Thanks to my friends at the eclectic non religious homeschooling site for turning me onto HomeschoolLiterature.com.  It turns out that there are many books about homeschoolers. And I quote:  Homeschoolliterature.com was created to highlight books that pertain to homeschooling situations. We have read and reviewed each book personally; it is our intention to introduce these books and authors to readers of all ages. It is our goal to provide an honest, family-friendly online directory where everyone can come read book reviews and comment on them.

I've found that there are two kinds of homeschool kids and parents: those that get along well and find teaching writing to be a great experience.  And those that find that the teaching of writing skills is the single largest friction point and frustration point for teaching writing.

Why do you think this is so?

If you are teaching on your own, here are some marvellous free resources for teaching writing:

Free Resources by Category

Today, we did our first of the new year, book club meeting. More on that later. But basically, we deviated from our standard curriculum to try and read some books that reflect our situation so we are reading books about homeschoolers. So far, great idea but we hated the book that we chose. Fortunately, we've found a website which is a complete directory of books about homeschoolers.

One thing that I'm trouble with is my highschool homeschool program. More on this later too. I did just learn a very basic thing about the standard high school requirements:

Most colleges expect high schoolers to have completed a somewhat standard set of high school credits before they graduate. These are based upon preparing a student for the rigorous demands of a college schedule. The general outline for what is expected of college-bound graduating seniors in high school can be found in the chart below:

I continue to be amazed by our interest in homeschool curriculum.  We know that there is no silver bullet. We know that we need to mix and match curriculum to put together a homeschool curriculum. We know that each curriculum takes time to learn, get used to, and ultimately, the quality of education has more to do with how you use the curriculum rather than which curriculum you use.  

Still, I, and as far as I can tell all the homeschool moms, are fascinated by looking at and considering the possibilities.  So here's my picks these days for online homeschool curriculum.

Time4Learning.com - I push this as my bread and butter, Prek-8th grade, online homeschool curriculum for language arts and math. It's self running, student paced, animated, and thorough.   While not comprehensive, it does provide a very solid building block to work from.  I also like the parents homeschooling discussion in their forum. Its deeper than the Facebook discussions, easier ot find things, and has more sections. Their support is wicked good too. 

For indepth writing study, I'm a big Time4Writing fan. Their courses are $99 each whcih is a little expensive for me but still, it's better than a tutor and seems to accomplish a lot more. I've also started using their free writing study resources.

For vocabulary practice, SpellingCity.com of course! The Free teaching materials that we use the most are analogies, dolche words, compound words, math vocabulary, and science vocabulary.

For fun relaxing and learning, there's another vocabulary website with Analogy Study, Latin Learning Games , and more. Lastly, my kids did great with some typing practice games that I gave them recently.