A great alternative to traditional homeschooling curriculum is online homeschooling. Make use of the Internet to enroll your children in online homeschooling courses.
Benefits of Online Homeschooling
Online homeschooling offers so many benefits it's hard to know where to start...first of all, by enrolling your child in some online classes, it takes a lot of the pressure of you. For those of us who have a few children we are homeschooling, it can be hard planning enough activities and assignments. Online schooling takes the pressure off, but still allows us to monitor what our children are learning.
Which brings us to our next benefit of online homeschooling: the ability to monitor and decide what and how our children are learning. Unlike sending our children to public school, with online homeschooling classes we are able to view what activities the instructor is having our children do. We can also control what classes our children participate in, and plan extra activities for topics our children are interested in.
Online homeschooling provides structure that is hard to provide (especially in my hectic family life!) One of the problems I face is planning...it's hard to sit down and plan any long-term lessons and activities for my 5 kids. Online homeschooling would remove that obstacle.
High school is hard when you're homeschooling. These last 4 years of school are so important; you need records kept for college and higher level skills in subjects we know next to nothing about! Online homeschooling is definitely a benefit in this case...you have a set schedule, and copies of work that your high schooled student has done.
Now that we've discussed all the benefits, it's time to discuss where you can find sites that offer online homeschooling.
Where to Find Online Homeschooling
If you're intrigued and want to check out the different online homeschooling options, here's a list to get you started:
Global Student Network Online Homeschooling - This site offers unlimited online classes, although they do limit it to 7 classes at once. Online homeschooling is available for grades 2-12. Tuition is $625 with $100 discounts for additional children in the same family.
Christian Online HomeschoolingThe Jubilee Academy offers online homeschooling courses for $895, but they have discounts available for advance enrollment. Unlike the Global Student Network, The Jubilee Academy doesn't have all its materials online; but they do send you all the materials.
K12 offers an interesting array of online homeschooling options. I know here in Texas, the public school portion of k12 is free; however, I personally didn't like the limitations, which is why I opted not to enroll my children. Part of the appeal of homeschooling is that you can work on your own schedule, not someone else's; the public school option that k12 offers has the same attendance requirements as the physical public school system. They also have a very expensive private school option, which leaves it open to only the rich portion of the population.
The last online homeschooling option I want to share with you is Keystone. Keystone offers online courses for grades 6-8, and is a great deal less expensive than k12.
For more information on online homeschooling, this book is an excellent resource:
