We homeschooled our daughter from 1st through 6th grade, and our son from 4th through 8th. Two children, two completely different runs at it, eight grades between them. We did it in California, through a charter school, and we did it while working full time.
Both of our children finished high school at the top of their class, and both of them credit the years at home. I am not telling you that to boast. I am telling you because I spent those years quietly certain I was getting it wrong, and I would have liked someone to tell me it works.
We were part of a charter school in California. It was a tuition-free public charter built on an independent study model: a credentialed teacher, the parent, and the student, working as three points of the same triangle. It gave us the flexibility of homeschooling with a real school community attached, and it is the single thing most people are surprised to learn existed.
Home grades 1st to 5th. Then in 6th grade math class and enrichment classes twice per week and the rest with me. Books, unit studies, the blanket iceberg, the kitchen table.
Hybrid for 6thHome from 4th. Then from 6th through 8th he went in for math class and enrichement classes twice a week and did the rest with me. A hybrid, and it suited him.
Hybrid from 6thBeing in the charter came with an allotment, which is one of the genuine advantages of the California model. I did not spend it the way people assume. It went on supplies and on sports, mostly gymnastics and dance. The curriculum itself I largely cobbled together free from the internet. If you are in a charter and paying for your kid's gymnastics out of pocket, go and ask what your stipend covers.
Two honest things before you go looking for your own version of this.
Full time in health care. I built school around my shifts rather than the other way round, because that was the only version available to me. If you are working and wondering whether this is possible, it is. Not tidily, and not the way the brochures show it. But it is.
My husband was a fireman, and on his days off he stepped in wherever homeschooling needed him. But history was his. He had a real passion for it, and he handed it straight to our kids.
He told them stories. He watched history movies and documentaries with them. And on vacation, he took them to the places themselves: Pearl Harbor, Civil War battle sites like Gettysburg, and the 9/11 memorial in New York. In Washington, D.C., they did the memorials together, the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. Standing where it actually happened is a different kind of knowing than any book gives you.
Thematic and hands-on, almost always. We would take a book and build the rest of an education around it: the science inside it, the math hiding in it, the history underneath it, the art it deserved. That is where nearly every unit study on this site came from.
I never stayed loyal to a curriculum. I picked whatever fit the child in front of me at that moment: where they were in their learning, how they were growing, how old they were. When that changed, we changed. Two children under one roof often meant two completely different programs.
I pulled from all over the internet to make it more interesting than anything I could have bought in a box, and nearly all of it was free. That is the entire reason this site exists, and why the curriculum page lists so many options rather than one.
We traveled as much as we possibly could. Museums, national parks, zoos. School was rarely only at the table, and the days they remember are almost never the days we stayed home.
In the early years I read to them as much as humanly possible. If I had to defend one decision out of all of it, it would be this one.
Music alongside the reading. I believed then, and I believe now, that reading and music together were the best things I could hand a developing brain.
My daughter came home at 1st and left at 6th. My son came home at 4th and left at 8th, easing back in through two days a week at the charter first. Same house, same mother, two different shapes. That is allowed.
The question everyone actually wants answered is what happened when they went back. Here is the honest version, and it is not one tidy story.
Because I pulled all of this together from scraps, at midnight, between shifts, and nobody had written it down in one place. So I did. Take what is useful and leave the rest.