Home Schooling For Less

Question: Could you please advise my family on how to keep costs minimal while homeschooling? Our kids are 4, 2, and 11 weeks old. I have taught in charter and public schools, but we are interested in homeschooling. I saw on your main site that you recommend Homeschooling for Excellence. I am reading it now :) However, any other advice on keeping the cost of homeschooling low would be greatly appreciated. THANK YOU!!

Demetria Elms

Answer: With kids as young as yours are, just spend lots of time reading to them. We used to go to the library every couple of weeks and brought home a wagon full of books. (Check out our Book Review section for picture books — we've reviewed loads of our favorites) And involve your kids in doing chores, projects and other things around the house like setting the table and unloading the dishwasher. None of these things cost a penny.

Talk to other families who are a few steps ahead of you and find out what they are using that really works for their kids.

We never used a complete “store bought” curriculum. We just picked things that worked like:

- Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons

If you’re not acquainted with teaching phonics get Spalding Phonics for your own reference.

- Miquon Math

- Cuisinaire Rods

- Math Wrap-Ups

- Lots of biographies and classic books.

- Do some hands on science — planting some container gardening seeds, baking banana bread.

- Teach them to handle money and soon and you can. Of course, we recommend our MoneySmart Kids system once they're old enough to recognize the differences in coins.

We're going to include a lot of this information in our Kids and Money book that will be published some time in 2012.

But the most important thing is to study your kids, discover their interests and use those to help them learn. Our daughter Becky fought with dyslexia, but because she loved horses, she would work harder to read anything that had to do with them.

Read all of the books written by Dorothy and Raymond Moore — they really advocate looking for readiness in your kids. When your kids are ready to learn, your job will be really easy.

Don’t try to do this all at once — you’ve got three young kids, your life is pretty full. Just spend time with them, love them and read to them — they will naturally learn to love to learn. Home schooling doesn't need to be expensive to be effective.

Hang in there Demetria, you’re doing THE most important job in the world.