Eclectic

My family and I decided on an eclectic curriculum. Just like us, it is a little bit of everything. Right now, we are using workbooks by McGraw-Hill. Their workbooks range from Pre-K through 8th grade. These books can be found at either Staples or www.amazon.com. For "textbooks", we shop library sales. A lot of times, libraries will have a book sale event 2 - 3 times a year to get rid of books with low circulation. At one sale, we literally got 200+ books for $25. Thrift stores are also a great resource. From my experience, both libraries and thrift stores get books donated by local colleges.

I also like finding great books on Amazon.com. We get some great deals from the independent book sellers listed there.

Then there are the hands on experiences that books can never teach. Hands on science museums, backyards, dirt, rocks, cloud watching, family walks, etc are great conversation starters that lead to further investigation into a specific area of interest. My eldest son found a frog once during one of our mammoth walks. He was able to pick up the frog, go to the library, figure out what kind of frog it was and then set it free again.

In my opinion, there needs to be a balance between parent directed and child directed learning. As both parent and teacher, there are just some absolutes that need to be taught. There are also some experiences, that if I did not insist on, they would miss out on. They might not appreciate it in the moment, but later on, when that same opportunity avails itself again, my children are the first to say "Can we go to that?"