John asked so I thought I would sit down and kind of explain our “methods”.  We are a very eclectic family when it comes from home schooling.  We believe in hands on, life learning lessons for the most part.  Being from a family that “does for themselves” and does not “hire out”, our boys know that they have years to look forward to very hard physical work.    They have both been involved in many of our remodeling projects and are about to take on a small addition to their room.  They both cook and bake so they get plenty of reading with that and they are both into an online game so they type to their friends on that.

Time4Learning has helped me be a little more organized and focused on keeping everything together.  We worked out of Modern Curriculum Press for the last several years and love them for traditional book work but because of issues with both boys, T4L is a much better program for us right now.

Our family uses a lot of School Zone products for different things and have been able to incorporate so much into learning maps, states and areas using the Highlights Which Way USA books that my parents got for them.  I struggle with spelling lists and would be Oh’-so-grateful to see spelling added to T4L.  For some of our writing projects we use McDonald Creative Thinking “Write-Abouts”.  McDonald also puts out “Silly Starters” and “Story Starters” which we have used.

For the most part we have our oldest draw his own comics and add story lines to that when he gets really frustrated.  They also have a program that their godfather has them on which requires writing every week.   Boy Scouts has helped them with some writing projects.

Like I said though, we are kind of all over the place and take one day at a time.  At least now there is one part that they don’t complain about so it makes all the rest so much easier.