Working on our third month of homeschooling

My oldest son is in the first grade this year. We've been homeschooling for about 3 months now. This is my first year homeschooling at all. There is a lot to it and it's been hard but not as hard as I thought it would be. The benefits are great. It's wonderful to spend so much extra time with my child. This homeschooling forum has been a big help as well.

Currently for Language Arts we are working on phonics. He is doing a lot of reviewing on ce, ci, wh, er, ir, and ur with his first grade homeschool online. Knowing these sounds have helped so much! The phonics program is great. We do it through a website called time4learning.com. They have an online first grade curriculum that is really good.

By checking out his portfolio, I am able to view his grades for any lessons he's completed online. I can review his work done for the day, week, or month. His grades are pretty good. The first grade activities are so interesting that it makes it easy to keep him interested.

We've completed a lot of the science and social studies, but the math is taking a little bit longer. For the math, we are doing a lot of work offline. So I use the lesson as a reinforcement. I want to make sure that I cover all the basics, and he has a really good understanding of it before we move on to something else.

I'm really impressed with how complete the Language Arts are. The phonics lessons cover everything. It's only $19.95 per month. The phonics are so good that I would pay that for them alone. Time4learning.com has been such a big help in our homeschooling journey. I really and truly love it! Offline, we are reading a book a day. What truly amazes me is how well he has picked up words. Even driving down the road, he will start talking about words on his own. And when a child does this, you know they are really interested in learning.