Ten years ago, I began homeschooling my daughter by accident. She is now a beautiful, clever, imperfect, and soulful human being, and I am proud to have her as a citizen of our beautiful planet.
I began homeschooling my daughter when she turned six years old. As a family, we spoke both English and French fluently, and we lived in Singapore, which was our adopted country at the time. I had no friends or family who knew anything about homeschooling. The only guides I had were my commitment to raising my daughter surrounded by possibilities and my natural intelligence and curiosity to continuously learn.
Singapore provided a large array of educational materials and books. There was also a wide selection of learning materials from all over the world. I created a foundation for her learning and began my quest to seek the books and learning materials we would need. At the start of this expedition, there is a certain sense of excitement in discovering something new, especially when it concerns the wellbeing of your child. However, at the end of two hours of constantly searching curriculums and workbooks, I was swimming in a dread of information overload.
Most of the books offered repetitive and boring exercises until I discovered Evan-Moor workbooks. It was not the cover of the books that invited me to them, but the range of books offered that prompted my first purchase. The Daily Practice range of books covered my foundations in math, reading, geography, language, science, and writing. Although there was a required repetitive pattern in the daily exercises, each day of work brought about a new way of learning the same core concept. This important distinction won us over as the facilitator for my daughter’s learning. It was clear that I would not be bored with the learning materials available to teach my daughter if I was to continue homeschooling her.
The other range we both loved within the Evan-Moor materials was the History Pockets. My daughter loved her active role in cutting, choosing, and pasting parts of the book to retain key factors she was learning within each history topic.
My top Evan-Moor resources are:
- Daily Practice (available in math, language, geography, science, handwriting, and reading)
- History Pockets
In Singapore, the Evan-Moor books were high-priced. But I found them to be a lot more information-packed, and therefore a good value. If you’re homeschooling overseas, consider purchasing Evan-Moor e-books or subscribing to TeacherFileBox, Evan-Moor’s online lesson library. With TeacherFileBox, you can print or project the lessons that you need and have access to every Evan-Moor title!
In the four years since we last used them, every time I come across Evan-Moor books, I cannot help smiling at the memories they evoke of my daughter and me having fun with learning.
Lara Jay Hequet is a life entrepreneur, certified and qualified in many fields of knowledge. She is a single parent to a fifteen year old daughter who is ‘lifeschooled’ for the last ten years. Together, they travel the world creating life stories and capturing stories of other wonderful people via film and the spoken word.
She is the founder of wowageing.com, a community of people who choose to Live Older instead of growing older. She intends to inspire and support unique individuals and their parents in the art of homeschooling.