I do have several of their abridged classics and a handful of student books I've bought over the years from CK. If I do use it, I will purchase the student books for sure. Still thinking about it actually. Thanks.

Thanks for all the responses. This was helpful.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience with it. I appreciate you taking the time to do that.

Thank you! I appreciate the feedback.

What if I rephrase the question this way: has anyone ever looked at the Core Knowledge curriculum that is available for free download and considered using it for homeschooling but decided against it? If so, why? I like K12 but it cannot be reused from one year to the next. A subscription is needed to access the online content which is necessary to use the curriculum. With Core Knowledge there are engaging student books to come back to again and again.

I have used K12 for Lit, History, and Science in the past too. I wonder if I should just go that route next year. K12 is already set up so well for use in a homeschool.

The entire Core Knowledge curriculum that is available to schools is also available for free download on the Core Knowledge website. It is wholly geared toward a classroom setting. The homeschool sets available for purchase on the website are just printed copies of that free curriculum in a single-user set rather than a classroom set. But the person who created this website - homeschoolworkplans.com - did all the work of figuring out how to use the free, written-for-a-classroom-setting Core Knowledge curriculum in a homeschool setting. Her plans are incredibly thorough and detailed. It is not the same thing as the What Your __ Grader Needs to Know books which are a summary of what is taught in the Core Knowledge curriculum. I have used the What Your __ Grader Needs to Know books loosely as a guide in our homeschool for years. For various reasons, I do not want to piece anything together next year as I have done in the past. I want to start with the whole Core Knowledge curriculum and subtract bits and pieces as we go if needed. Just curious if anyone else has done that...

Has anyone actually used the Core Knowledge Curriculum ( www.coreknowledge.org ) for homeschooling? I am not referring to using the "What your __ Grader Needs to Know" books or to referencing the Core Knowledge Scope and Sequence. I am curious about the experiences of anyone who has actually downloaded the free curriculum and/or purchased the Homeschool Sets. I recently came across a website that makes it look doable to use Core Knowledge for homeschooling (www.homeschoolworkplans.com ) so I am considering using this for the coming school year. A little background on me - I've homeschooled for 18 years, and I'm looking at using this for my youngest two kids in elementary. I no longer have babies and toddlers in the house and am only homeschooling two of my kids now. I know using Core Knowledge might be a time consuming task especially at first until I get accustomed to sifting through the teacher's guides. I have always liked the engaging content in the Core Knowledge student books. For various reasons, I think it would be a good fit for us this coming school year. But I can't seem to find a single soul who has used it for homeschooling aside from the incredibly organized woman who created the site mentioned above (homeschoolworkplans.) Any experiences to share?

Swimming helps me tremendously. It's really the only exercise that doesn't cause me additional pain.

I continue to be amazed at the wonderful solutions motivated parents will come up with when they let go of what *should* be happening or what they *wish* and deal with what *is* happening. Meadowlark, I have no doubt you will find a way to work this out. Pray and then just take some small action in the direction you think you should go. There are few things I despise more than seeing a mom who is clearly pouring her heart and soul into mothering feel defeated and sad when things don't look the way she thought they would in her family. This is just a new challenge and there will be MANY more. Lots of homeschools don't look like the cover of a Sonlight magazine but the kids turn out fine. And lots of kids go away to even mediocre schools and are an absolute delight to be around. I know some wonderful kids from both situations. And if by chance I said anything helpful, it was not me, but the guidance of the Holy Spirit working through me. You see how often I post here. This isn't my usual mode of operation.

Yikes! I didn't get the impression the OP was shutting down her kids' communication by being overly punitive or not thinking through her homeschool methods. Quite the opposite actually. Some of my kids' friends went to school in elementary too. It took some work from all families but we somehow managed to maintain our kids' friendships. It was important to all of us and quite honestly the moms whose kids go away to school have expressed to me how helpful the friendships they have with the homeschooled kids have been to them. It lets their kids know that school is not the only place they belong. I don't live in an area with a large hsing community but even if I did I would still be working to be sure my kids had close friendships w kids whose parents share our values whether they hs or not. I also totally understand survival mode w kids. Don't beat yourself up for not being super woman while trying to keep your head above water. Take it one day at a time with prayer. God cares about those kids too. It may not be obvious as you go along but He will guide your path if you ask. I have the benefit of just a wee bit of hindsight w my oldest being 16. I can certainly see how the things I thought were missteps at the time turned out to be just what we needed.

And my neighbor has asked me every year when I will 'let' my kids go to school (in front of my kids). There is an assumption that any normal kid would want to go to school. My kids picked up on that and we did have to work through it. When I say I ignored the 'I want to go to school' talk I mean that I made it clear it wasn't an option in the near future (for my 8 or 9 year olds, it wasn't). I'm so sorry your kids felt singled out. That's painful for a mom too. Another situation I can really relate to. Everybody wants to feel like they belong somewhere. Where do your kids feel most like they belong? Can you give them more of that? Can you create it for them? When my oldest was asked if homeschooled kids have any friends, she laughed because she didn't think the kid who asked her that could possibly have been serious. But later when we talked about it and she realized that is actually what some people think (including our neighbors) she started to understand why some people think homeschooling is so weird. She was more appreciative then of the places and situations where she did feel like she belonged and where she didn't have to explain herself to other kids.

I can definitely relate to your post. Oh boy can I relate. I could have written it 7 years ago. One thing I did with my kids that helped a lot with the bad attitude was to tell them that I could not even consider outside activities of any kind unless they demonstrated for me the type of behavior I would expect of them in a classroom with another adult as the teacher. In other words, no fun science class at a museum, no co op, no nature hikes with the park ranger, whatever, until I saw a cooperative attitude for me at home. Then of course when I saw the first glimmer of the right kind of attitude I praised it and made a point of getting a fun activity scheduled asap. At the ages of your kids I mostly ignored the 'I want to go away to school' talk because it wasn't an option. But I did address the attitude issue. My oldest kids do go to a small Catholic high school but the youngers are homeschooled. I have had to address the attitude problem to some degree with each of my first four kids. The other thing I would add is that *I* had to stop wishing my homeschool would look the way I imagined it would and start accepting it for what it was. Mourn the loss of the imaginary homeschool you thought you would have and then let it go and find the joy in the homeschool you do have. And if ultimately you come to the decision to send them to school, well then that will be OK too because they obviously have a mother who is willing to turn her life upside down to do what she thinks is best for them. Hope it gets better for you.

I have the LA with spelling and handwriting for 3rd grade. I used part of it for my son. He liked the stories. They held his interest enough that he didn't complain about reading them to me and often finished them on his own. The rest was too advanced and too much writing for him. I set it aside. It would have worked well for my daughters who enjoyed writing and neat little workbooks at that age but it was a poor choice for my wiggly son who has no patience for sitting still and writing. HTH

I am considering using Aquinas Learning at Home with my 11 and 9 year old for the coming school year. (I will also have a 4 and 1 year old at home and a 14 and 16 year old in a brick and mortar Catholic high school.) There are no Aquinas Learning Centers anywhere near me so I would be using the curriculum without the support of a group. Does anyone have experience using AL at Home? Any tips? Things you really liked or did not like about the materials/methodology? I have been homeschooling since 2005. I tend to rethink my whole plan every year about this time and try to find the resources that will best fit my circumstances each year. Most of the seasoned homeschool moms I know tell me to stop doing that and just stick with something. It sounds like a good idea but it never happens that way for me. AL seems like a good fit for next year bc the two oldest will be away at school, and the two youngest won't need any formal schooling. With AL I think I can keep the 9 and 11 yo together on everything except math. I would really appreciate any thoughts/insights experienced AL users might have to offer. Thank you!

To the op: I think it's easy to forget how much time a baby takes/needs from mommy. My kids are 14, 12, 9, 7, and 1. Before the 1 year old came along, I could get through school much quicker with all my kiddoes. I think your schedule looks fine. When my two oldest were that age and I had a couple of toddlers running around, I remember scratching my head wondering why school took me all day too. I searched and searched for a way to make it easier. There are certainly some good ideas here, but the thing I wish I could go back and tell myself is that this homeschooling thing can just be hard work sometimes. There is no magic bullet. I eventually figured out the kids and I needed to enjoy the process even if it took all day (which it frequently does.) That isn't to say my kids were sitting in chairs working all day; it's just that with a baby running around transitions take a long time. Sometimes you lose a kid during a diaper change and since he's having so much fun with legos you let him go for an hour to work with the other child, but the baby needs to nurse and then your lose the second kid and then you need to use the bathroom and the baby spills cheerios and kid A wants to discuss his lego project and by the time you get back to WWE it's two hours later. I get it. Those days you won't finish your list until 4. This is what I needed to learn to accept in the beginning. You're doing a good job, mom. Keep it up!

Thanks for your thoughts, Lavender Girl. Growing with Grammar looks like a good choice for when I start grammar with 2nd grader. I need to mull over the spelling options some more. Thanks again!

I took a good look at Sequential Spelling again. That might be a good choice for my 4th grader who is a good speller already. That would free up some of my time. I think I will just focus on copywork for my 2nd grader at the beginning of the year and see how his reading develops before I add any other language arts besides phonics and reading for him. He is a lego fanatic. He builds and rebuilds robots with his sets and comes up with the most surprising things. His 3 older sisters learned to read in a few months with almost no effort on my part. He has been slowly chugging along on reading for a couple of years now, but it still hasn't clicked. I see steady improvement though so I'm trying not to worry just yet. Thanks so much for taking the time to share your ideas. I will definitely implement the suggestion for how to help the child be more independent by expecting independence in just one new subject at a time at first. I love to read aloud to the kids so that is one thing that actually gets done even when I'm busy. So I'm trying to keep that in the schedule. The co-op is just once every couple of weeks, the kids love it, and I love it so we're keeping that in the schedule too. I like the memory work we've chosen to do too so I'm trying to make that the unifying base for the year for history and science. Would love to read more ideas!

Thanks so much for taking the time to give me your thoughts. I will check Rod and Staff 2nd grade English. I'm planning to let my 4th grader take the lead on the science. She can do most of the experiments/demonstrations herself with the 'help' of my 2nd grader. They will both just do a notebook page after each chapter and I may just have my 4th grader read it to my 2nd grader. I have the audio of SOTW and I do plan to use audiobooks for read alouds sometimes. I am concerned that I won't get to AAS often enough with my 4th grader. I'm thinking of using a spelling notebook system for misspelled words we catch and just using AAS as a way to teach the rules with spelling tiles once a week. I used AAS with 2 older kids, and the rules as presented in that program are already in my head so that it's easy to catch their spelling mistakes and go to the whiteboard and say remember 'such and such' and then spell the word by syllable with the tiles. I'll check into all your other suggestions. I would love more feedback! Thank you!

I will have a 2nd and 4th grader at home this coming school year. For various outside reasons I need to SIMPLIFY their curriculum so that they can work more independently. My rising 2nd grader is not a strong reader yet. I am working through All About Reading with him, and he is making progress. I plan to stick with that and hope he makes a breakthrough soon. My 4th grader is good at working independently, but I need to stay on top of checking her work and her level of understanding so I can make corrections and give guidance quickly. There is one local co-op that I will definitely include in our plans for this coming year. It meets about every other Friday and the focus will be memory work. (It is not CC, but it is similar.) My plan is to stick with our current math which is already working well (Singapore for the younger and Saxon for the older and some IXL for both.) I will use Hake Grammar for the 4th grader. I've used it for two older children and love it. So she has grammar, vocab, and composition covered. I will also use All About Spelling for her. For the 2nd grader I need to find a gentle grammar introduction that is less parent-intensive than FLL. I will choose read-alouds to go along with the time period for our memory work (ancients) and have them listen to Story of the World and do mostly oral narrations for both. I'm going to use Real Science for kids - Elementary for both and supplement for the older with some books for independent reading from our home library. They will both use the memory work for copywork and dictation. I'm sure I'm forgetting something I planned to do, but that is the bulk of it. I'm really open to suggestions. Many of the resources I mentioned have not been purchased yet. These are my tentative plans. My focus for the coming school year for my 2nd grader is improving his reading skills. The focus for my 4th grader is to strengthen her math skills and improve her grammar, usage, and mechanics skills. Any ideas on how to simplify all this? Right now I'm working out an 18 'week' schedule (only have about 2 'weeks' done) based on our memory work that presents all of the above in a clear way so that both should be able to sit down and know exactly what to do each day. Each 'week' should actually take about 6 or 7 days to complete, leaving us with wiggle room for music lessons and life in general which will be messy this coming school year. They will each have a stack of assigned reading (or books on cd, etc.) to fill the gaps (if any - it might take us 9 school days to get 6 or 7 days of work done-did I mention life will be messy?) after one memory 'week' is finished and the next begins. Math will be an everyday thing though. Input? I sure could use a fresh set of (homeschooling-mother) eyes to look at my tentative plan. Thanks, Lynn

Thanks, Margaret, for your words of caution. I don't think I want to know how you know the things you mentioned. Ignorance is bliss, right? My oldest is in some online classes and has accountability beyond just me. I'm really not thinking of making any changes at all for her. We've decided to send her to a local private high school next year. She is ready academically (and otherwise, I think;-) I'm just looking at cutting way back for the rest of the kids and just for the remainder of this school year. I need to come up with a better plan for next year. You all have given me some good food for thought. I welcome more thoughts. My outside responsibilities are likely only going to increase for a time so my husband and I are looking at the big picture of can we/should we keep hsing all of them going forward. Thank you.

Thank you so much! I knew if I asked on the high school boards I would get some needed perspective. I think I need to rework my plan going forward. I will definitely use some of the ideas you all have given me. If someone else cares to chime in, I would welcome your thoughts. My parents need my help on some things right now. Well really, it's indefinitely. So I need to rethink how I do things in terms of homeschooling. Thanks again.

I need to refocus my schooling-related goals for the remainder of this school year. I have 5 kids - dd13, dd11, dd9, ds6, dd1. They are in 8th, 6th, 3rd, and 1st grades and all homeschooled since the beginning. They are all avid readers and curious and doing well academically if standardized tests can be used as an indicator. For various reasons I am at a stage where I just cannot give as much time and effort to hsing on a daily basis as I used to. I'm getting stretched thinner by responsibilities outside the home and inside the home. I'm thinking of paring down to just the basics for a season in our homeschool. I mean really basic like math, whatever aspect of LA that each one needs most right now, journaling, and lots of assigned reading. Would you agree that in the younger grades, they just need exposure to science and history topics? My 6th grader just finished a year of intense science, and she loves to read historical fiction. I can assign a stack of books and just keep my grading to a minimum. My 8th grader works very independently and checks a lot of her own work so I don't need to make many changes for her. My 3rd and 1st grader have not seen the Liberty Kids series yet so I though this might be a good time for them to watch all 40 episodes. I guess I would just really love to hear an "it'll be ok" from an experienced hs mom. I've learned that I can't do all the extras every year. This year it seems like I can't do any extras. Thanks

I appreciate these replies so much. Each one has a little nugget of which I need to be reminded. My system is good enough right now. I like the reply that said she decided to get a hobby instead of spending all her time researching curricula and coming up with the perfect schedule. I do that way too much. It's funny you mentioned chickens as we hope to acquire a few egg-layers from a friend this summer and I am on the search for a good family dog right now. Anyway, I posted in a moment of weakness last night, and I feel strengthened already. It's a big job being child of God, wife, mommy to baby and teenager and everything in between, teacher, friend, sister, daughter, volunteer, aunt, even great-aunt in a few short months. I just need to take a deep breath and chill. thanks again!

Might I suggest something that might give you a more regular break from teaching, and the children more time with you on a "fun" level? Thank you so much for your reply. You're certainly right about treating schooling like a job. I do better when I remind myself of that. I do think we need to take more planned breaks during the school year. Last night I ended up doing what needed to be done for the coming school week and playing with my little boy. I knew I could count on the Body of Christ to provide. A few different perspectives were what I needed. I have a better outlook today. I know summer break is just around the corner. I can make it. Thank you all again.