Homes Schooling High School

Many families are nervous about homeschooling through high school, but it can be done.  I wanted to share with you a great resource for building your confidence.

Lee Binz, TheHomeScholar.com, has a plethora of resources to walk you through the land of high school.  Transcripts, credits, records, scholarships, college admissions, and more.

This is a webinar that Lee Binz did several months ago.  She covers a lot of what you will need to traverse the land of high school.

The Self-Propelled Advantage

I love teaching.  I love sharing in the learning of my children.  It brings me joy and I feel fulfilled.  I love planning our school days and spending them with my children.  I could even do a decent job of it when I had just a couple young children.  But then my family grew and they started growing up.  I became way too busy.  I even found myself spending up to 8 hours a day teaching only three of my children.  Something was a miss, and I was quickly becoming overwhelmed, the one thing I preach against being.

Even when my children were young, I saw the wisdom of working myself out of a job.  I wanted my children to become self-motivated, self-learners.  This has always been my desire, however it didn't seem to be happening.  For some reason, my methods were not giving the desired outcome.  But I wasn't sure where the problem was. 

So, I do what I usually do when I find I am in over my head: I PRAY.  

And what do I find? Underwhelmed Mom, Joanne Calderwood from URtheMom.com.  She teaches the why and how of teaching self-learning.  I browsed her website and learned some very valuable things.  The first one struck me as a DUH!!  That "duh", was simply this: Give them the planners.  I had a beautiful school planner wherein I kept track of everything.  I had check lists for the kids but I kept the control.  I realized that if they were going to really own their own education, they needed more power.  I quickly made some planners for them.  That simple thing did WONDERS.  They could see what they needed to do, how long it would take, and then have the joy of crossing it off when done. 

 I decided to order her new book (the Kindle version is less than $8.00).  I am glad I did.  I had many of the tools already, but in this format, I was able to put the pieces to create a better whole.

Not just for Home Schoolers:
The Message is for All Students

She also has several hours worth of audio over at Blog Talk Radio that is fascinating to listen to.

The thing I like most about Joanne message is that it is Not just for Home Schooled Kids.  Her message is for all students and all parents. 

My days are already easier.  I am less stressed and have the time and energy to do more fun things with them.  In other words, the quality of our time is better.  My vision for them has expanded.  

The kids are less stressed and they have more time to enjoy.  I still have a lot of heart training to do (mine as well as theirs. After all, it was mostly my attitude that needed tweaking.)  But I am so much closer to my goal of having self-motivated learners.  

I challenge you to give your children the Self-Propelled Advantage.

Fun with Math

We have found a fun, new math resource.

I first heard about Times Tables the Fun Way by Judy Liautaud when I visited the Montessori school in Lakeside. Math facts for 3's 4's, 5's, 6's, 7's and 8's have a fun story to help the children remember it. I looked it up and Judy Liautaud has also written a similar book for the addition facts. My budget would only fit in one, so I decided to start with Addition the Fun Way.

My boys are really picking up on these. Each number is a cartoon character for example, 3 is a bee: the 3 bee. 6 is always sick. Some are silly, but others are pretty good. Either way, it seems to work.

Memorizing math facts are important, yet I also do not like the idea of memorizing by rote without understanding the concepts behind it. So we have also pulled out the dominoes. We have a set of double nine dominoes which are perfect for generating addition (or multiplication) problems from 0-9. So we pick out a domino at random, say the problem, maybe write it on the white board and then talk about the story. Then they count the dots to make sure we are right. It is fun to see.

Another fun game we have started playing is Addition War very similar to traditional War. We use a stack on number cards with each player having half of the cards. To play, the players each pull off the top two cards from the deck and lay them on the table. The two cards are added together. The player whose card added up higher get all the cards on the table. Much funner than timed sheets.