Thank you for your answers. My kids do indeed have access to craft supplies - scissors, glue, colouring pencils, and stickers. They really like colouring pictures, so I always have a stack of these ready, and they will often reach for these while I am napping with the toddler. Scissors and glue they can also use whenever they want, as long as I am in reasonable proximity so as to keep an eye on them. So I am reasonably confident that they are developing these fine-motor skills. And come to think of it, they actually do "real" crafts once in a while with my husband, and some home decoration crafts with me before Easter and Christmas. My son loves helping his daddy with home repairs, and I plan on teaching my daughters to sew when they are older. So yeah, they do crafts, but not school or lesson related crafts. Thank you for reassuring me that you can successfully homeschool without crafts. Where I live, homeschooling is just starting to gain traction. The homeschooling community is very small and from what I gather, very insistent that anything resembling "school" at home is just as "bad" as brick and mortar school. In other words, if you are not well versed in Montessory pedagogy and if you use workbooks instead of learning through manual activities, you are not really doing any better than the local school. So it's easy to get the feeling that you are doing a poor job if your homeschool is as books, discussions, and memorization focused as ours is...

Hi all! I am a long-time lurker, but a first time poster. DH and I have 3 dc - DS6, DD5 and DD1.5, with a little one on the way. We "officially" started homeschooling this year, meaning that DS6 is now registered in 1st grade (where we live in Europe, homeschooling can only happen with a certain amount of constrains). DD5 is actually following the same curriculum, as she is very ready for "school". We homeschool because it is, for now, the better option for our children, from an academic and social point of view. Things are going well, I am happy with what we have managed to do so far. We don't however, do any crafts. Our homeschool is very "book focused". We read a lot, do spelling and handwriting exercises, use Singapour for maths. Both kids are learning to play the piano, and we do one lesson of geography, science and history per week, where I normally read aloud from a book while they colour a picture with some relation to the topic, then we discuss what I read and finally memorize a (very short) summary. I was recently reading an old thread on teaching history, and I am in awe of the various activities some homeschoolers have done with their children on topics from SOTW vol.1. However, I know we/I could never do that...Partly because I have a toddler and a baby on the way and am not feeling well, but mostly because this just isn't the way I work. I love books, read-alouds, discussions, and assignments. I am very, very bad at crafts. Simple crafty endeavours take me ages to imagine, organize and implement. Each time I have tried, we were all very frustrated by the end of the experiment. I think, or rather I know, that I am not really manual, or sensory oriented. I am exceptionally bad at drawing - most kindergartners draw better than I do. This is not to say that we spend our whole days with books - we spend a fair amount of time outside, and we are lucky to be living close to the forest where we can do a lot of nature walks, but...no crafts for science, geography or history. I am wondering whether we are alone in this, and whether more experienced homeschool moms would think I am harming the children in some way.

Just a few words to introduce myself, as I have been reading the WTM forums on and off for a couple of years, and am about to start homeschooling my eldest. I live in Europe, and my family is bi-cultural - French and Polish. We are raising our 6yo, almost 5yo and 1yo in both languages and cultures, though we haven't figured out exactly how we are going to organize our homeschool to incorporate both cultures. I have known I was going to homeschool for a long time, one of the main reason being that I was educated the Trivium way more or less (in a Catholic school) and loved it, but schools offering this kind of education these days are few and far in between. I look forward to participating in all kind of discussions here!