This is my story. I am married going on 12 yrs in Aug, I have 2 boys ages 8 and 4. I live in Illinois and have only been hs for 2 years, going on our 3rd. My oldest went to 4 yr old preschool at a Lutheran Church just down that street from us even though we are Catholic but non practicing. The school did not impose a lot of their beliefs on the children since a lot of the children were not Lutheran. Then he went to ps for K and that is when the trouble started. He was 1 of only 3 white children in a class of 21. Most of the children were Hispanic and didn’t speak English. He was more advanced then the curriculum and the children and therefore got in trouble a lot because he was bored.

I decided to check out other schools in my area to send him to and stumbled upon hs. I loved the idea and started working on a plan which included talking my dh into it (which wasn’t easy). I did my research, wrote my letters and withdrew him from school, asked for his records and started buying every book in site. I even got books (math, reading and handwriting) from his principal.

By the time he was out of K, I was ready or so I thought. I let him have his deschooling time and started schooling him a few days here and there in July. I join several newsgroups for hs and meet this wonderful person. She seemed to be my twin in a lot of ways. We both had 2 kids; we liked the same things and thought the same way. Well in our many conversations she asked me what type of schooler I was and I didn’t really know. She said that I might want to try the classic hs method because that was what was working for her and we were so much alike. So I took her advice, got the WTM book then revamped my curriculum. That was the best day of my life because I love to have the organization and surety but didn’t feel like I had it with just the willy nilly curriculum I was using.

Now my son is doing great. He does 3rd grade spelling, phonics and English. He reads at a high grade level and he can do almost anything I put in front of him. He is learning Spanish, Latin and Japanese. He takes karate and loves swimming and riding his bike. This coming year we will be doing SOTW3 and LLB Chemistry, Saxon 3, art history, geography and some computers. We have tried both manuscript and cursive and neither seem to be his strong suit.  For art we will be studying art through history (the famous artists and their paintings with cute coloring books, postcards that we will use to make an art gallery wall in their playroom and I have tons of pictures of things he has already done.

For the last year I have started to work on lessons with my 4 yr old. We do sort of a curriculum in a box. For him we work on basic math (adding, subtracting), logic stuff, matching, letter recognition and writing, among other things. Well that about sums it up in about a 1000 words or less. 

As for me I am 34, married and work out of the house 2 nights a week. I am a Certified Paralegal, I am a licensed Nail Technician and I recently was going back to school to get my Assoc. degree in Early Childhood Education before I started home schooling. My dh works full time for an architectural firm and travels a lot. We live with my mother-in-law in her house and she helps me out tremendously between working a full time job herself. Most if my time is spent trying to better our homeschooling which means I am on the computer a lot. If you would like to chat feel free to ask for my MSN name.