I couldn't afford to home school, either. I was on student loans and a TAship, getting my PhD. A bit of creativity is all we need. We did experiments for physics using string and wire. We borrowed books of art and read about different periods such as Impressionism and then tried to imitate the masters with our crayons. We listened to opera on the stereo; also musicals. We wrote books. We went to SO many free exhibits that his favorite activity was to make "brochures"--yes, at age 4 he knew what brochure meant and enjoyed making them out of notebook paper and pencil. He also liked to play "museum"; he would make sculpture and art and models; then he would make a cassette recording of himself guiding people through his museum. He did that because he had been to a museum where one pushed a button at each exhibit and heard a recording. His recording included an explanation of what inspired the artist; yes, at age 6 he knew the concept of artistic "inspiration". At 4, I explained Descarte to him and he made up his own cogito: "I wish. I wish, therefore I am." At 4 I taught him to read and write; at 6 I taught him to read and write music. When he was 3 his favorite movie was Amadeus but he would censor himself during the scene in which Salieri cut his throat; that is, he knew by listening to the score when to turn around so as not to look at the blood; then he knew when the score was different when to turn back around. He was always interested in punctuation. A teacher saved a piece of his work because he knew, in first grade, how to use elipses to show suspense in a story. He tested into the gifted program but it was awful; the teacher wanted little engineers but my son was spiritually gifted so she gave him a B when he did his big project with presentation, in 3rd grade, on fortune-telling and palm-reading and general astrology. He read the palms of his classmates as part of his presentation. He begged, begged me to let him call Dionne Warwick to get a "psychic friend". In kindergarten he started keeping a secret notebook. Worried that he was emotionally troubled, I sneaked in his room and found his secret notebook. You'll never guess what was in it. It was full of lyrics to James Taylor songs which my son had written out by hand. At 3, he refused to listen to Puccini because Mimi's death scene made him burst into sobs. He was never bored in school because he liked teaching and helping the other children. I also taught him feminism and anatomy using one of my school textbooks--Our Bodies, Ourselves. So he knew what the clitoris was as young as 2. I also read to him from Ovid's Metamorphoses for religious education. He also wrote poetry, and we used scraps to create elaborate board games such as "What Killed the Dinosaurs?" with tokens leading the player to one of three theories.

My point is two-fold. With no money for extras, I utilized what I had and what I knew. My other point is just that I am very depressed so writing out these memories has cheered me up a bit. If you read this post, thank you.