Kerr Family Homeschooling Resources

image The B-I-B-L-E

This is the place to start if you are thinking of homeschooling your children, it really has lots to say about children and parents. We start every day with reading the Bible and prayer. On days that we don’t, things always seem to go amuck. God wants to be part of our everyday lives, it is so fulfilling to teach our children about Him and see them understand God and know Him more, and teaching them draws me closer to Him too as I don’t want to lead them astray in any way. We have just come across a new version of the Bible called the English Standard Version which we are enjoying as a true ‘word for word’ translation and have just bought the children their own ESV Bibles and pray they will grow in Gods word as they grow up in our family.

Sonlight

This is our main curriculum and definitely a good place to start out. It is a Christian Homeschool curriculum with the option to buy single items or one box with all your resources for a year. When we started off we did that, but I found that we wanted to tailor our school year more to our style and life so this year ordered just the Language Arts and History for J. I really like that SL is easy to use and that they have done a lot of the preparation for me.

Explode the Code

We buy this through Sonlight. It was not included in ‘the Year in a box’ but is on the schedule they provide so was easy to use alongside the regular Sonlight stuff. The kids really enjoy these workbooks and they have really encouraged the kids with their reading.

Rod and Staff

We decided to use R&S for M & D this year. I didn’t think they were ready for Sonlights Grade one work but had surpassed Kindergarten. I have found the R&S Grade 1 curriculum easy to teach and fun for the kids. I think I would like to get geography and science from them too as I have heard great reviews about how they stay true to the bible which is something I appreciate about their reading/writing programs.

Footprints on our Land

A really fun South African curriculum that we bought to help us teach about our homeland. We use it when we’re tired of world history and just want to read some good South African stories/history and learn about where mommy and daddy are from.

Learn to Read

My kids think these are video games, a great little program encouraging children to read along with a story/game.

Learning Page.com

Lots of worksheets and things to do on days when we need something easy-going. I use this a lot at the end of a term or during holiday’s and weekends, when believe it or not the kids ask to do school.

Math U See

Our Maths curriculum is so cool, we are loving it and has really made Maths fun to learn and teach.

Ambleside Online

A Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling, something I’m very interested in and have adopted a few of the ideas especially lots of time out doors (when possible) and free time each day for the kids to think and learn about the things they are interested in personally. Even if you are not homeschooling I would highly recommend reading some of Charlotte Mason’s work that explains her philosophy and gives very good insight into children.

The Home Service

We recently became members of this group that gives support and help to other Home Educating families here in the UK. I believe they also have a homeschool camp once a year.

We made it through our first week of homeschooling 2009

image Well we did it! we started early this year to get a head start and we did great. The kids were really stoked about their new workbooks (M&D) and J really got into his new subjects and even said that he likes school now :) We learned the continents and oceans and have the whole family singing the song to remember them, J and I looked up where Jericho is and saw how important it must have been for the Israelites to conquer that city when entering the "promised land", we learned that the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers are in Iraq, and kicked off our MathUsee with learning decimals.

We also watched an old cartoon Narnia movie with them and are once again interested in learning more about C.S. Lewis. It was very interesting to discuss with the kids afterwards and see how they could immediately relate Aslan to Jesus. For D the story was a little too ‘real’ (even with the horribly old animation) but they enjoyed the story  and even had Kenny begin reading them the Chronicles of Narnia. (wonder if he’ll finish it?)

I am so excited about teaching them this year, I love that God has given us this passion to maximize our children’s education and teach them at home. We feel blessed to have happy and healthy children, and they certainly keep me on my toes with daily questions like "when are you going to let us have chocolate?" and "why do we have to die to go to heaven?"  They just keep them coming and I just keep asking God for wisdom to answer them well.