Dutch language arts etc books from their school in the Netherlands, so that they can keep up with their Dutch.

I think we have all the bases covered. And of course there are museums, in which there are great things to see and to do. We have a great children's science museum nearby, which we visit regularly.