Knowing what I know now, in some ways, it does seem like a stupid question. Rather, the better question might be, "How do you not homeschool?" But, in another sense I am still asking people, "How do you homeschool?" Discovering new techniques and finding out about new ideas is always exciting.

Sharing how I homeschool is also fun for me. The first book on homeschooling I read was For the Children’s Sake by Susan Schaeffer McCaulay. The second book was The Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer. Both of these books strongly influenced how I began homeschooling.

I bought Phonics Pathways and began teaching my daughter to read on the couch. At this point we didn’t even need storage space. We read a few verses from Genesis each day and she drew pictures. Later, I added handwriting and dictation. We did all this at our small breakfast table.

Now that same daughter is beginning third grade work and we have introduced quite a few more resources since then. We use Math-U-See, Veritas Press history, Exploring Creation with Astronomy, Italic Handwriting Series, Shurley English, MCP Spelling Workout and we have recently added Latin. We still use the Bible for our bible study and sprinkle in a generous helping of library books.

Now we homeschool all over the place but we have one central location for all the stuff, our dining room.

This large table and hutch and new shelves work out well for work and storage. We also have our Veritas Press history cards attached to the wall with velcro so we can see our time line. We have a solar system hanging in one corner and art work all around.

I have also added more children to our homeschool, another daughter and a son.

My second daughter began Phonics Pathways last year and now we are beginning to add more to her curriculum, following the same path I took with my first daughter, with a few changes. That's the beauty of homeschooling, being able to adapt to any situation, whether it's a different learning style or family changes.

 Right now, my son keeps us from getting too serious. When we are reading aloud or working through a math problem, he likes to break the silence by throwing all the pencils to the floor or getting fed up with his wooden blocks and dumping them all out with a crashing thud.

The most fun learning times happen when we can all work on something together through projects or reading books.

A couple of years ago a large garden spider built a web on our front porch. This sparked an interest in spiders. We searched websites to find out what kind it was. We got books from the library and read about spiders. The girls drew pictures.

We read The Twelve Labors of Hercules by James Riordan and the pictures in the book made my artsy daughter want to paint. She painted a picture of each of the twelve labors and we made a book out of it.

Often our curriculum suggests a neat project like making a volcano, building a salt clay model of Roman ruins or creating a model of the Solar System and I'm forced to do hands-on activities with them. They love this part and I do too once I dig in and get going on it.

It’s exciting to see all the wonderful curriculum out there. There is so much to choose from now and so many different ways to educate your children. Knowing that when something isn’t working I can change it, and when we are having a bad day we can go outside and start again tomorrow, are some of the how's of homeschooling I had never even considered when I first asked the question, "How do you homeschool," until I began doing it myself. Now I can't imagine doing it any other way.