Homeschooling Recommendations

I am often frustrated by my homeschooling purchases. I hate it when I order something I think will work great for the kids, only to discover we all hate it and of course you cannot return the item when you have done a few lessons in the book already (it takes about a week of lessons for us to be sure we hate something). I find that a lot of material out there, either skips around too much, or is not accurate when it comes to the grade level of the material (either being to advance or to remedial).

So I have decided that when I find something I love, I am going to pass it on. Of course every family is individual and you may not home school like my family home schools, so to understand if you would like my recommendations here is a bio on our home school life.

We are work book lovers for the three "R's (although why do we call them the three R's when really only one subject starts with R" ). For everything else we prefer a more hands on approach. Of ten we will watch videos on a topic and then read a bit about it and then go see it for ourselves by going to a museum or a local home school workshop. For history we prefer biographies to text books. We love books on CD while we travel in the car, and we have just about every computer program out there that is education and fun.

So with that in mind my first recommendation is the KIMUN workbook series. They are great for preschool to about grade 2, and cover a variety of topics from scissor skills to telling time to counting money. I love them because they take baby steps and go over and over a topic making sure it it thoroughly understood before moving on. At $7 a piece, they are economical too. You can get them at Barnes and Nobles, either at the store or on line.

I give them a four stars out of five. The only thing I don't like is that their binding is very hard, making it hard to lie the book flat when you get into the middle. Besides that minor complaint I love them, and have Courtney doing three of them and Aiden doing another three.