The First Few Months Homeschooling

My favorite homeschool website SecularHomeschool.com has a great discussion going about what to do as you transition from public or private school to homeschooling. When I first decided to homeschool, I thought I would dive right in the day he was home for good "so he wouldn't forget everything." I also thought we would be blending a Classical and Unit Studies approach to homeschooling. That went out the window within a few days as I realized my son loved to learn and letting  him lead the way usually meant covering 3 times the material that I would have with a curriculum or schedule.

So, I printed out what Public Schools across the country cover in 2nd grade and now try to find fun activities or interests that will introduce or reinforce those skills. I don't worry about it too much, because many of our activities "accidentally" teach everything (and more) that he would be learning in a classroom. Cooking and building teach fractions (and adding or multiplying them), measurement, following directions, multiplication when we triple a recipe (I like to halve a recipe so it requires him to double or triple it).  We also learn how to research and take notes when we are cooking something new or looking for substitutions (Geekling is allergic to milk, soy, and peanuts).

I'm a bit of a control freak, so I was shocked when everything we were doing bordered on "unschooling!" When school ended, Geekling said he just wanted a week or two off so I decided to just leave interesting books lying around and watch some fun educational shows and documentaries on Netflix to spark his interest. We used the iPad to play math games to reinforce math facts, read poetry, read books together, and did some backyard and kitchen science. I taught him to write a hypothesis and take notes; when I told him that he needn't worry about spelling or punctuation when taking notes, he became incredibly excited about writing, something he has always hated and fought doing.

Now he writes stories because he wants to, requests that we read poetry instead of the Boxcar Children or Captain Underpants (his favorite), and loves to read our Field Guides to Virginia and the Carolinas on mammals, amphibians, and birds. He has learned more biology from casually flipping through those books and asking questions than he would have in 3 months in a classroom.

I'm glad I somehow resisted buying all of those expensive curricula. I really wanted to, I'm the type that would see receiving a box full of books, workbooks, outlines, etc. as Christmas morning, Hanukkah and the 4th of July all rolled into one so not ordering anything but a math curriculum was torture, but now I have plenty of money to buy used books on Amazon and some new ones that I think we'll reference for years to come like A History of US by Joy Hakim, a wonderful secular American History 11 volume set that will be battered and dogeared in no time as we drag it around the East Coast on history road trips to where all of it actually happened.