Posted on 07/24/2008 10:19:49 AM PDT by Tired of Taxes
Free Republic Homeschool Forum 2008-2009
A spot for homeschoolers on Free Republic to share information
Once again, we are reviving our Free Republic Homeschool Forum where homeschoolers can share tips and talk about curriculum for the upcoming year.
Below is a list of educational books, curricula, and other resources recommended by homeschoolers on Free Republic. This list was compiled, updated, and reformatted using the suggestions many of you gave on our last thread. (If any corrections are needed, please advise.)
Feel free to add more of your favorite books and products to the comments below. Which curriculum has worked well for your family? Share advice with other homeschoolers.
A big, hearty CONGRATULATIONS to all homeschoolers who graduated this year!
And, as always, many, many thanks to Jim Robinson and Free Republic for the continued support!
PLEASE WAIT FOR THE LIST TO BE PASTED IN THE FIRST COMMENT BELOW BEFORE POSTING A MESSAGE. THANK YOU!
Disclaimer: The website links below are provided only to give more information on each item. They are not intended as solicitations. Free Republic does not officially endorse any of these products. We are merely a group of Free Republic homeschoolers sharing information with each other.
Ping to metmom
Wow. Thanks for the info. already forwarded the thread to my wife. Thanks again.
FYI: The educational resources many of you recommended on our last Homeschoolers’ Forum have been added to this newly updated list. Thank you!
I would be very interested to see how high schooling homeschoolers like their science curriculum.
I teach a coop class on chemistry and biology to homeschoolers, and have been using apologia. But I have to admit I am not happy with it. It’s too “conversational” and very week on outlining and clarity to me. I was looking at Bob Jones, which seems strong on basics.
Within the next few weeks we need to purchase biology. We have microscopes and lab equipment, but I was having trouble figuring out exactly how they conduct labs from the BJU website. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Any ideas?
Wow. That’s weak, not week.
Even though my specialty is science, I CAN spell.
Some other companies I like:
Veritas Press
Area 127
Curriculum Click - I found a great download for printables (household and school) on this website called Master Planner. It had 160 different printables for about $7.00 and it was totally worth the money.
read later
This ping list is for articles of interest to homeschoolers. DaveLoneRanger has asked me to take over the management of this list. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping List. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added or removed from either list, or both.Excellent! Thanks so much. This year we’re going to follow Ambleside Online curriculum, found at amblesideonline.com. It’s a free curriculum that follows the spirit and content that Charlotte Mason used in her school in England in the 1800’s. Lots of great, classical literature, short lessons, emphasis on nature and the outdoors. I think it will be a good fit for us.
Ping to RightWingTeen. Look like great resources for my kids.
We used Abeka and it seemed to be pretty thorough. We never did do much with BJU. It just wasn’t very popular in our area and you couldn’t find it used very easily. People around here tend to use Abeka. Several I know did use the Apologia, but opinions were mixed on it.
My daughter took some old NY Biology regents tests to see how she’d do and she did very well on them. Close to 90, IIRC.
Where can I find good information on making high school transcripts? My son starts freshman year this semester.
Homeschool graduate, no kids yet to homeschool. I can attest that a number of titles on your list are excellent from personal experience - particularly Writing Strands and Saxon Math.
You might add some courtship links :) although my homeschooled husband and I found each other on FreeRepublic, I believe other homeschoolers have found soulmates on more, er, romance specific forums.
We used The Prairie Primer for one year in grade school using the Little House books. It was fine for grade school.
For English grades 1-6 and reading grades 1-3 we used Rod & Staff publishers. Their curriculum is very low cost and the English is great for teaching grammar and mechanics.
They also have a section in their website where you can bring up actual pages out of their books to see what the format is and how they teach it.
http://www.rodandstaffbooks.com/
although my homeschooled husband and I found each other on FreeRepublic,
***Well, that’s pretty freeping cool...
I’d be interested to know of homeschool/courtship sites. I operate courtshipconnection.net, which is not a match-making site as such (although a couple did meet through it). It is more for courtship discussion and links to articles and resources on courtship, and there has always been a strong homeschool influence there. I need to get back to updating it and would appreciate tips on current courtship sites and information, to update the now-musty Body of Knowledge area of the site.
We have been discussing ways to fast track kids through high school to avoid the liberal agenda and other idiocies:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1315730/posts?page=84#84
Proposal for the Free Republic High School Diploma.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1316882/posts
I have been using the tag “chspe” to remind myself & others about the articles that have discussed this approach.
So does one of mine (I'm trying not to panic), and I hope to read lots of advice here. ;-) I think the Donna Young website under "Recordkeeping" has free transcript forms. Others here have recommended NARS (see "Diplomas & Transcripts") which gives official credit (fees involved).
Can’t help you there, we didn’t really spend much time looking for courtship materials. If you’re updating your site, make sure you have information about internet courtship! The hardest thing in our relationship was that we were very far from each other and our families so most of the traditional courtship strategies I’d heard of just didn’t work.
How about the Calvert curriculum?
Although we no longer use the entire package, it’s a great, rigorous boxed curriculum, especially for early elementary school years.
Hmm. Chapter 3: "Have Your First Date be a Group Outing with Lots of Friends. With Guns."
I seem to recall that strategy worked well.
Here’s my best advice, get your kids involved in one or two activities and excel at them. Don’t get so “socialized” that the kids just touch on 50 different groups and things. As you’ll see from my tagline, I’m involved in Boy Scouts. Find a home school friendly Pack or Troop for cub and Boy Scouts and get involved. It teaches young men the correct things of life.
On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.
My daughters were in Girl Scouts for a while, but it wasn’t the same. However, a new Christian centered organization is coming on strong. If you have young girls, find or start an American Heritage Girls troop.
The only requirement from the Community College for them to take classes was that they take a placement test. This gave the school a benchmark by which to determine at which level they should start. For example, our daughter didn't do well on the writing part, but extremely well on the Math. Our son was just the opposite. They both enjoyed their classes, and because some of theirs were at night, they had quite a mix of students; some closer to their age, some older, and going back to school to finally get their degrees. It was quite enlightening for our kids.
I'm a procrastinator, and knew I needed some oversight, so I registered our 2 homeschoolers with NARHS (North Atlantic Regional High School), so they'd have an accredited diploma at the end of it all. It's not that expensive, and it was great for my peace of mind. I still had to prepare a portfolio and transcript at the end of each year, and submit the evidence of their having done the work required for each course. This meant that at the end of four years, all that work was there, and credentialed, and the school submitted the information to the Admissions offices of the colleges to which our kids applied. I didn't have to do a portfolio for EACH college application.
Our daughter graduated in 2006, and our youngest son will be graduating this month, and will head off to college in August!
WHEW!
*snort*
do they need any kind of transcript before enrolling? many of the online schools required a transcript ahead of time.
If your student has already attended high school, you can have the school send NARHS the transcript, and NARHS will blend that information into their own records, showing the credits your student has already earned.
I liked NARHS because our kids were able to create their own courses, and get credit for their work! Our daughter taught herself Japanese, and Digital Video Editing and we just provided proof in the form of translations of Japanese works and grammar instruction books, and sent them DVDs of some Anime Music Videos that she created for the Video Editing course. You can be very creative in how the subjects are studied, and the kids will stay interested and learn SO much!
Another resource homeschoolers might want to take advantage of, or look into.
*Better Late than Early* is a book by Drs. Moore and Moore and is excellent for understanding how kids learn and early childhood education. I read it some years ago and would strongly recommend it to anyone with small children. The book can be found through Amazon. I didn’t know if posting the link was permitted since it’s selling something.
http://www.moorefoundation.com/
http://www.moorefoundation.com/article.php?id=3
LearnsFromMistakes sent the list below from his wife. (Thank you again!)
Buy/Sell curriculum:
http://www.homeschoolclassifieds.com/
http://market.hslda.org/Auction/xcAuction.asp
http://www.thecurriculumcoop.com/
Naturally Simple Homeschooling: http://www.naturallysimple.org/FreeorlowpriceOnlineHomeschoolResources.htm
http://www.homeschoolplanet.com/
Lapbooking:
http://www.dinah.com/
http://www.tobinslab.com/
http://www.geocities.com/gibsevengang/lapbooks.html
Letterboxing in North America:
http://www.letterboxing.org/
Math Worksheets:
http://donnayoung.org/math/
http://www.edhelper.com/math.htm
http://www.smartalecbooks.com/
http://www.superkids.com/aweb/tools/math/
http://themathworksheetsite.com/
rent calculators: http://www.rentcalculators.org/
Unit studies:
http://www.waldsfe.org/Study%20Topics.htm
Music Forms:
http://highland.hitcho.com.au/musicforms.htm
Spanish: http://www.jvlnet.com/~liliana/Spanish_Numbers.html
to keep portfolio’s of student portfolio…
http://www.osportfolio.org/
http://donnayoung.org/forms/planners/
Educational board games: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec670/cardboard/CardboardCognition.html
Trivia games: http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games_menu.htm
http://www.funbrain.com/
Science:
http://www.bartleby.com/107/indexillus.html
Maps:
http://www.netstate.com/states/symb/seals/ia_seal.htm
http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/namera.htm
History:
http://historylink101.com/
presidents:
http://www.presidentsusa.net/
i also like: Memoria Press, Veritas Press (as you do), Pennywise Learning, Peace Hill Press and Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers (for Latin and Greek material)...
I’m glad you asked that question. I just spent months searching for a high school biology book for our eldest child. Every book I found either was too expensive, didn’t include enough information, and/or included controversial topics that had nothing to do with biology. So, I’ll be checking into the biology curricula recommended here, too.
Ping to RightWingTeen. (I think I was pinged by mistake.)
Thanks for all of your input. The next Homeschool Resources list will be updated with the resources and links you recommended.
that's one of my favorites! we've gone through all 200 roots... and i still have my son hit them once a week.... i do not want him to forget them... it helps that we do Latin... the roots come up all of the time...
The Science Spot says it is a middle school site, but it has some worksheets that are good for physical science (sometimes taught in 8th grade, sometimes in 9th, sometimes at a more advanced level in 11th)...answer keys are given for most worksheets, and there are also some links to interactive sites.
I'm not sure about lower grades, but college textbooks can frequently be purchased through Amazons' used book section quite inexpensively.
(If I was the last person in the world to figure that out, pardon me for butting in...sometimes I've gotten new books much cheaper than the price of used books at the college bookstore, and with 2 in college it helps considerably...my favorite "game" at the beginning of the semester is "beat the bookstore's prices")
A friend of my kids said that she bought the used books so cheaply on Amazon, that she made money selling them back to the college bookstore.
I believe that...as I say, I love buying the books online just to see how much more cheaply I can get them! (although the bill is often a “gulper” either way...)
It’s like going to the dollar store. Yeah, it’s great, everything is a dollar...
Until you realize you just spent $40.
I haven’t had a chance to check out Abeka biology but I know it has good lab manuals.
I’ve peeked at some BJU. Some higher schools diss it, because it is Christian oriented (aka not big on evolution) but I found it was one of the few curricula that I didn’t have to outline and make extra handouts. It has good natural outlining built into the text.
Apologia was a big disappointment to me. I guess it’s good if you have no science background, because the book is a running conversation. He comes from the reasearch analytical background, but I found my kids didn’t process it into memory as well. It’s good if you can’t figure out how to do something.
People have told me for Physics the Apologia text is good. I didn’t like it for Chemistry.
A good site for used curriculum is vegsource. It’s vegetarian site, but for some weird reason they have a huge homeschooling swap board.You have to search for it, I never can find the link when I need it. But I’ve bought lots of cheap curriculum from there.
Also, as I said I teach science. I’ve found older editions are MUCH cheaper. People hold over from their college days, when they found if they had a early edition it made problems. But if you are doing the work by yourself, it doesn’t matter if the pages or problems don’t mesh with others.
I actually tell kids to bring in older edition books to my class, and we just share the problems. I’ve found the text doesn’t really change that much. Just the colors and page numbers.
We purchase almost all of our books through Amazon. Before buying, I either preview the book online (sometimes I find previews on other sites if Amazon doesn’t give one), read the reviews customers post, or go to a store and review the book myself. Still, sometimes the books aren’t appropriate after all. In fact, I’m in the process of returning a few for a refund now. That’s why I find the recommendations here so valuable.
After reviewing so many books (and now returning a few), I now keep a warning list of books to avoid and the reasons why. I don’t want to forget which books I shouldn’t purchase. That reminds me, eventually, I’d like for us FR homeschoolers to share information on books to avoid, too, as most of us are probably buying online.
Thanks, I know other homeschoolers who use Vegsource, too. It’s listed in the links above under “Homeschool Forums, Stores & Swaps”, but I haven’t tried it yet. Most of the homeschoolers where I live are natural foods enthusiasts and vegetarians. Maybe that’s why so many homeschoolers are there.
I may be one of the few people who didn’t resell her college textbooks. I kept all of them, so we have college textbooks on geology, for example, but nothing on biology!
I noticed PBS sells a video series called “Core Biology”, but it’s very expensive, and I don’t want to spend the money without knowing if it’s appropriate. That reminds me, we need a DVD/CD category. If the packages are opened, they can’t be returned for a refund, so it would be good to know which are OK to buy before purchasing.
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