Homeschooling thoughts

(below is an e-mail I sent this morning and after sending it I decided it would make a good post.)

This is the book I was talking with you about last night that talks about different philosophies of home schooling and has examples of curriculum that is available. The book is 5 years old, so you may want to update it with some web searching but I found the book very helpful. Wake county library has the book, so I personally would check it out instead of buying it:

http://www.amazon.com/100-Top-Picks-Homeschool-Curriculum/dp/0805431381/

Also, I don't know if you know about the Homeschool Gathering Place
( http://www.homeschoolgatheringplace.com/ )
It is a new and consignment homeschool place in Raleigh. You can go in there and look through LOTS of curriculum choices.

And then there is always the NCHE annual curriculum fair (I have not been to this one, but when I had my own company I used to sell at curriculum fairs.) http://nche.com/conference

This year will be the first year we have used any curriculum for pre-school (and that is just because Joshua has been asking for school like his older siblings, and we realize that we are less intentional with him due to time constraints.)

Our pre-school work for the kids has been mostly reading, reading, reading to the kids. We do also use some books with pre-school activities. When Abigail was interested in reading, we used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons ( http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985 ) I know we also looked at The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading (http://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Parents-Guide-Teaching-Reading/dp/0972860312/). With Philip, we didn't intentionally teach him to read, he just picked it up on his own. With Joshua, we are planning to use the Readers K from Sonlight. (I can report back later on how well this works.)