So, I'm childless for now, but I'm planning to not be forever.
...
As the voice of experience: Wait until you have kids. Then try looking, because...
1) One of the best places to find information is where other parents congregate (like at playgrounds, parenting groups, etc). Since this forum in pretty much international, you will get all sorts of varying information.
2) If your child is not yet born, you still have at least five years to go... in that time period the resources you get now may disappear, and others may reappear.
3) Sometimes things happen that you do not anticipate... like having a kid with medical issues, and as we have found out over the past 17 years, our oldest has some serious learning disorders.
4) Other things happen, like you move... or one parent is no longer there, which make homeschooling more difficult (one thing my hubby and I have in common is that we both had a parent die while we young).
I live in an area with lots of secular homeschooling. There are homeschooling groups, companies that cater to homeschoolers and even homeschooling resource centers provided by public school districts (including online courses for high school students). Since I know a few kids that are homeschooled (including the kids of the director of a speech therapy clinic my oldest went to) I do have a couple ideas:
1) There are "children's fairs" or "educational fairs" held in our area about once a year... there may be something like that in your area. You need to check out the local parenting ads in your local newspaper or some local parenting publication (the latter are often given away free at maternity stores, kid clothing stores, etc.). The last time I went to one over a decade ago there were several companies with booths promoting their homeschooling materials.
2) There are a couple of newsgroups for homeschooling, you can check out their archives on
http://groups.google.com/group/misc.education.home-school.misc ... and there are some others (in the groups.google.com the search on the world "homeschooling" included a private group on "pagan homeschooling"!).
3) One very reason some children are homeschooled is because they are serious musicians. These are kids (some as young as 9 years old) who practice several hours a day, and cannot schedulre regular school attendence. I've seen a musical performance of a homeschool group that was incredible... so you might see if music stores or teachers know of any of these groups, and what are their resources.
4) Often in metropolitan areas you will have education specialty stores. In this area there is a "science" store and a "Math" store. These are places that cater to homeschoolers.
Good luck... I personally would not homeschool my kids. One of my jobs as a parent is to make sure they get to bed alive --- I'm not so sure that would happen if I had them home all day.
Oh, I must add this anecdote: Even though I had one kid in the special ed. preschool and realized how
little I knew about children and child development, I got an additonal lesson with fair normal child #2. When the kids were little I took them to a "parent/baby/toddler" swimming class. While other parents were getting their toddlers to jump in the pool, blow bubbles and actually do stuff... my then two-year-old would not do ANYTHING for me! So when he was three years old I enrolled him in the pool's class for three-years-old (one teacher for three kids). It turns out my son would do anything the teacher asked and actually learned how to swim!
That is when I learned that my kids really don't want to listen to me... so I've limited my "teaching" moments. That even included paying for sewing lessons, even though that is something I could teach them. Last night my offer to help my 6th grade daughter with fractions was rejected forcedly.
They are kind of like husbands that way. I have often found that the best way to tell my husband something is to have someone else tell him (the shining example of that was when he insisted that all walls have to be painted with flat paint, while I thought semi-gloss would be better in the bathroom... the clerk at the hardware store's paint counter told him that the flat paint he was buying for the bathroom was not a good choice, so he relented --- I did my "told you so" dance where he could not see me).
