I was always leery of homeschooling. My experience with children that had been homeschooled was that they were sorely uneducated. But a situation came up that me take the bull by the horns and I truly regret not doing it sooner.

I did tons of research. Probably more than I had to, but my goal was to give my children a better education than the one they were currently getting, not to put them further behind. So the first year I found out exactly which text books they would have been using in the traditional school and I purchased those exact text books. Then I did a search for the required/suggested (depending upon their age) reading list and purchased those books. For the classics I also bought the cliff notes to ensure that we covered every aspect of the book that we should have.

It was an incredible experience that I would not trade for the world. When we found something exceptionally interesting, we could stop right there and research that topic until we were sated. Then pick up where we left off. The discussions we had on all sort of topic were amazing. They were interested and invested and did not have to worry about that the jerk behind them had to say about their opinions. I cannot tell you how many times my husband came home from work at 3:00 and we realized that we had not even had lunch yet. We actually had to set an alarm.

When I set up my syllabus, I made it so that we would have Friday's off. Do you know that they did not want Friday's off? They would ask "mom, can we just work on ... for a while today." The PE portion of our day was them outside jumping on the trampoline. I could hear them out there jumping away still discussing what they thought would happen in the book we were reading, what they thought of an event in history and what could have, would have, should have happened. We actually ran out of the school based curriculum sometime in December. We had met our hour requirements for the year by January (our state does not check, but I kept track anyway). Even though I added penmanship (which they no longer practice in school but need to!), and shorthand because one twin is a lefty and writing notes quickly was difficult for him. I broke English up into Grammar, Literature, and Spelling. They looked forward to writing book reports. I had a family member that is an English teacher grade one book report each for them so they had professional feedback.

As you can tell I really enjoyed my experience. I don't know how I would be able to handle homeschooling with younger children running around. That may be distracting. When they got older one twin decided to go back to a traditional school. The other attended a virtual school. It was considered a public school so the public school paid for all of the classes. I see that you are from Florida. FLVS's classes were AMAZING. The twin that utilized that system took Honors and AP classes through them. One of the best things was that he could zip right through them as well or take his time as needed. Some of the more unsuccessful programs he could only turn in 3 assignments a week, then wait so many days before the test etc. It was set up really poorly.

Some of the curriculum that were really successful for my boys were: Spelling Power and Teaching Textbooks for Math. It is a bit of a struggle to get your hands on secular science books. I had to join a club through the textbook company to get those.