My introduction and a brief overview of homeschooling

I feel very crone-ish in this group with all my kids grown up so some of what I have to add is in retrospect to what I should have done rather than how I did it.  Learn from my mistakes, if you will.

I homeschooled my youngest son all through his pre-college years initially from a fundamentalist Christian perspective.  We did the whole Christian curriculum thing with the workbooks, the pledge of allegiance, Bible readings and everything.  The result was that after one year of school, Zach was so burned out that he never wanted to pick up a book again.

So the second year was extremely laid back and delight-directed.  I figured he would learn history a multitude of times over the homeschooling years so I just read him historical fiction and some biographies.  With a phonics course and some basic math I felt we had covered it all.  It was several years before we met up with curricula again.  In the meantime we did unit studies.  Unit studies consist of finding a particular subject and doing all your school work with that in mind.  At one time he was interested in anatomy so in addition to reading about it, he wrote about it, learned spelling words related to it and even found ways to incorporate math.

But...and here is where I think his Paganism first fostered itself...his favorite times were when we studied history from a unit studies plan.  We immersed ourselves in the time frame we were studying.  The Egyptian period, we did hieroglyphics on posters that we left leaning against the wall, had meals with Egyptian food, read book after book about Egypt, made Egyptian clothing (and wore it when we had our meal) and studied the mythology of Egypt.  I think we spent a year doing that.

We had as much fun during the study of Ancient Greece and Rome.  I just wish we had explored China and India, too, but we were Christians at the time and only focused on European history, sadly.

We returned to curricula in his sixth grade years because I was going through chemotherapy (breast cancer, celebrating my 8th year cancer free, thank the Goddess) and I just didn't have the wherewithall to design a curriculum on my own.  But after that we went back to delight directed studies although not unit studies.

By high school we were using the library nearly exclusively with some secular text books for math and science.  And we had pretty much tossed out Bible study and anything Christian, although we remained Christians for a few more years.  If you have a good library or a interlibrary loan system, homeschooling can be extremely inexpensive.

The point is that you don't need a fortune to homeschool and you can still get learning in there.  My focus on Zach was to teach him how to learn, not to teach him facts that he had to memorize.  As a Pagan I would have done a lot of things differently, of course, but as it turned out, we evidently did a lot of things instinctively Pagan without thinking about it.

You also don't have to worry about exposing them to your own spiritual path because if you teach them how to learn, they will learn.  They won't be as inclined to just accept things they're taught as gospel (if you will) and will find their own path.  Zach was first drawn to the Pagan path in junior high (middle school) and although I was still very much a fundamentalist, there must have been enough Pagan in me to want to let him explore that path himself because I did let him go there.  I got him books from the library from different perspectives and didn't discourage him when he wanted to explore Wicca.  His fundamentalist guilt won out on several occasions but eventually through his use of those skills he learned and with a lot of common sense, he chose his path definitively.

And amazingly I followed, although on a different Pagan path from his.  Because while I was teaching him how to learn, I was learning how myself.  I started questioning things I had accepted as fact and discovered that they weren't actually facts after all.

Today we are both Druids but walking that path at different speeds.  And he is getting ready to graduate from technical college with a Phi Theta Kappa award. 

My best advice for homeschooling is to relax, get the mandatory courses in but don't stress out too much on having a rigid curriculum. Different places have different requirements and in some places there are tests and homework that need to be handed in, but that doesn't mean you can't turn it all into an interesting and fun experience.  And of course your children have different needs as well.  Some require more structure than others.  But the most important thing is to relax.

I know this is very vague overview of homeschooling and I hope to be more specific over time but I thought an introduction and brief look into homeschooling would help give you and idea.  Also, any questions you have will help me write more specifically.