I realize I am late to the party, but one thing you find out as you homeschool - you have the flexibility and freedom (and sometimes the fear!) to do what you want and drop what doesn’t work. I abandoned most of the structured curriculum we had. They are designed to be used by one teacher trying to teach 20 kids in a classroom and are one-size-fits-all and unnecessarily repetitive.
Get your kids to read, give them plenty of time to explore their interests, and find meaningful, real work for them to do. If you live on a farm or run a family business, getting your children involved will provide the best learning experiences of all. We found that computer games (not the stupid ones that are really just electronic flash cards) that give kids a task to do or a puzzle to solve are great resources. Playing a game about being captain of one’s own trading ship gave our sons an incredible knowledge of world geography. Allowing our daughter to experiment with home repair and design in our home gave her an ability to fix or renovate just about anything. She is not afraid to tackle most DIY challenges.
Even though he was an old, hippie-lib, John Holt’s books, especially How Children Fail, give one a new perspective on what real education is, how children learn, and how bad most schools are.
Don’t be afraid to be different. Formal education hasn’t changed much in 100 years, and it’s a dinosaur. If you are concerned about doing a good job teaching your children, I can pretty much guarantee you ARE doing a good job teaching your children.
I have all of John Holt’s books: he is the one that convinced me to homeschool.
I’m really thinking of a structured curriculum for a year or two; then we may switch to the “unschooling” approach.
Even though I am a college-educated professional, 95% of the things I have learned in my lifetime, that have been of real value to me, have been those things I learned on my own when I NEEDED to in order to further some goal of my own.
My kids read a minimum of an hour per day, and I often find them reading outside of “reading time”.
I have no doubt that my two kids will be “homeschooling success stories”.