I homeschooled, with excellent results, using online materials rather sparingly. True there are numerous wonderful resources on the net, especially for classical studies. More every year.
However...you can spend an awful lot of time searching, shopping, selecting, and then it’s tempting to plop the kid in front of the monitor and give him a list of places to go, lectures to absorb, etc.
They’re no substitute for a teaching parent.
If you read to him happily and often when the child is two, three years old, you usually get a child who loves reading and learns it as eagerly as he learned to walk.
If you want him well-educated in ninth grade, tenth...the same approach will achieve that.
When you teach what you know, you share a treasure; when you teach what you don’t know, you share an adventure. When you just assign lessons, rather than participate, you convey the message that learning is something less than a marvelous intellectual exploration of the world and its most interesting thinkers.
Good advice. Thanks for sharing your reflections.