Also, I just received The Well Trained Mind but have not read it yet. I am looking forward to it!

Thanks so much for the responses! We are in TX, so the rules here are very lenient. We lived in a great school district with high ranking schools. We were completely satisfied until my youngest began 4th grade. I felt that his wonderful grades and stellar comments at parent-teacher conferences were not really matching the struggle that I saw when he was doing homework or projects. My older kids were natural learners and did not really struggle at all, so it was new to me. I quickly realized that they weren't telling me that he was struggling, and when their defense was basically "He does ok on the standardized tests, so we don't see a concern," it sparked my dissatisfaction with public schools. We then moved to the next town over with schools that ranked half of what the previous schools did, and my thought process was if a "great" school won't help my child, then the new school likely won't either. We pulled them out of public school in the middle of the year when we moved because I really couldn't imagine them even attending a public school that ranked so low with so many poor reviews. Our school district does offer cyber school, but I have shied away completely from public schools at this point. I have tasted the joys of not being tied down to school (needing to log in a certain amount of hours, standardized tests, we can take a week off if we need to, etc.) that I do not want to go that route. I am searching for secular curriculum. I am not completely opposed to teaching them myself. I am just worried that there is not enough time in the day to teach at least 12 lessons (4 lessons for 3 kids) each day and still do my own college work. I am also not opposed to piecing together programs or materials for the kids, but I am not sure where to start. I understand that many people do not keep up with grades at all, and they are more focused on their child learning the material and moving on to the next lesson. I am too, but I don't know how that applies to my high school child who needs grades for her transcript. Easy Peasy: I did look into it earlier today, but I saw that it was basically set up so a child could work through everything, but again, there were no actual quizzes or tests to grade, so I put it aside. I liked how it was set out work for specific days though. As for our goals, we are the first homeschoolers in our family, so trying to keep up with where they would be if they were in public school has been our goal so far. Not sure if it's appropriate, but it really is the only way for me to gauge how they are doing. I hope I answered all of your questions, and I cannot explain how thankful I am for the help!

I have been homeschooling my children for a little over a year, grades 10, 7, and 5. The decision to home school them was sudden, so I did not have the time to thoroughly check out every home school option. We have been using Time4Learning as the main curriculum with a little added on the side. I have found that I am not happy with the program at all, and while it was good to have a fairly all-inclusive program to get started, it just isn't enough to use as the main curriculum. So I have started once again to find something that works for us. We are on a budget, so many of the all-inclusive programs are out of the questions. I look at the stickies here and on other sites, and I don't know where to start. One of my main hurdles is that I am also in college, so my time to actually be involved with the daily lessons (as in actually teaching every lesson) is limited. We are also very strict with our time and stick to schedules (we have the entire semester schedule printed out so we are never behind), and it works for us. However, I have yet to find another program that can allow me to create schedules to tell the kids what to do each day. Also, I feel like every program has a review similar to "This is a great supplement, but it's not enough for curriculum." Then what is? I have to have 5 different sources of information for each child? How can I be sure that I am teaching my high school student everything she needs to know to be successful in college? Why isn't there a site that she can log into, do scheduled lessons, take a quiz/test, and I can see progress?! I may just be asking for too much: a more hands-off type of home school that records actual grades that doesn't cost a fortune. Can anyone help me please?

I just realized I posted this to the wrong forum. I'll post it in the general discussion instead.

I have been homeschooling my children for a little over a year, grades 10, 7, and 5. The decision to home school them was sudden, so I did not have the time to thoroughly check out every home school option. We have been using Time4Learning as the main curriculum with a little added on the side. I have found that I am not happy with the program at all, and while it was good to have a fairly all-inclusive program to get started, it just isn't enough to use as the main curriculum. So I have started once again to find something that works for us. We are on a budget, so many of the all-inclusive programs are out of the questions. I look at the stickies here and on other sites, and I don't know where to start. One of my main hurdles is that I am also in college, so my time to actually be involved with the daily lessons (as in actually teaching every lesson) is limited. We are also very strict with our time and stick to schedules (we have the entire semester schedule printed out so we are never behind), and it works for us. However, I have yet to find another program that can allow me to create schedules to tell the kids what to do each day. Also, I feel like every program has a review similar to "This is a great supplement, but it's not enough for curriculum." Then what is? I have to have 5 different sources of information for each child? How can I be sure that I am teaching my high school student everything she needs to know to be successful in college? Why isn't there a site that she can log into, do scheduled lessons, take a quiz/test, and I can see progress?! I may just be asking for too much: a more hands-off type of home school that records actual grades that doesn't cost a fortune. Can anyone help me please?