We're trying Classical Conversations this year, and I'm sure meeting with Gather Round and Good and the Beautiful. And then I'm giving my local librarians topics and they're helping me come up with additional books/projects. I'm meeting with the library here in town this week to come up with a monthly homeschool activity that is NOT STEAM focused, because most libraries in the system are hopping on that bandwagon and I'm over it.
Discussion
It seems STEM programs for elementry is the new NASA. Its designed to get them to focus on meaningless trivia and dream of unrealistic goals while they are surrounded with no people that can provide useful direction. Sure there will be 1 or 2% that might end up in that career path, but any curriculum for children that can even attempt to scratch the depth of necessary skills to do anything meaningful has to be dumbed down to the average kid which even the average adult isn't qualified to do even the most basic task. The only positive outcome is parents bragging and exaggerating about their kids doing things they have no understanding of.
You may get along fine with classical conversations. Its very diverse. You may be fortunate and the mix of people in your area may turn out to be perfect. Unfortunately, in our area, homeschoolers generally are closely tied to their church and if you can't attend sunday service with them, you aren't going to get access to the social circle. We can't play along with the church scene because of our biblical beliefs.
I'm Catholic, and definitely the minority in our CC Community, but there is one other family who attends our parish in the group.
Next weekend, the Diocese of Superior is hosting its homeschool conference at St Joseph in Rice Lake, and I'm going for the day to make connections and see what others are doing.
Catholics are more accepted by protestants than we are. Honestly, my wife and I get along with catholics better and Catholic school may be our only remaining alternative to homeschool.
We're on the wait list for our Catholic School for the second year. It's great, but also a frustration. We're parishioners, bit there are a lot of non-parishioners sending their children to the school. And we didn't do pre-k, so that locked us out.