I am also new to homeschooling; this was our first year with the older kids. I have found that no one approach and no one way works for my children, depending on the child and the subject. Makes for a lot of work for mom, but works really well for us.
I have materials from 8-10 different publishers, again child/subject dependent. I also always have my library card maxed out, we are limited to 50 books here.
I do have an actual curriculum for math for all the kids, we just move forward based on each child. I have many other curriculum materials, I have found that many traditional publishers offer online versions of many of their textbooks at a much smaller cost in most cases. I use this as a great resource as well. (It can be hard to find secualr materials for homeschoolers, my choice.) I visited my state website and pulled grade level curriculum expectations for each grade to help guide my core curriculum, or use inexpensive materials like studies weekly to guide me. We just checked in with the Barrons, Making the Grade series to see where we were grade wise there as well.
My kids tend to want more than a base curriculum alone would offer, both in content and variety. They are also very interested in science, so TWTM wouldn't work so well here. My DD9 chose an online science course for high school credit to use for this coming year and decided which area of history she wants to study next. I don't think I am as unschooling as many here by any means, but I am learning.
I found it very hard at first to leave the way I was taught behind and be more open to my child, still working on that. I find it easier with the littler kids because they never had "traditional school" like my oldest DD does. I do my best to be flexible, not to plan to far ahead, because things always change, they become more fluid with time.
