Homeschooling, Catholicism and Us

       

So ever since we found out we were having kids S and I have talked about homeschooling.  We talked about it for many reasons.  S and I had polar opposite experiences in high school.  I loved high school and he counted down the days until he graduated.  My teachers were involved and seemed to care, his teachers counted down the days until summer vacation.  I came from a well off county in North Carolina, he was in a very poor school district in West Virginia.

Since all of our family is in West Virginia now we really want to stay in this area.  The schools where we live are not the greatest.  I do believe that public school is what you make of it, but it can be hard to make something when there is not much to work with.

We are Catholic, which we try to integrate into every facet of our lives.  I am not against the separation of Church from school, but schooling is such a large portion of a child's life that it seems like a missed opportunity to teach about God.  The closest Catholic school to us is about fifteen-twenty minutes away and it only goes through elementary school.  We would have to drive about forty minutes to continue that Catholic education through high school. 

S has a masters degree in History and I am working on my masters in Children's Literature.  We are both well educated and motivated to see our children succeed.  We just want what is best for them.  I'm not trying to convince you that we should be able to home school our kids, I'm just giving you a little back story.

So where this is going...since we had children I have been doing research on the internet.  Trying to find blogs, websites and any other information I can about home schooling and what it involves.  Yesterday I was looking around and found a few books I wanted to learn more about.

The three books I found are Literature based learning books.  They are all pre-K, since Poppyseed is only going to be two at the end of the month and Raspberry is only 4 months old.

The pictures are the three books I was looking at purchasing to see if they were good programs.  So if anyone is reading, have you tried any of these products and which one did you like/why? Thanks for all the help and I hope to hear from you soon.  Also, what programs do you use and like? I want to find as much information in the next few years that I can so we can make an informed decision about this home schooling thing.