We will be homeschooling our 2 school age children and preschooler starting this summer. I have been researching for weeks,and so far what I want to do is mostly time4learning,but using etap for science and social studies. I'm still not sure what we will use for handwriting and reading. If we sticking with mostly online,the older 2 will each have netbooks for their work,and the preschooler will use our old desktop. Is there a horrible reason for us not to use the online sources? Or are there better sites I haven't found yet TIA!!
I have the same worries you do. We are starting homeschooling within the next couple weeks and I have decided to use mostly online. My son loves being on the computer and learns best this way and actually doing things, He doesn’t do to well with paper and pencil work. I think that we are going to use the new program from Alpha omega called Monarch. It’s all very scary because you want to pick the possible best for your children
This sounds good to me, depending on your children's ages though watch how long they are at the screens at a time. When my ds was in 4th grade we AOp's SOS for all five classes and he had a mild tendonitis for a while. Other than that kind of intense typing stuff I don't see any problems. Jeanie Iwas looking at Monarch cause I only have one homeschooling now and was thinking it is so like SOS, you could just get that if you have more than one. Once again depending on the age, I would try paperwork for Maths. Printables at least if you are in need of using cheaper or low cost online stuff. I would also like to recomend you check out Simplezine and see her online classes! They are super good! There is also a lot of help getting things set up in the begnining at Donna Young.org. I go through changes at this time of year all the way up to September when my new school year begins, finding what I want then changing my mind. Alpha Omega is where I started though for my first 8 years of homeschooling pretty much we used AOp. Life Paks and SOS.
I replied to your post on DS I am not a fan of T4L, we did the trial some years back, and I didn't like that I had no way to print out samples of our work.. something we need to keep for our state, and even if it's not required, something I totally reccomend everyone do (you just never know). I have been looking at www.headoftheclass.com lately, but if I remember rightly your oldest is in 3rd grade.. and rignt now they only go up to second. I love the BBC school site, it will take some work from you to put it all together in order, but it's free. We use the computer alot, but not online programs so much... except for progressive phonics and starfall for my younger kids.
You actually can print out all of the online tests and quizzes. Also, there are printable worksheets for most subjects.
We are going to homeschool our son next year for 1st grade and I'm not buying anything but hooked on phonics and 'teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons'. Everything else will be free online resources I've discovered and of course, stuff from our local library. I told hubby our biggest cost will be ink and paper to print out the printables. LOL One of my fav sites is http://www.havefunteaching.com/ There are lots of links here sorted by subject-I've only checked out a few of these so far http://www.withpurpose.com/2008/08/02/homeschooling-for-free-series/ And there are a lot of links here as well http://homeschool.withpurpose.com/ Last night I did buy 4 PDF unit studies from this site for $1 each http://www.hshighlights.com/index.php?act=viewCat&catId=91 2 we'll probably use this year (both on leaves, cause that's something my son asks a lot about) and the other 2 not sure, might use one of them later on this year the other one we'll use next year.
When we used it.. oh I guess about 4 years ago, you couldn't print much of anything from it, so maybe they have changed a lot. I still think it's expensive with all of the free things out there.
