homeschooling advice

A mother in my apartment complex is going to homeschool her 5yo daughter this year. She came over here two days ago to ask me some questions about homeschooling. She was absolutely sure that she was going to go with this big Christian homeschooling company that supplies all your books in all the subjects for the entire year with very detailed teaching manual. This company's "ultra" homeschooling package cost's about $700 which is way more than you have to spend on homeschooling a kindergartener.

Last night, during dinner, we get a knock on the door. It is my neighbor and she says that she really needs to talk to me about other options, now she wants me to help her put together her own curriculum.

She had her list of classes and in about an hour I had saved her about $600. I completely changed her Language Art curriculum. Instead of a handwriting workbook and a phonics workbook and a writing workbook and a reading comprehension workbook, etc I advised the more holistic (and as she put it, the more common sense way) of Charlotte Mason. Pretty much everythnig could be handeled through their normal reading of classic literature along with narration and copywork. So basically, if you have a library card and some paper Language Arts is free.

For math I recommended Singapore which is about $7.50 each for four books that would last a normal kid the whole year. And I recommend the free resource Livingmath.com and gave her links to free math games and math practice on the internet.

Science? Again, use the library, take field trip to the zoo, natural history museum, botanical gardens, science museums (it helps to get memberships.) And I reminded her that the library even has books with science experiments in them if she wants to do that.

I let her borrow my copy of What your Kindergartener Needs to Know and it covers the human body, weather, plants, and other basic science topics that can be jumping off point for her.

She had history covered with the booklist she had downloaded from the original curriculum she was going to buy and had already checked that many of them were avialable from the library.

She ended up staying for more than 2 hours. We got into talking about Libertarian politics (now she thinks she might be a little libertarian, *wink*) and towards the end some about religion. She is born again but I hope I made it clear in a kind way that I was not interested in her trying to convert me, but I don't mind talking about religion.

Her little daughter who is almost 5 played dress up with Z in Z's room. It is kind of funny to see Z being the "older" kid in the relationhip. Z is usually the younger one. They were playing some game where Z was the Queen Wicked Witch and C was the Princess Wicked Witch and Little C kept calling Z "mommy."

Anyway it was fun to help her. She was so grateful and excited to pick up where I left up and create the rest of the curriculum. I think she might be a good homeschoolers because that is how you are supposed to feel.