I have been homeschooling my 2 children (girl 9, boy 11) for 4 years, and we have a very loose schedule. The kids are up around 7:15am and we start school between 8 & 8:30. We do "core" subjects (math, science, etc.) until about 11:30. Then we have lunch and free time. After that, we spend time on cleaning, reading (at least 30 minutes), special projects & reports, and music. Sometimes they also watch a video in the afternoon. A couple times/week we do art and foreign languages. Having some sort of structure is great because the kids know what they need to do and when. I rarely set time limits on subjects for my son, but almost always need to give a set time for math for my daughter.
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We use Saxon math and love it. We've tried several Language Arts curricula, but weren't really satisfied with any of them, although ABeka was probably the best we saw - especially for earlier grades. We've discovered that once they learn the basics in Language Arts, they can just do daily reviews (like Daily Grams or something) - the rest is learned by using it. Both are writing short novels this semester. We do unit studies for Science - Treasure Box Press is great and inexpensive. We also buy lots of books - fiction & nonfiction.
~ Joy
