Homeschooling: part 1

Ah, my poor neglected blog!

It's been so long since I added anything here...
We have been pretty busy lately, I guess!

Much of what I have been busy with is planning our homeschooling year, so I thought I would share some of that. I'm going to do this in a few parts, or else I could be here all day!

We have been homeschooling for four years already, but all of that was with a charter school. They provided all the lesson plans, books, and materials. Around the end of the last school year I started feeling dissatisfied with our experience with them for a few different reasons and wanted to have more freedom than they provided so I started looking for other options. I didn't want to build a curriculum from scratch, but wanted the freedom to combine Madison and Hunter when appropriate, and to add and take away from a program to make it suit our family. So I searched and I searched, and discovered the Charlotte Mason philosophy. That seemed like a good fit to me.

For example, Charlotte’s students used living books rather than dry textbooks. Living books are usually written in story form by one author who has a passion for the subject. A living book makes the subject “come alive.” - from simplycharlottemason.com

After some more searching, I discovered the Ambleside Online curriculum. It is designed to be as close as possible to what was taught by Charlotte Mason. While this was very close to what I wanted, there were a few things I wasn't entirely happy with. So I kept looking. And then I discovered Milestones Academy. Here I found a wonderful curriculum following the Charlotte Mason principles that I love, using many of the same wonderful books as Ambleside Online, but adding in an LDS perspective. I finally found something that was a (nearly - I will be doing a little tweaking) perfect fit!

In the next few posts, I will share our curriculum choices, scheduling, and whatever else I can think of!