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The title says it all. Are you currently homeschooling your DC(s), or have you in the past? What is your family's level of satisfaction with homeschooling?

I'll start: I'm unofficially homeschooling DS3, and will begin "officially" homeschooling him for kindergarten when he turns 4 in the autumn. In practice, homeschooling currently involves borrowing and reading oodles of library books, visiting museums and local attractions, spending lots of time playing outside, travel, play dates, science experiments, concerts, and free play. In practice, next year probably won't be much different, but will be a logical continuation of a child-led approach in an enriched environment at a higher level of complexity and difficulty.

DS is an extremely energetic child, which requires extensive parental energy, but our satisfaction with our current arrangement is very high. DS' cognitive needs would not be met in a traditional brick and mortar school at this age, as he satisfies his curiosity by carrying on a one-on-one running conversation with me through much of the day. We both tremendously enjoy spending our time together.

My DD10 has been in a home/public school pendulum.

K - Public school for a couple months, was a disaster, homeschooled the rest of the year.
1st - Public school GT offerings increased, still not good, DD managed to make it through the year.
2nd - Public school got worse, yanked her out after a few months of failed advocacy, homeschooled through the rest of the 2nd curriculum and 3rd grade as well.
4th - After grade skip, 4th in public school went rather well. It was the only school year in public school that could be considered a successful fit.
5th - DD is complaining about learning nothing again, but still sticking it out in public.

We're openly considering homeschooling with K12 for 6th grade, and trying again with public in 7th, which is when her middle school would begin.

We did. PreK through, er-- well, I guess since we entered the school system when DD was in 3rd grade, that would be K through 3, although-- not really, since it was only a solid 18 months or so of what I consider active homeschooling, from when DD was just 4 until she was 6.

Successes:
Love of reading, literature, and word play
Love of science-- authentically so (as in, the process and making observations/hypotheses)
Love of numeracy (we used Singapore Math Primary Maths-- 1a through 3b, and have never again been so happy with a math curriculum)

Failures:
Written expression-- it was simply too easy for her to avoid doing this, and the activation energy required was too high to MAKE her do what she didn't want to. This is a personality issue as much as anything else.

At 6yo, the resistance on the latter front became positively eye-watering for us, and we were increasingly concerned that she was oupacing her written output to such an alarming degree (it was 6-8 grades and widening in reading comprehension and social studies, for example, and about 4-5 grades in science) that it was going to be disastrous to leave it underdeveloped much longer-- the arc of development had her into collegiate level materials before she could possibly cope with the written output, and what would we do then??

And no, this wasn't hypothetical or in the very distant future, by any means-- we weren't worried at first, and figured that it would "all even out" at some point. It wasn't until we started looking at what the arc was shaping up to be in various domains that we got concerned. She'd gone from what seemed to be fairly typical if bright 3yo to a 5yo who could read faster than many adults we know (and, um-- we know a lot of people with terminal degrees), and absorbed whatever she read with such breathtaking speed that she'd gone from more-or-less typical through elementary school content across MANY domains in about a year, maybe a touch more.

We weren't pushing her. She was just reading that avidly.

She could write her name more or less legibly, but otherwise, a single sentence was her limit in terms of written expression.

So, we entered her in the highest grade that her written output could conceivably support (3rd) and opted to strenuously hothouse that written output, which we did for the following 6 years before she "caught up" to grade level.

We saw that as a race against time-- we were providing drag on the other skills so that this one would be college-ready. She made that mark with about 18 months to spare, by the way-- her written output is clearly about 90th percentile, maybe better on a good day, among other high-performing college freshmen. (whew!)

Our satisfaction?

I can't say that I'm unhappy that we homeschooled her. I do wish that her personality had been amenable to that hothousing without the introduction of the cyberschool, because I think that placing her commensurate with her weaknesses taught her to give in to her perfectionistic demons.

She probably SHOULD have been placed at 6th grade upon entry-- if not for the organizational challenges and the writing, I mean. She was ready in most other respects, and it would have been far more suitable for far longer. We did do an additional acceleration, but it should have been two. Maybe three.

Then again, that would have put her into college before her writing and executive skills were ready for it, and would have required a LOT more parental input/oversight.

I don't know, honestly.

I love that homeschooling developed critical thinking skills gently-- through tons of open time to just explore, and to read and dream.

On the flip side of that, however, it didn't do a lot to prepare her to live by the rules of the world at large, and because of her LOG, she had to be ready for that a LOT sooner than most children.

I also can't envision anything but eclectic homeschooling really working for kids at high LOG; their burn rate on curriculum is truly eye-watering.

I have two kids, one HG+ and the other HGish with dyslexia. I homeschooled the older one (with dyslexia) from grade 2-10. He went to a private high school from grade 10.5 to grade 11.5 and then he went back to homeschooling (officially) but was dual enrolled full time at the community college. He graduated last June with a homeschool diploma/transcript and was accepted at his first choice college.

I homeschooled the other one from K-4. He then skipped 5th, did 6th at a private school, skipped 7th, and did 8th at the same private school. We decided to homeschool again this year for 9th.

Our experience is that the skips increased the executive skills demand without very much increase in cognitive demand--which made things doubly frustrating.

I'm still trying to figure out when and how to attempt entry into "real" school again.

Homeschooling was the best decision for us. Grade accelerations seem to work for about half the year and then my DD was back at the same level of boredom. We started with the younger DD earlier and for motivated kids, it works out great. We are able to work at the level that they need for different subjects and allow them to explore a lot more options. If we mistakenly move to fast, we just stop and review for a week. Much easier to do when you are already working over a year ahead anyway.

We plan to homeschool until High School. The good thing if you start early is that you can figure out whenever you want if you want to officially grade accelerate or not. We are waiting until High School because high school is more flexible with what a student can take in a certain grade level and there is always AP and Dual Enrollment.

Howler, with the benefit of hindsight, assume your DD was compliant in being hothoused on written output. Would your DD have been successful with a 6th grade + curriculum if she had a parent to scaffold the written output and shifted the majority of her course output to oral work?

I homeschooled my 2e older son 1st-3rd grade and half day 4th for half a year and then full day back in public school the second half. He is now in public high school. He did fine in public middle school. I kept expecting to need to pull him and homeschool him a bit in middle school but the school was just accommodating enough not to be forced to do that.

My younger son has been in public school K-5 with one grade skip. We are waiting to see about acceptance into 6th grade program we want him in. If he doesn't get in then we will homeschool 6-8th and put him back in public school for high school.

Oh yes-- definitely. We did just that as enrichment on the side, aquinas.

Unfortunately, it also meant that the material that she saw in honors/AP coursework in later on in high school was largely a rehash of stuff she had done at 7-11 yo.

She is amazing in Socratic/oral settings. Too bad that college isn't set up that way, let me just add, because she can't take written exams worth a darn (relative to her grasp of material, I mean).

Thanks Howler. I recently came to appreciate what you mean by eye-watering burn rate through curriculum.

A while back, I bought the Singapore Math essential kindergarten A and B math books out of curiosity about what the method involved, with no intention of using them with DS until next year. He pulled one off the shelf the other day, decided it was a "scientist's book", and wanted to do some of the exercises. It took less than 20 minutes for him to do one or two representative activities orally from each unit with 100% accuracy for the first of 2 K books. Granted, the material was REALLY easy, but at this rate, he'll be done a year of work in under an hour. Is that burn rate what I have to look forward to for the grade 1 material as well?! It's not like grade 1 math is meaty.

I'm thinking of holding off on purchasing the first grade book until the fall unless he asks for more books in the interim. I'm in no rush to be tethered to "school".

We haven't has as much success with homeschooling as others have. The academics are great and she makes great leaps and bounds, but then she just gets lonely and sad and unmotivated. She loves the classroom settings, the teachers and note taking and discussion but only with other motivated kids where there's actually a challenge.

We're doing a mix of things (external classes and online school) but it's definitely a least-worst kind of situation. We're also (and frankly always) on the hunt for better options.

If her temperament were different, homeschooling would work better and I think it would be a great option for kids with a high LOG.