I get that they’re trying to stretch a buck; aren’t we all these days? But the determination to homeschool for free (particularly at the high school level) seems a little short-sighted. In answer to such parents’ enthusiasm, all sorts of online businesses have now popped up offering “free homeschool curriculum,” but much of what they offer is worth about what you pay for it.

I won’t name sites, but I’ve clicked on the links people share in response to forum requests for “free homeschooling links,” and as far as I can tell these sites are light on substance and heavy on online advertising. The more people they attract, the more attractive they become to advertisers. Seems like that’s the reason for their existence.

That doesn’t mean that good homeschooling resources have to cost a fortune. There are many great resources available online that are no- or low-cost. If parents try looking for quality resources first and then find the low-cost options among them, instead of just looking for “FREE!”,  they might be pleasantly surprised.

Here are a few sites with resources that are high-quality and free:

Classic literature and history: Project Gutenberg

Free classic literature for Amazon Kindle (List 1 and List 2)

(How to read Kindle books on your PC for free)

Upper level math, science and history videos

Do you have others to add to this list? Please share the links in your comment—thanks!  :) 

This is tragic. Are 21^st century citizens so self-centered that they think they’re too sophisticated and technologically advanced to learn anything by studying the past? It’s starting to look that way. I guess the educrats who make these decisions have chosen to ignore George Santayana’s warning that “(T)hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Thank goodness homeschooling families have the freedom to choose to study history. I like to think that many of our homeschool grads will use the wisdom they’ve acquired from studying history to help straighten out our country when they become adults. We’ll certainly need their help, the way things are going these days.

They’ve been sawing and painting for the past day, and Josh is very excited to see the project coming together. Most 17-year-olds wouldn’t get so excited about doing this. But Josh isn’t like most 17-year-olds because he has developmental delays.

When he was a baby, I sometimes wondered what homeschooling him would be like. I’d become accustomed to the pace set by his three older siblings. I wondered how much longer it would take him to learn the things they learned by certain ages.

This is why it’s good that God doesn’t give us the ability to see the future. The person I was back then would have been pretty freaked out to know that we would spend years (literally) working on the alphabet and basic counting, or that at age 17 he still wouldn’t be ready for Saxon 54, the wonderful math book all three of my older kids used.

Several years of working on simple concepts wore down my naïveté and helped me see that Josh wasn’t going to do things on his siblings’ timetable. You might be thinking that should have been obvious to me once I got his diagnosis when he was 18 hours old. But there’s a difference between knowing a fact and living the reality of it. I had to live it to really realize it. Then I had to accept it. And finally, I learned to make other plans when it came to his education.

I could have continued prepping him for traditional math, trying year after year to get him to the point of learning multiplication tables. After all, the experts say that people with Down syndrome have a learning curve that goes up almost all of their lives. Those who don’t learn math by age 10 may learn at 15 or 20 or later. That would seem to make a case for keeping at those multiplication tables until he finally caught on.

But what kind of life would that be for him, forcing him to do the same work over and over, making him miserable? There are so many other things he needs to learn, things he will need to know in his life. Our time is better spent working on useful subjects that he has an aptitude for, making the learning much more pleasurable. So I taught him to use a calculator. Why waste precious time trying to learn those darn times tables?

Instead, my husband and I both make time to teach Josh to work with his hands, which he loves. He’s very creative and enjoys working with color, so my husband has been teaching him how to paint with watercolors. They make craft projects together. Josh also helps his dad mow the lawn and trim its edges. He’s very proud that he’s allowed to use the weed whacker.

In addition to working with Josh on basic reading and math skills, I teach Josh about cooking. He loves to make meals for our family, and especially enjoys the praise he receives at the table when we eat his creations. He also makes his own breakfast and uses the microwave to make his lunch.

One of his sisters got him a cookbook that he loves because it’s got plenty of pictures of ingredients. He’d use it every day if we let him, but the recipes aren’t the healthiest. So most of the time, I try to include him in what I’ve planned for dinner instead of using his cookbook. But he does love that thing, and brings it to me if he sees me making out the grocery list.

His sister who still lives at home also cooks with him. As a culinary student, her homework assignments are often made in our kitchen. A few weeks ago she asked him to help her make a strawberry cheesecake from scratch. It was delicious 

These activities teach Josh a variety of skills while letting him enjoy the relationships he has with all of us. He’s a people person, so relationships are really important to him. We enjoy our activities with him, too. But it took us a while to get to the point to where we could look at them as educational for Josh. It wasn’t easy to let go of the idea that he should be studying certain subjects at certain ages. Once we accepted that he was different, we could embrace and enjoy who he is at each age and what he’s capable of doing, or not. Facing facts is certainly not easy, but it does make life easier once you do it.

Of course, we were fortunate that we had a diagnosis for him shortly after his birth. It hit us hard at first, but at least we knew what we were dealing with. I think it must be harder if a child has delays or difficulties that are not obvious or even present at birth, such as autism or delays of unknown origin. The slow dawning that something is wrong is very painful for those who love the child. But it is what it is. All you can do is pray for help in accepting your child’s situation and diagnosis, because once you accept those things, you’re in a position to look at your child and his future as an open slate, unencumbered by the expectations you have of your ‘typical’ children, and instead full of possibilities that will educate your child and bring him joy.

I recently read about a homeschooling mom whose son was dealing with multiple developmental issues including Asperger’s. He struggled with traditional high school subjects because they were so hard for him, and as a result, had come to hate homeschooling. I wondered if his mom had actually accepted his disabilities yet. It occurred to me that if she had, she could get rid of the world history and grammar textbooks that cause her child so much frustration and replace them with musical instrument lessons or art classes, subjects that allow for creativity and self-expression. And she would not feel guilty about it, either, if she had faced the facts of his situation. I pray that she was able to find a solution to her son’s painful difficulties, because I know how hard this road must be for her. When it comes to disabilities, acceptance is key.

Josh’s Cookbook:

The quilts were pretty, and representative of their time (late 1800s to early 1900s). But what really interested me was the story of her married life.

She met her future husband, David Eisenhower, at college. After they were married in 1885, David sold the prime Kansas farmland his father had given the couple as a wedding gift, raised an additional $2,000 and started a mercantile store with a friend.

The business did very well for two years, but then local farmers began asking for credit after losing their crops to drought and grasshoppers. Eventually David and his partner had to borrow money to keep the shop afloat, but the store failed anyway.

The Eisenhowers then moved to Texas, where David found a job working for a railroad company as an engine wiper for $40 a week. These were hard years for the Eisenhowers. It was during this time that the future president was born.

After two years in Texas, David was offered a job in a creamery in his hometown, and the family moved back to Kansas and lived with relatives for seven years. Then Eisenhower’s brother, a doctor, sold them a house on a few acres at the edge of town. They would raise six sons in that 818-square-foot house. And Ida and David would live in that little house for the rest of their lives.

~.~

Ok, it’s a bit of history, but what’s so interesting about it? I think it shows that up until the mid-20^th century, getting started in life was tough. People had a hard time making it. If it wasn’t drought and grasshoppers, it was financial trouble. But people persevered and got through it.

However, after World War II, our country became unusually prosperous compared to the past. My generation (the tail end of the Baby Boomers) grew up believing that life wouldn’t be so hard. You go to college, get a degree, buy a nice house, drive nice cars, and as long as you show up to work each day, you’ll keep moving up and getting in a better position financially until you retire comfortably like your parents did.

It’s not working out that way in my family. I’m one of four sisters, three of whom are married. Of the three husbands, two have been out of work for some time and one is watching his business shrink. The unmarried sister is the mom of two boys and has been out of work for over a year. The other two sisters work in the public schools and are employed, for now.

And it’s not just our family. One friend’s husband has had his hours cut and faces an uncertain future. Another quit her church preschool teacher job because of something immoral going on in the church; a few weeks later, her husband was laid off. Friends who retired early had to go back into the work force as substitute teachers because their retirement account took a beating.

Up until recently I was thinking something strange was going on, with so many people I know losing their jobs, and unemployment rates across the country skyrocketing. But now I’m wondering if the “something strange” was actually what happened while I was growing up, when for fifty years or so it was so much easier to earn a living than it had been for most of history.

Maybe it was a glitch, a blip, and now we’re going back to normal, like the normal of Ida Stover Eisenhower’s time, when making a living was a struggle, and you were grateful to have an 800-square foot house to raise your six boys in. I wonder….

For one, writing came easily while math was a much slower process. For another, vacuuming the living room properly (i.e. in more than 30 seconds) was far too difficult, while learning to design a Web site based on a much-loved hobby was fast and easy. For yet another, reading Shakespeare was a piece of cake while reading history from a textbook was torture.

Then there’s #4. He’s the one with Down syndrome, and homeschooling him has been a much slower process all the way around. He’s had a particularly hard time with reading. We continue to review words that he learned years ago; if we don’t, he forgets them. I got kind of depressed the other day when he blanked out on “is” and “find,” because they’re easy and he’d known them for a long time, up until then.

However, my husband discovered something that same day which reminded me that dsds15 can easily remember the words that mean something to him. He loves video games and movies, and one of his favorite subjects in both categories is “X-Men.” He especially likes to pause the game whenever it displays a character so he can write down the character’s name. He will often print long lists of these characters as he plays.

My husband took one of these lists and asked my son to read the names on it. These are names like Professor Xavier, Mystique, Magneto…..15 or 20 of them on a page. And he could read every name we pointed to! That stinker…..like his older siblings, if something interests him, he has a much easier time with it.