Before I’ve even started homeschooling, I’ve completely changed my thinking about the best way to move forward in teaching literacy skills to my daughters. Somehow I think I’m going to learn as much or more through homeschooling as the littles. I knew we would start working on letter recognition this year, and in formulating my curriculum plan for age three, I realized that would include learning letter sounds. I figured we would start with A and work our way through to Z, and I thought we’d start with uppercase letters and move onto lowercase letters later. I wasn’t so sure how to go about teaching letter sounds, so I started doing some online research. What I’ve found out is that there are a number of [...] Read more »

My oldest daughter will be three in April and, since we live in the middle of a wildlife reserve, homeschooling has been on my mind.  In fact it has become a bit of an obsession as I search website after website and try to sort out what makes sense for her and for us as a family.  When we made this lifestyle choice we knew that homeschooling would become a part of it but then it was way off in the future and now I’m realizing that if we were still in the States Boo might be starting preschool soon. I say might because of course preschool is optional in the States, so I am viewing age three and four as guinea pig years.  I’m [...] Read more »

I knew this was on the horizon since I found out I was pregnant with my first child but then it seemed such a long way off and now it is upon us.  If we were living in the States, I would probably have sent Boo off to preschool just like all her little cousins and never given homeschooling a thought.  However, since we live in the middle of a wildlife reserve in Southern Africa, traditional school is not an option for us. As parents we naturally encourage our offspring’s development through play, exploration, and exposure to different stimuli, but, if we choose to homeschool, how do we utilize these innate skills to guide our littles along a path of learning that will ultimately lead [...] Read more »