1. Chat with other homeschooling families to see what they are using. If they are local, ask to look at their materials.
2. Read homeschooling blogs to see what other families are using in their home schools. Read about why the material does or does not work for their family. From this, you may be able to figure out if it will work for your family.
3. Read reviews from places like The Curriculum Choice to gather more information about the various products that are available to purchase.
4. Consider getting a subscription from a home school magazine or reading one online. Many different companies advertise in these magazines and there are often reviews. You can visit this list of homeschooling magazines.
5. Spend some time reading homeschool catalogs. You can have many different catalogs mailed to your home or you could choose to read them online. You can view this very long list of home school catalogs.
6. Seek out the company websites of products that you are interested in. Most companies will have more information about their products and they will often have samples available to download.
7. If you still have not been able to view samples, take some time to look up the products on Christian Book or Amazon and see if they have examples available. It is always helpful to see samples if you can’t actually touch and feel the materials that you are considering purchasing.
Here is my overflowing basket of homeschool related catalogs:
When Honey is not knee deep in home school catalogs, she can be found blogging at Sunflower Schoolhouse and Marketplace Mommies. She can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
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Don’t forget that you can view samples of thousands of materials on Rainbow Resource website, too. They have a fantastic website.
Thank you for sharing about Rainbow Resource. I will have to check it out.
Blessings
Honey
The homeschool buyers co -op site is great as well.
One of the things I have found most useful is reading parents’ comments on a site like homeschoolreview.com or in the buyers’ comments on amazon or cbd.com. I find it helpful to see if the positives and/or negatives are in line with my thinking. Some things that are written as negatives may not, in fact, be negatives in my thinking – same goes for the positives. Here’s an example: when we were looking for a math curriculum the year we started homeschooling, I heard some great things about Singapore Math. I also read a lot of negative statements about it. Most said it didn’t have enough review… but there were extra practice books available. So, after finding I really liked the positives I had heard, I ordered Singapore 1A with the extra practice books. It turned out we never needed them – and I haven’t ordered the extra practice books since – but the curriculum itself was a perfect fit for my very mathematically inclined boys. It was helpful to know that the negatives could, in this case, be easily rectified – and that the positives were exactly what I was looking for.
Oops, typo… that should be homeschoolreviews.com (with an ‘s’). Sorry. Got typing too fast!
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