What is the difference between charter schools and traditional homeschooling?

Question

I'm interested in home schooling my children my oldest is 6years old. He attended kindergarten this year and I might pull him out to homeschool him. I don't know what is best right now. It's a big responsibility. His current school has a charter school. I don't know what that is or what my options are living in Modesto CA.

Answer 1

Hello! I home school in California too and there are a ton of resources here to help us, right on line:

http://californiahomeschool.net/default.htm
http://www.hsc.org/about/contact.php
http://www.homeschool.com/

I used the last link when I got started. For a small fee they sent a video and a book talking about the benefits of homeschooling, the different methods (charter school, unschooling, etc.) and how kids can excel in social and academic areas and homeschool.

As I understand it, the charter schools still are very involved with a curriculum that you need to follow and criteria that must be met and they treat you like a regular school child, you just do your lessons at home with a teacher assigned to help out. Many people I know do the unschooling method for little ones (where education is largely child driven - we study whatever they are interested in) and then sometimes switch to a charter school as the subjects get more difficult or they find their child needs more structure.

We are using the holidays this year to introduce new lessons (planting for spring, cutting and pasting for holiday decorations, etc.) and I also use a lot of web sites with my kids - as programmers it's a natural for our family - and both of my kids (3 & 7 years old - the older is special needs) can read (thanks to starfall.com largely) and are starting math concepts (addition and subtraction, patterns, sorting) from sites we found on line.

I have had so much success with this that I put together a tutorial for my local mother's club, which includes step by step how I got my kids comfortable on the computer and helped the develop their skills along with skill appropriate sites for examples - and literally 50 links to various fun and educational web sites that I have found. Here's the link: http://www.sonomamothersclub.org/kids_links.htm#online_games

Peace!

Answer 2

Well, I have done both and I think that traditional can be easier than charter school. You do mean cyber-charter right? We are using a cyber-charter right now and I can tell you that on some days I wonder what in the world have I gotten into.
With tradition you have to deal with the school district and follow the homeschool laws for you state. I don't know what CA laws are like, it's shouldn't be to hard to find out online.
Find yourself a local support group too, their will be parents there that can give you lots of info and support.
Good Luck.