Hi! My husband and I are just starting to homeschool our kids, and we are trying to get ourselves organized. Our oldest just finished kindergarten at the local public elementary school, and although she liked it, we were not satisfied with the academic experience (she's an advanced reader, and we've been working on math at home with her; she's working on fractions, exponents, negative numbers -- even the advanced/gifted program teachers don't seem to understand why we would introduce her to these concepts at her age). We can do better.
One of our goals in teaching our kids is to make sure that they are prepared for admission to a selective college, when the time comes. (We understand that they might choose another path, but we want to make sure it's a choice, not a lack of options.) Presumably this will mean lots of AP classes in high school (or potentially earlier). I am not too worried about planning for math, because it builds on itself in a pretty logical way. Similarly for English -- it's not quite as clear-cut in my mind, but it's still a natural progression of skills in comprehension, vocabulary, composition, etc. When we get to science and social science, though, I am a lot less certain about how to set benchmarks to make sure we stay "on track", given the wide range of topics that fall into each category. I could look up the Common Core standards for each grade level and say, OK, we want to do 1.5 years of material each year, or something like that, but I'm not sure if that is the most sensible approach.
I was homeschooled myself growing up, and I don't think we did too much formal stuff for science/social science in the elementary grades, but looking back, I do recognize that there were a few gaps, things we just neglected to cover. I'm hoping to avoid that for my own kids by planning ahead. Does anyone have thoughts on these issues?