Home schooling on the web

The internet plays a huge role in our homeschooling:

www.literacycenter.com
www.starfall.com
http://www.math.com/practice/Algebra.html

You get the idea, my husband has been a medical resident for a million years, so I’m a fan of ways to educate on the cheap.

I taught an online Shakespeare class for several years. The parameters were one play for three months (close reading), no grades, voluntary interaction (IRC then), and we utilized project gutenberg so we could really study the text. My students were ages 11 to 17, and they lived in Maine, NY, Georgia, Colorado, Texas and California. I had one boy who never said one word in class, but continued to take play after play, and a little girl who organized a production of Julius Caesar for a cast of 75. (She would also go on to be a member of the National Math Team and take second in that infamous National Spelling Bee… she was special.)

One nice thing about homeschoolers is that their education doesn’t have to be packaged in a lecture format for them to learn. If I had a child who had recently come from P.S., it might take them a minute to adjust to the whole learning for learning sake philosophy. Their comfort zone, especially the smart ones, was to have grading so they could "do well". In a discussion format, a lot like the one we are using, the only way to do well is to think.