Homeschooling really isn't as scary as all that. Youngest dd's gone in and out of it, as the year seems to require, and she is currently headed back to school after a mostly homeschooled middle school. (Her brother's been dually-enrolled or homeschooled during the same time period.)
Check your state for requirements, but as a comparison, here's our fifth grade curriculum (our state is pretty free and easy with requirements):
Math: online, seventh grade advanced math through the state's virtual school (required me being creative about their expected graduation date, but no biggie). I'm also fond of Math Minutes workbooks, by Creative Teaching Press, if you have to have a workbook. They're very non-intimidating and user friendly.
Social studies: nothing formal, though we spent a lot of time on civics and politics because it was a big election year. I arranged for them to be observers at our polling place, so they got to see what happens when voting is over and everything is torn down and sent back to the Supervisor of Elections. We also did a lot of field trips just to see people in their natural habitat. Just sort of...a wider worldview than is possessed by the average 9 or 10 year old. And my daughter decided to do a project wherein she studied a little about every country in the world, alphabetically, because that was her interest at the time. She still knows Burkina Faso and Myanmar better than anyone I know.
Science: environmental science, with an emphasis on marine ecosystems because we knew some people doing cool stuff with beach reclamation and renourishment at the time. Lots of field trips. We got to see sea turtles hatch, which was fun. We did a lot of experimentiing in the kitchen, and consequently learned the scientific process backward and forward.
Foreign language/culture: a little bit of Japanese, self-taught off the internet, because dd was interested. (Ds mostly just learned insults in Russian and Yiddish from a friend. Oh well...) We did a lot of cooking from various cultures, because it was a good way to get my picky eater to expand his palate.
Music: private lessons. This was the biggest expense, but one we might have had even if they'd been in school.
Language Arts: I completely made up my own curriculum based on what I perceived as my kids' deficits. One thing we did was write five paragraph papers every week. Either they picked a topic, or they drew one from a jar (random crazy things, the only ones of which I remember were William Henry Harrison, how to raise rabbits, and Gilgamesh). We also did an assigned fiction book every month, which I picked to illustrate a topic (theme, platform, setting, protagonist, etc) and then they kept a log of the books they read for fun: title, author, year published, a two sentence description, and a star rating (one-five). I will tell you they hated Johnny Tremain, and loved Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. (Though this summer's required reading for high school means that Johnny has been replaced in my son's opinion as Worst Book Ever by The Old Man and the Sea.) Also, ds learned to spell from the five-paragraph papers, because I made him type them on the computer without Spellcheck, and then edit them with it on. Spellcheck and Grammarcheck were less embarrassing to him, and he internalized the corrections more easily, than if I'd gone over them with a red pencil.
They also took "fun" classes at homeschool coops like a Hogwarts potions class, Southern Folktales, shuffleboard, and fencing.
Now that I type it out, it looks like a lot, but honestly, I spent less time on homeschooling than I did on homework and fighting with the IEP team. The biggest time-suck was that we're required to keep portfolios, and I decided to scrapbook ours.
Last edited by eldertree; 08/01/12 02:26 PM.
