Homeschooling - Sharing our Children's Joy of Knowledge

I am a proud supporter of Homeschool eStore! For those of you who are currently homeschooling, or considering homeschooling, I'd like to share some information about them, so you can have the advantage I did not when I began homeschooling over a year ago. If you aren't homeschooling, but your child has difficulties in some areas of learning, or maybe you'd like some fun educational activities you could quickly obtain for your little one, please read further.

There's tons of curriculum out there, from $free to $1000's (yes, $1000's!). You can literally spend what you want, or rather what you have on the education of your child. I began by creating my curriculum from scratch. While my daughter actually seemed to enjoy this, I quickly saw that I was spending an entire weekend (plus some) creating one week of lesson plans, that sometimes either didn't last as long, or didn't go quiet as expected and ended up in wasted paper, or wasted time (mine). After extensive searching I found an online program, which was cheap enough at $20 per month, it included all the major curriculum that any state would require, and most of its lessons were animated and enjoyable. My daughter loved this - at first. Us being on dial-up did put a major damper on the excitement, as we would sit and wait several minutes for the lesson to load, or the next part of the lesson, or simply the next topic in the lesson - sometimes not all the page would load and we'd have to go back in and out to get it to load properly. Needless to say, no matter how fun learning is, if a child has to wait, they quickly loose interest. Trying to drag her back to her desk several times a day, makes a mom stressful, and a child resentful. This is NOT what learning is supposed to be like!! This doesn't even feel right!!

I realized I was trying to recreate school at home! Why?? I removed her from the school system, for many reasons; one major one being our small town atmosphere and certain prejudices over who's parents make the most money and who's back provided the most profit from a little scratching. There is also the issue of teachers being restrained in their teaching efforts from the stress of preparing children to pass TAKS tests, or whatever other initials officials want to apply to them. I decided to take it upon myself to be my daughters teacher. Little, did I know at the time, I would not really be teaching her at all. I have discovered this is a learning process for the both of us. Just Like Life. What I call Spiritual Education. Both one in the same.

We've moved on from boring homework stuck behind a school desk and the older dictating to the younger. We've grown to learning, sharing, and creating - together. We learn about what we are interested in when we are interested in it. Do we still get math, science, language arts, and social studies in? You bet (and more!). Our favorite venues include unit studies, lap books and other electronically downloaded lessons. Tomorrow we begin our horse lapbook unit; my daughter could not be more excited! Arts and Crafts and her passion for Horses all combined into a fun filled week+ of learning!

What could be better? It's a time she can learn and create on her own, and I can also enjoy in the process and learn a thing or three myself - not just about the subject at hand, but about her, about me, about life!

I urge you to take a look at the very affordable, professionally created and endorsed curriculum at:

All of their items are delivered in ebook format IMMEDIATELY after payment! Oh yes, and they always have a new Freebie, that is a Valuable Teaching tool! And sorry, but you missed 'black friday' in which they gave away over $200 worth of free educational material; so sign up for the newsletter for their next giveaways!!

With Love,
ColorGoddess Tina