Homeschool World Forum

I'm thinking this might be a good homeschool option for us- but I'm not sure. I want structure and teacher support- I have a 5th grader. Any experiences or suggestions? Right now, he's still in school but hates it.

Much of it would depend on which on-line private school you're talking about.

WANTED - online courses can be good when there is a high degree of interaction in terms of message boards, maybe regular chats or video conferencing, and when the subject matter lends itself well to an electronic interface. I've taken some courses where the teacher only posts once a week and there isn't really any student interaction to speak of, or courses where I'm trying to draw graphs and complex math formulas on my computer. Not much fun.

Short version - I'd use online courses as supplement, rather than everything. And I'd probably wait until around the end of elementary school. Everything up to then is really pretty easy to do using regular curriculum, even if you (the parent) never even finished high school. Look for a packaged curriculum if you don't want to mix and match, though for math I always recommend Saxon because their style is quite successful all the way to around the end of Algebra II (if your children find math easy, just skip every other problem in the math sets).