well welcome hello everybody and thank you for joining our webinar on homeschooling on a shoestring budget we are so glad that you're here so make sure you let us know where you're coming in from here tonight love to know uh where you are and maybe we'll see some of our hometowns there too so check in with us there ah new york been talking to a lot of families from new york lately california we've got both sides oh you're getting on little early there california michigan colorado georgia all over the place oh we're so glad that you're here well my name is vicki bentley and i'm going to be your moderator for tonight's discussion i'm a homeschool mom myself we've homeschooled 17 kiddos four of our eight girls and some of our foster kids and i'm also a homeschool consultant for preschool through eighth grade through hslda we are the largest and oldest homeschool organization in the us and if you're not familiar that's home school legal defense association tonight's discussion is going to focus on one of the biggest questions that we get from parents who are newly considering homeschooling that's how much is this going to cost planning your financial costs of homeschooling before jumping in is really important just as in any other major decision about your child's education while there's lots of different expenses in homeschooling to consider you're looking at testing and possibly field trips parent learning opportunities such as conferences magazines you've got supplies some of you are looking at computers but i think most of us would consider our biggest budgetary concern to be our curriculum so the good news is there are homeschooling options for every budget in fact there are many many ways today to homeschool your children practically for free while still providing a pretty comprehensive education that's going to prepare them for college and career so during our webinar tonight we are going to talk to a panel of experts who have lots of experience in planning homeschool curriculums in lots of different budget ranges and we're going to hear some of those creative ideas that they've come up with when homeschooling their own children so i encourage you to use that q a box to submit your own questions during that q a session at the end we're going to get to as many of those as we can so make sure you fill those in we're also going to provide some links for you to the resources that we discuss here tonight there's going to be a follow-up email so make sure you check your email box for that after the event maybe the next day or so so that you can get started building your own curriculum so i just want to go ahead and introduce you to tonight's panel we have with us my friend kathy duffy who is a well-known curriculum expert she has researched and written about curriculum for home education for more than 30 years in fact she was one of the resources i utilized when i started homeschooling our kids as well her website at kathyduffyreviews.com is a go-to resource for homeschool curriculum reviews her digital book how to home school excuse me how to choose homeschool curriculum walks you through the process for choosing resources that are gonna work best for each of your children and for each family kathy home educated her own three sons through high school and she has taught lots of children and adults so we're really glad to have you here kathy i'm so glad to be here i love helping families figure out ways to home school affordably so this should be great looking forward to your ideas tonight we also have with us stacy lemkul she's entering her seventh year of homeschooling this year her kids are in third grade and fifth grade stacey has a master's degree in secondary education and she taught in private and public schools before she transitioned to being a full-time mom at home and their family loves to travel they do a lot of outdoors things spend a lot of time together and they concentrate on being wise stewards of their resources so we're going to get to benefit from some of the things she's learned in why stewardship tonight thanks for being here stacy well thank you for having me i'm excited to share some of what we've learned on our journey awesome awesome well we also have sandra cam and sandra's a public school mom who's just made that decision to homeschool her own three children so she's in the same boat many of you are in right now tonight so she's going to share some important insights about the journey that she's on with her family getting started so glad to have you sandra thanks i'm so excited to save money and um just not having anticipated homeschooling it's a big part of figuring things out so i can't wait to hear what you ladies have to share tonight well i want to thank you all for being here tonight and as we've mentioned before homeschooling on a budget is a lot more than just your books the biggest way to save is probably your curriculum choices so we can create in general so you can check on that one but as a reminder we as we're making budget friendly choices it's important to know your state laws about any subject requirements and then set some learning goals for your students concentrate on resources that are going to help you to accomplish those goals that'll help you stay on budget because as you set those goals also keep your children's interests and giftings in mind but that'll all help you stay a little focused on how to spend that money best so a really common question that we get is what does it cost to home school so let's look at what some of the gotta have are as parents get started stacy what did you find some of the gotta haves well when my kids were really little i didn't find i needed anything other than what i had in my home already or in my neighborhood it was easy to take advantage of what we had for free once my kids got a little bit older like the first and second grade i really felt i wanted a math a guideline for math and language most of all and i agree with stacey you know you can homeschool very inexpensively using the library in free or inexpensive resources online in your home it's so there are so many options that's right you know the the average out there is stated as about 600 per year per child but you don't have to spend that i've homeschooled for under 100 a year so you can borrow material you can go to library sales you can buy used material on the online sites there's a lot of local groups and state organizations that offer local and online online used book sales for you lots of ways to save money but one big concern especially seems to be with families who have more than one child so how can you save when you're homeschooling more than one child stacy let's start with you because i know you have two children how did you stay within your budget when you were choosing materials for more than one well when we first started out i spent a lot of time talking to friends and actually looking through curriculums to see what we liked and what was going to work for us after that my husband and i set a budget of this is how much we could spend and then i bought the materials that i wanted when we were able to and just filled in the gaps of what we could and we did what we could we did what we could with what we had right and then as much as possible i actually homeschooled did use the same materials for both my kids at the same time as when available okay i find that really helpful as well because math and language arts are skill subjects the kids need those materials for themselves independently because they're covered sequentially as skill subjects but science and social studies those are content subjects so i found to save money and to save time if you pick what your oldest student is going to be doing for science and social studies let everybody cover those same topics then you don't have to buy a different science and history for every level so some of the things that the younger kids can do do as well i might add library books at their level and i'm basically teaching to the level of the oldest child i'm including the others along the way basically i like to think of it as everybody rides the mental bus to their own mental bus stop and then they hop off the bus and you'll know they hopped off so but kathy when we're looking at incorporating the younger kids in with the older kids and and using some of the materials this way is there a way to do this fairly inexpensively well i like to use what we call real books or living books you'll hear these terms in the homeschool world rather than textbooks and you find a lot of those at the library sometimes you have to buy them but oftentimes you can borrow them from the library or from friends but i know when i say that it leaves a lot of homeschoolers thinking where would i start you know what i do with that you know pile of library books but there are guides that give you lesson plans laying out your curriculum using those real books particularly for history and science and even language arts they don't cover math but this can save you a lot of money just as you were saying you know combining kids doing this it's far more interesting to approach learning this way too and then you teach your children together so you've got things going on within the entire family they're keeping everybody on the same page so uh it really works great um as far as guides go can you tell me more specifically what you're talking about i mean i get the library and the books but where do you get these guides yeah there are a lot of these guides different ones that have been written by homeschoolers for the most part for homeschoolers so they're not your typical school type material but they list the real books that you use like for history you know historical novels biographies information books you know for science information books hands-on experiments that sort of thing guidebooks and they give you assignments for reading the books and then doing activities that reinforce or expand upon what you've read in those books so children are learning academic skills and knowledge at the same time but in a an interesting and yeah isn't it that's something we're worried when we first started schooling so many of us oh i'm gonna ruin my child for life if they don't learn how to read and we don't know what we're doing and all those fears we have and you get past that i guarantee you get past that but there are lots of really inexpensive um reading programs out there and there are really expensive ones you can spend a fortune on a reading program but they're actually a few they're even free that will do the job for you uh primary concepts free phonics program is online it'll teach your child for free gives you everything you need it's not fancy it's just their you know resource online starfall is another free online resource that even has animated lessons and games that are online it also has worksheets and there's another one teaching a preschooler to read and it's not just for teaching preschoolers but they're all solid phonics-based programs that you can get for free so affordable yes awesome so it sounds like you don't even need workbooks for reading well some people still like to have workbooks um starfall that i just mentioned has free worksheets and there are other sources for free phonics worksheets and they're inexpensive ones too you can get on the internet and there are inexpensive phonics workbooks you can get if you want something that just feels a little more like school and a lot of us do that's just the reality there's some security there uh things like modern curriculum presses plaid phonics that workbooks have been around for a long time are still good solid easy to use that's a you know lots of resources like that i guess that's all great but what about math i mean i'm a real english major i have a masters in journalism i tend towards you know language arts so uh i'm not feeling so confident in math um what can i do about that well when your kids are young like the preschool kindergarten first grade type age simply going about life together is a great way to incorporate math and is really all they need you count anything and everything you come across you match socks you match you know you put dad's shoes with you know dad's shoes together you order the shoes whose shoes are the smallest who shoes are the biggest you put them in order and you just do all sorts of activities that get to math concepts it's even easy to start the adding and subtracting with the young kids at that age especially at meal time so you want to do like one-to-one correspondence where you're getting one fork for one person while you tell the kids how many people are in our family well there are five so they're counting they know how many but daddy's not here tonight so how many do we need instead oh we only need four and you've gotten them started with subtracting and they don't even know it they don't need a worksheet they just need to talk through life especially at those young ages i love the sock mat stacey a lot of real life ways to do this but i do know that parents are oftentimes concerned about what other children are learning at each grade level and you can check out what they're supposed to be learning or what other children are typically learning um a scope and sequence is what you're looking for and you can get these from all the different publishers they're free but a scope and sequence tells the specific topics that are covered at a grade level um those subjects that's the scope you know how much how wide are we going with these things and the sequence what order they're being being taught in so the scope and sequence is a helpful tool you look at a scope and sequence and you can see for instance that kindergartners are working on matching identical items and so rather than doing worksheets where they match identical items you do like stacy up things you were talking about with matching things in the house um and you can you can continue that even with first graders uh you know they're going to be working on beginning edition so you might play math war with a deck of regular playing cards instead of playing just one card they play two and they have to add the numbers together to know their total so it's a great way to practice addition you're playing a game they'll think it's just fun much better than doing a worksheet having children get involved in the kitchen with cooking lots of opportunities for practical math so the idea is to find ways to meet those learning goals that would be meeting what's on the scope and sequence just with everyday life activities as much as you can save a lot of money doing that yeah i really like that um we've been baking a lot so we definitely have been using the doubling recipes and things like that and they do not know that they're actually doing so i'm more of like a workbook he has to be sort of a year-round i'm the teacher thing um are there some suggestions that you have that won't break the bank there are inexpensive math books you know and you can combine those hands-on things with an inexpensive math book you know it's not like an absolutely either-or situation uh for instance uh liberty mathematics for kindergarten through second grade and math lessons for living education for kindergarten through sixth grade are both very inexpensive series less than thirty dollars gets you what you need uh in both cases i think and there are also sources on the internet for free math worksheets that might do the job for you uh plain and not so plain is one of those sources where they have grade level math worksheets organized for you there are a lot like kathy was saying there are a lot of great resources that don't have to cost a lot of money i know one of our favorites was making math meaningful uh for about 45 dollars for the parent workbook and the parent workbook and the student book the teacher's book is totally scripted so if you're not a math person it's a it's a great fit um life of fred is about 16 a semester it's easy to walk through with your kiddos there's math mammoth um it costs a little bit more up front but it lasts for years and years and for your younger kids ruth beach has a book called the three hours of learning that includes math teaching tips and as kathy said some of these aren't free but they're pretty inexpensive and sometimes we have to remember that there's a trade-off sometimes the things that are absolutely free there's a little bit more of a time investment so just look at the trade-offs sometimes when you're getting something totally free so well let's go back to this math cost i know stacy you have third grade and fifth grade how did you keep the math cost manageable well vicki i'm glad you mentioned that trade-off just now because i did choose to buy a curriculum so that i didn't have to spend a lot of time planning but what i did do then is i reuse what my materials for my older daughter with my younger son so i've only invested the cost once for one child and my second child is basically free okay and remember too there are still some free math programs when kids get older you know we think about them just for the younger grades but ck 12 has their math interactive programs online for grades six into high school actually through high school free and master math has programs for grades six through nine they are outstanding courses you would never expect to be free they're you know they're doing it all for you i know a lot of people have heard of khan academy but i think programs like these two ck 12 and master math are better designed and even easier for homeschoolers to use so you know the the free stuff and the inexpensive stuff doesn't go away just when you get to the older levels oh that's so good to know especially with a seventh grader in algebra um you know figuring out the whole mixed fractions thing was definitely going back in the book of my mind just managing all those zoom classes this spring for three separate kids was um quite a challenge just uh different kids had to get on at different times and uh two of them couldn't do it themselves so we had to find a spot get them logged in you know mute and unmute their microphones so it was a bit frustrating and stressful because we were also trying to work at the same time so is that something that you can address at all yeah um there are still classes zoom style classes available for homeschoolers if they want them it does take a lot of time because you're usually dedicating full classroom time and uh you know this is where children have to meet at a specific time so you've got to schedule it and work around it and yes you might use those sometimes but there are lots of other online courses that allow students to work independently on their own schedule or your schedule and they're usually far more efficient they don't take nearly as long and the ck12 and the mastermath i just talked about are good examples of those they won't take nearly as much time as if you're sitting down with a classroom group for a zoom class okay so those are ones that they can just um log in and do on their own schedule and they're not um at the same time i see that's great thank you one of the nice things about those is they can move at their own speed to the class too so and i'm with you sandra i don't want my kids online all day long so we do a little bit online we do one zoom class a week and then my kids have a couple of resources online that they use to practice and reinforce and then the rest of the time at the traditional i'm teaching the kids and presenting the information and they're using it and manipulating it and we're discussing it in some way shape or form together at home and lots of homeschoolers are like stacy where they want to use resources that look more traditional or they might want to limit screen time for a number of reasons so typically homeschoolers use a mixture of online and offline resources along with in-person group classes when we can do those and you might have one child that does great online and another that does better with books so you have to choose what works best for each situation and i and i hear stacy talking about you know buying curriculum and using the same thing with the next one my experience wasn't so successful with that because my my boys were so different from one another that i couldn't i was having to do different things with each one but um if you can do that it's a it saves money well speaking of doing all the things with this with the different kiddos i know there are a lot of all-in-one curriculum packages kind of come in a box with the teacher's guide and all the books and everything you need are these a good option for parents who are trying to streamline their costs kathy what do you think yeah there are boxes of curriculum they range from these huge boxes with teachers manuals and 40 books you know lots of books sometimes there's smaller ones that have you know a handful of workbooks you know and a guide to go with lots of different ones to choose from but typically they put all your subjects together for one grade level and these might be a good place to start out you know when you're just new to homeschooling it gives you a sense of security and it may not be a bad idea i don't you know don't want to put them down but sometimes you spend a lot of money on that box and you've got it home for about two weeks and it just doesn't work for your family you know so if you're new to homeschooling i would urge you to be cautious about buying an expensive big box to start with first before you do that try to experiment look for samples and try things out before you sink a lot of money into something and i'll use one example sunlight is one of the most well-known publishers that puts together these large boxes they are excellent they do a great assortment of books but now they are selling nine week courses so you can try out you pay for this but you can try out nine weeks rather than investing in a year-long program and sunlight will help you combine your children as much as possible too so you can teach them together with the books in the some of the ways we've been talking about already and if you really like the idea of the all-in-one box it's simple it's done it's put together for me there are a lot of places where you can pick up used curriculum ebay sells it facebook marketplace has all sorts of used curriculums and talk to your friends figure out where the homeschoolers are in your community because sometimes you can even borrow something and use something for free that your friends used last year two years ago and then don't forget about the library because the library is there and a lot of times some of those resources are actually in the library so you at least at our library you can always take it home but you can go and look at it see what you need and go from there i love that i definitely miss the library during the panda mix so it's really nice that they finally reopened for me uh in my search i'm really kind of like a tactile person so i like actually looking at the book the hardcover book so i have found a lot of really cheap stuff on facebook and i've just purchased it um for you know ten dollars it was worth it to me to be able to look at a couple of books to see if that's something that we want to use and um i'm lucky to have stacey as a friend because she dropped off a few books for me to look at and it just gives me a feeling of oh i really like this or you know having my kids flip through them uh just gives them a chance to have their buy-in as well and um you know this week teddy learned about lightning bugs and bioluminescence and that was from one of stacy's books so you know that's something that we may go with well that's awesome but um i know that a lot of times people like these boxes that we talked about because they give them guidance if they're new to homeschooling and they're not sure what they're doing and they just want somebody to give them the lesson plan if they don't want to buy the big box are there other budget-friendly options that are still going to give them that guidance that will kind of walk them step by step what have you ladies found how about you kathy yes there definitely are there are actually some free programs that essentially replace the box of curriculum for example easy peasy one of the most popular and discovery k-12 both provide most of the learning content online and it's laid out for you there step by step and there are others like ambleside online and materia mobility that are they outline complete programs for you and then you'll go get your books from the library or you know buy whatever you want but um they lay it out for you step by step and they don't charge plain and not so plain i mentioned before that it's a worksheet based curriculum for those who prefer that approach these are all very different from one another but they're all free so you don't have to go out and buy the big box and i i want to throw in here i want to mention unit studies unit studies tie together learning activities around themes so that subject areas are interrelated and some of those boxed programs are actually unit studies programs like five in a row and gather round when i haven't mentioned before are good examples of other unit studies that don't come in big boxes but they're still the mainstay of your curriculum for the entire year you'll use the library or online resources with these books they're guides of a sort um and there are lots of week-long or month-long unit studies on individual topics lots of free ones that might only take a week or two to complete and you can find these on really diverse topics yeah martin luther king frogs uh volcanoes you know uh spacecraft whatever uh so there are lots of these small unit studies that you can try out and there are lots of free ones i think we'll put these on the handout that you'll get later so you can get access to these online but the week-long or short-term unit studies are a great way to try out what could be an entirely new way of learning and you could find out if that appeals to you or not so you can you can investigate that but it won't cost you anything well that sounds awesome it sounds like there's a lot of things to choose from we could probably talk all night just about curriculum so uh let's look outside that curriculum box literally the curriculum box what are some other creative inexpensive ways to provide some learning opportunities for our children outside the school books type thing yeah well for us we traded talents with other homeschooling parents uh we got to do amazing things and this was you know there are fewer of us homeschooling when we were doing it and still we had one mom who taught computer programming another mom with a linguistics background taught foreign languages another mom who was a professional artist taught art a man from church volunteered to teach violin to our kids you know it was it was just amazing like you know all of these resources that were just available to us and we didn't have to pay for those and we also used boy scouts too uh the merit badges were a significant part of our curriculum because boy scout merit badges combined book learning and hands-on activities great blend for what worked with my kids and the boy scout mirror badges motivated them to do work that they would have not you know not wanted to do just for school so those were really a great option for us too scouting worked out well for us as well i know my kids did 4h and they did scouts and nowadays i think families have american heritage girls and trail life as uh as other scouting opportunities as well and my kids as we talked about back in the old days my kids were involved in an enrichment co-op and it wasn't really heavily academic but they did things like slimy science or introduction to latin i think we did creative writing and public speaking and biology labs nowadays you might have clubs such as odyssey the mind and robotics and things and we had yearbook and drama and band so you know when people ask about socialization we had a lot of opportunities and i know that now i've been reading a lot about the pandemic pods that are popping up now these are just remind me a lot of the co-ops of the early homeschooling days where we basically split the cost for the teachers we shared teaching with other families and it's just kind of thinking outside the box and it just didn't have to cost a lot of money so and co-opting actually doesn't have to cost any money at all my family co-ops with one other family there are no fees involved at all we just share the teaching burden we share the child care burden we enjoy life together and we have a lot of fun we use each other's strengths and weaknesses and it's a great change of pace for our kids to get together with other kids once a week yeah and for us i like teaching the older kids so i taught world view classes writing classes geometry and the other moms some of the like teaching the younger kids so it was a nice division of labor that suited each of our preferences too that's good um kathy will you zoom with my kids kind of you can really just go in any direction and you know as long as you're covering the basics so uh one thing that we have set up that we're going to start doing is with my cousin she's a translator she has her master's degree in english and korean so we're going to be doing a zoom lesson once a week with my kids so it gives her a chance to get to know my kids my kids get to know their cousin and learn a little bit of korean that's cool it's a wonderful the one thing great thing about zoom is being able to do that sort of thing so what are some other ways to learn girls besides the books and the classes so what have you found helpful oh there's so many inexpensive ways uh for children to learn i think a few that i use with my kids i think photo books would probably be one of the most important we took photos for field trips you know adventures vacations whatever parties and then my boys would then be responsible to take the photos and arrange to select them and arrange them in their story and arts was built around those and they were motivated again to do it because they were writing their own story so we had a shelf full you know of these story books that we put together now they weren't fancy my boys were not into creative memories type things no glitter glue and sequins or anything like that but it did the job and they had you know these wonderful adventure memory books and field trips are absolutely my favorite thing to do my favorite way to expand our learning explore the museums both large and small in your area honestly sometimes i enjoy and we get more out of the little museums than the big giant ones for example across the street from us is this little community um the county museum and it's fantastic because the amount of information is not overwhelming if you do like to travel and visit a lot of museums you can get museum memberships so you can buy a membership to one museum that gets your entrance into other museums and this is a great time to ask grandmas and grandpas for christmas presents and birthday presents passes either annual passes or even one-time admittance is a great gift because let's be honest very few of us need more toys so they make great christmas presents um and national parks i'm going to put a big plug here for national parks because national parks have amazing history and science resources they have ranger-led programs that are offered all the time the rangers are super friendly and very willing and helpful want to talk to your kids and most national parks have what's called a junior ranger program so you go to the ranger station you ask for this junior ranger book the kids walk around they answer questions they learn all sorts of things and then at the end they go and they get exploring and they come home with a batch so you get a free souvenir as well and you save money on there and the kids just learn a lot um and one more thing if you don't know if you have a fourth grader every fourth grader can get a free national parks pass for the entire school year that gets the whole family in so take advantage of that if you happen to have a fourth grader or take advantage of it when you do have a fourth grader yeah that's a great program i'm glad you mentioned the national parks pass because that's a super resource ano another way to save on field trips would be group discounts you know don't be afraid to ask people about discounts some people say oh my family's not very big so we wouldn't get a group discount you'd be surprised some places their idea of a group is six so or maybe it's just your family and one other one so it never hurts and a lot of places have educational is a homeschool teacher's card that could be your hslda membership card your hsld id card if your local support group has an id card a lot of times those will suffice for that so those discount cards by the way they can save you a lot of other places too not just your field trips but if you buy school supplies when you buy computers when you go to the fabric stores and the craft stores be sure to ask if they take teacher cards a lot of the bookstores will take teacher cards as well so be sure to check our list of some of the places that'll give you some lower prices on your homeschool resources so all right well i think we've covered like books and supplies and field trips and uh let's look at some of your questions so let's see i don't if i can scroll through some of these questions here let's see uh we may not be able to get to all of these only just pick a few here thank you all for sending these in i'm looking for just questions let's see okay sorry um how long do your children we've got some of the questions just so you know some of the questions um if they're not quite related to budgeting we may touch on them in another another uh workshop just want to let you know somebody asked how we get that hslda card that we mentioned you can find that on our website and we're going to put that down that information for you down in the uh chat area here for you we can also probably put that on the resource list i think so co-op opportunities for sports and music with local schools what have you ladies found um some of those topics that maybe don't lend themselves as easily what have you found for music and sports and things like that a lot of it is going to be very dependent on your area so exam for example the area that we live in does have a home school group that actually competes in sports with a lot of the smaller private schools we're in a big metro area so there's lots of the public schools are all big but this homeschool group competes with the private schools in the area um and so they offer a lot of those extracurriculars um the best one of the best places to go is your state organizations because they will often keep a list of the groups in different areas so it's hard to generalize when we're talking about 50 states and all the different places another question that came up is where can i find free or low cost tutoring for my children on subjects that are challenging to teach so we found in for our family that just somebody who's a few years ahead of them it could be another student it could be a parent who is interested in that topic it could be a college student sometimes you can get the local college students to we actually had music classes um taught by local college students because they wanted to get in some student teaching they actually came to our house and did the the lessons so that was great we didn't have to go anywhere and they gave us a really good price so trading off with each other is helpful and the other cool thoughts on that talent swapping is what i was going to say and throw out there you know maybe you can watch someone else's kids while they tutor your child or you can swap tutoring but figure out a way to share talents is a great way to get low-cost tutoring awesome somebody's asking about free resources for transcripts high school diplomas report cards and things like that you can print them from online there are a lot of sources for you online and we'll pop a few of those down for you as well i'll give those to grace to be able to put in there for you we'll also put them on the form for you so you'll have those somebody asked in case the libraries are closed due to covid how do we obtain inexpensive or free books for kids have you guys done any kind of book swapping yes definitely yeah i think we've talked about you know checking with your friends and checking you know if you're belong to a church i mean other parents always have books and say hey i need for two weeks i need a book on egypt uh somebody's probably got it or else you can look look for used ones online so many homeschoolers are using these that a lot of them are available used very inexpensively so yeah lots of options okay another question that came up was materials for coding and computer programs and things like that that are inexpensive and we found just go online and do a search for homeschool i don't know which what all the parts and pieces are for this coding or or whatever the topics are just put home school curriculum in there and you get a lot of but i found today that easy peasy has a free computer skills program available so check that out i i didn't even realize that was there until today so and vicki there's a great scratch if you look just type in scratch um they it's free online introductory coding my husband's a computer science does computer science has my kids doing these fun easy simple programs just getting used to the thinking but it's a totally free program and if you want to know more how to use it you can find a scratch book at the library to check out if you need a little more direction okay awesome awesome is that scratch with a c s c r a t b okay scratch sc okay got it sometimes they have these unique spellings anymore thank you kathy i wanted to ask you in particular somebody's asking about online high school accredited classes that are available for free so do you want to hit just really quickly on accreditation and then the the free part of that yeah well that's that's probably a much bigger question that's a high school question but yeah yeah because you know accreditation matters maybe at the high school level where it doesn't matter at the younger levels and you're going to pay if you're enrolling them in an accredited program it's you're in another ballgame there so um yeah i don't know of free accrediteds maybe you do but i i don't so how about high school programs in particular we're just going back to some of those we mentioned earlier or do you have anything in particular for high school if somebody's just now jumping in with a high school student and they're not quite sure what to do do you have any i no i think high school it's worth taking time to talk with somebody who knows something because you really have to be focused on your goals what are we preparing them for college what do we you know what are the requirements for the next step uh you really have to do it right and so this isn't a time to just you know guess at what you're doing so i i highly recommend talking with somebody who knows something rather than winging it awesome thank you all right and then somebody had asked about special grants for equipment and supply so i encourage you to check out our compassion section at our website at hslda.org under the community tab so check that out i just want to encourage you tonight we our time is getting short here but you know every family has its own personality all of you all have your own interests there's there's not only one right way to do this if nobody told you that when your child turned five or sixish that he had to go to school what would you be doing you were already homeschooling as it is so think about your family do you love reading together do you love playing games or hiking and doing a lot of nature studies are you an engineering and building family or do you like to sit around and discuss and debate current events or make music whatever it might be take what you already do because you usually already work those things into your budget and see how you can make some of those things a bit more intentional as part of your children's education because this is really a wonderful opportunity for you as homeschoolers to be that unique family that you are so if you still have some questions that haven't been answered be sure to uh check out the form that we're going to be sending out to you check your email we'll send a sheet with some resources for you and be sure to check some of our upcoming webinars we're going to be having these on a regular basis here for these next few weeks so we've got one coming up am i really qualified to homeschool my children we're going to be talking about how do i help my child love learning so hopefully these will answer some of your questions and i'm so glad that you were here tonight taking your time and until next time please visit us at hslda.org and remember you've got this thank you so much vicki i really appreciate you and stacey your insight with your kids and thanks so much kathy i really feel encouraged to just go out there and um you know try different things and there really is no fail because we're competing only against ourselves so i don't have to catch up to anybody at least that's what i think right now you're good okay well thank you so much thanks ladies you