homeschooling

Homeschooling Essentials: A Plan

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5 Days of Homeschooling Essentials

Welcome back to the Homeschooling Essentials series! I hope you’re enjoying reading about everyone’s Essentials and maybe even learning some tricks and tips for including some of them into your homeschool.

Today’s Essential from me is a plan. I have to know in advance what I’m going to be teaching or it doesn’t get done. It’s as simple as that. I’ve tried it both ways, with a plan and without one, and hands down, it’s better when I plan things out. I was blessed enough to win a copy of The Well Planned Day Homeschool Planner earlier this school year, and it’s made a huge difference in our school. Things are no longer crazy “what do we have to do today?” And the kids are more focused too ;).

You don’t need any specific planner, although I do highly recommend the Well Planned Day. Just find one that works for you and your specific needs. The things you’ll need to include are the different subjects you need/want to teach, and a space for the lesson required for each child. That’s it. You can even make your own. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to work.

Even though my kids are in different grades, we do pretty much everything except silent reading and math together, so my planner looks kind of blank, but it’s really not. I should be a veteran teacher by now, since this is our third year of homeschooling “seriously,” but most of the time I still feel like a rookie. Having a good planner and taking the time each week (or ideally, planning out more than one week in advance, although that rarely happens) to fill it in really helps me a lot.

In case you’re curious, here are the subjects we do regularly:

Bible (typically, I read 2-4 chapters aloud to the kids; last week, we read the Gospel of Mark, this week, we’re reading some of the epistles)

Math (currently the kiddos are learning their multiplication tables using flash cards; once they have those mastered, which I suspect will be soon, we’ll move on to age-specific stuff for them)

Reading (Munchkin participates in a book club at the public library so he reads that book; Seahawk decided he didn’t love book club, so he’s reading Johnny Tremain right now – he loves history, so historical fiction was the right choice for him)

French (we’ve been using the lessons from SchoolhouseTeacher.com, but I recently got a membership to Mango Languages – look for the review near the end of February!)

Science (another review coming soon – Science4us.com; also reading The Burgess Animal Book for Children)

English (we do a grammar lesson and/or creative writing/pen pal letters)

History (reading An Island Story: A History of England for Girls and Boys)

And that pretty much fills our day. I try to have us done with lessons by the time Small Fry goes down for nap (at 2:00) so that the kids can go play with their friends while the baby sleeps. There’s another homeschool family just around the corner from us, so our kids and their kids play together a lot. That’s been a real blessing. While the baby sleeps and the kids are out playing, that’s “my” time. I use those couple of hours to tidy the house, take care of the breakfast and lunch dishes in preparation for dinner, and then do any sewing or quiet reading of my own.

So there’s my thoughts for the day.

Don’t forget to check out the other posts, linked below.

Blessings,

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Lisa @ A Rup Life

Jordyn @ Almost Supermom

Jenn @ Teaching Two Stinkers

Crystal @ Crystal Starr Blog

Jennifer @ Chestnut Grove Academy

Brandi @ Brandi Raae

Jodi @ Insane in the Mombrain

Kym @ Homeschool Coffee Break

Lynn @ Ladybug Chronicles

Homeschooling Essentials: Flexibility

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5 Days of Homeschooling Essentials

Welcome to Day 2 of my Homeschooling Essentials! Today it’s all about flexibility.

You have to be flexible to be a homeschooling parent. Things don’t always go exactly the way you planned, and that has to be okay. There are unexpected sick days (for the kids and you), last minute errands (or days of errands…), and burnout days. You have to be flexible enough to let things go and say “There’s always tomorrow.”

Earlier this month, we had half a week of the need to be flexible. Right around New Year’s, Small Fry was sick. I think it was New Year’s Eve, actually. He was just feeling puny and was not himself, and finally, about an hour before bedtime, it became clear why when he threw up all over me (sorry if that’s TMI…). That was on a Wednesday. Thursday was normal, and on Friday, Munchkin was sick with the same thing. He spent the day in bed, but was fine the next morning. But that morning, Seahawk was under the weather and slept most of the day. Sunday of that week, the day before I’d planned to start school up again, was fine. We went for a family bike ride and all was well. During the night, though, I came down with the illness. Here’s where the need to be flexible really struck. Even though it was Monday, and the day we were “supposed” to get back to school, there was no school happening with Mom stuck in bed. Let me also say, I am incredibly blessed to have a husband who’s self-employed and works (mostly) from home. He was able to take that Monday (which happened to be our anniversary…) off to take care of the kids so I could sleep and recover. Enter Flexibility Day 2: Tuesday. We’d missed school on Monday, and because we’d also missed our anniversary, we took Tuesday off from school, too. The kids spent the morning with Grandma so hubby and I could have our anniversary date. (We went to see Saving Mr. Banks. Have you seen it? Very good. I don’t even care for Mary Poppins and I liked Mr. Banks. In fact, hubby’s been reading the book Mary Poppins aloud to the kids this weekend. Then we’re going to watch the movie, and on Tuesday, which is discount day at the cinema, we’re all going to see Saving Mr. Banks again.)Anyway. So we started school on Wednesday the 8th instead of Monday the 6th. And did anyone die? Nope. Because we understand the importance of being flexible.

Now, this is not to say that you can call yourself a homeschooler and just never “do” school with your kids. There has to be a balance, and I think it’s better to err on the side of more school days than less. The education has to happen, whether you’re at home or sending your kids to school. But you have to accept that things aren’t always perfect.

So that’s my thought for today.

Don’t forget to click through the links below and see what everyone else is writing about today!

Blessings,

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Lisa @ A Rup Life

Jordyn @ Almost Supermom

Jenn @ Teaching Two Stinkers

Crystal @ Crystal Starr Blog

Jennifer @ Chestnut Grove Academy

Brandi @ Brandi Raae

Jodi @ Insane in the Mombrain

Kym @ Homeschool Coffee Break

Lynn @ Ladybug Chronicles

Homeschooling Essentials: Pencils. Just Pencils.

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5 Days of Homeschooling Essentials

Hey guys! This is my first blog hop, and I’m really excited to spend the rest of the week talking about what I view as “Homeschooling Essentials.” When you’re done reading my post, make sure to head on over to the master list and read about everyone else’s Essentials too!

The essential I want to talk about today is very simple, and one we can’t do without in my homeschool: Pencils. Yep. Just the basic, yellow pencil. It might not be worth mentioning at all except when it’s time for school, the kiddos can never find one! No matter how many I buy, they’re always lost.

Have you ever seen how pencils are made? We watched a YouTube video with the kids once, a few months ago, and it was actually quite interesting. Here’s the short version. First, the wood, typically cedar because it’s soft enough to sharpen but hard enough to hold up under your grip, is cut into pieces and then a groove is added for laying the lead into. A layer of glue is added to each groove, and half of the wood sheets get lead in their grooves. Each sheet is enough to make 8 or 10 pencils. The other half of the sheets are then laid on top if the leaded sheets, where the “lead sandwiches” are pressed together with a vice for an hour while the glue dries. The pencils are then cut and painted. I found it interesting that it takes four coats of paint to fully conceal the wood grain. If you have five spare minutes sometime, I encourage you to watch one of the pencil videos (just search “how pencils are made” on YouTube; there are several to choose from). I think it’s good to know things like that, if for no other reason than to keep us from taking things for granted.

We couldn’t do school without pencils. I’m sure my kids wish we could, but I’m not one of those homeschool moms who goes the “unschooling” route; I need some sort of record of what the kids have done, and I need to push them to do things that they wouldn’t necessarily choose for themselves, which is the antithesis of unschooling. Don’t get me wrong – I totally want my kids to love learning, and I want them to develop ways of learning naturally. But I can’t leave their education up to them. Otherwise Seahawk wouldn’t be as strong a reader as he is, Munchkin wouldn’t know anything about history, and neither one would be proficient in their times tables. All of those things are important – as important as having fun learning. And without our trusty pencils, we wouldn’t have a record of what they’ve learned.

So that’s my first homeschool essential. Make sure to visit my fellow bloggers to read all about theirs, and come back tomorrow for another of mine!

Blessings,

Wendy

More Homeschooling Essentials:

Lisa @ A Rup Life

Jordyn @ Almost Supermom

Jenn @ Teaching Two Stinkers

Crystal @ Crystal Starr Blog

Jennifer @ Chestnut Grove Academy

Brandi @ Brandi Raae

Jodi @ Insane in the Mombrain

Kym @ Homeschool Coffee Break

Lynn @ Ladybug Chronicles

SchoolhouseTeachers.com {Review}

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Welcome to my first official review for the Schoolhouse Review Crew! I was given a yearly membership option to SchoolhouseTeachers.com in order to write a review on the site. I can sum up my feelings about the site in one word: amazing. But that’s not a review, so let me go over some of the many wonderful things you’ll find there.

I’ve spent most of my time in the “Pre-K/Elementary” tab, simply because that’s how old my kids are. There’s so much information there that so far I’ve barely been able to scratch the surface. Take a look at all the topics:

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We’ve already used the French lessons. I’ve really loved having a lesson plan. I know the basics of the language, but not necessarily how to teach it. The printouts (for teaching the lesson and worksheets for the kids) are wonderful. We’ve done the first two lessons so far: the French alphabet and accent marks. Some of the things in the later lessons (counting, primarily) are things I’ve already taught them, so we’ll breeze through those more quickly than we have thus far. I just love knowing that they’re getting the foundation they need for the language.

The Science tab is also pretty cool. There are YouTube videos from Jason Lindsey explaining some of the basics of why things are (or happen) the way they are (or do). There’s a new video up each week, and they’re designed to be hands-on experiments that you can do with your kids with things you have around the house. This week’s video answers “why do cranberries pop when you boil them?”

For the parent who wants to homeschool but is completely unsure where to begin, SchoolhouseTeachers.com has a “Dailies” tab that will give you a straight up, daily lesson in each subject. No (well, very little) planning needed. Just go to the site and print. Easy.

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There are topics in the “dailies” category ranging from copywork (which Munchkin is working on right behind me as I type this post) and math to spelling, art, and even tests if you want to go that route with your kiddos.

I think my favorite thing (that I’ve found so far) on the site is the planners that are included absolutely free with your paid membership. There are 5 of them, and you can download, modify, and print them to fit your teaching style/homeschool situation. There’s the basic planner for moms; a planner for parents of special needs kids; and student planners for elementary, middle, and high school kids. All I’ve had time to look at thus far is the elementary student planner, but it’s absolutely wonderful. It includes not only the planner pages (calendars), but also articles specifically geared toward the kids and pages of “important lists” – things like the planets in order and a times table.

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You can start your very own membership at SchoolhouseTeachers.com for only $3. That’s right – $3 buys you your first month of full access to the site. If you like it, you can continue your membership for the low monthly price of $12.95. Based on the amount of content on the site, and the fact that not only is updated regularly but the back lessons are archived for access later, $12.95 a month is a real bargain. But it gets better. Buy a full year all at once and you’ll save 10%, bringing the price to $139. And during the month of December, if you sign up for the annual price, you’re locked in at that rate, and you get an additional membership to gift to a friend. Believe me, any mom with school-age kids would be super blessed by this gift! Oh, and one more thing: the price, whether monthly or yearly, covers the whole family. There’s no hidden “additional kid” fee.

Keep in mind, too, that just because my review focused primarily on the elementary part of the site, that’s not all there is. There’s something there for every age range from toddlers through teens. Perfect for any family!

I’m not the only one reviewing this site this week. Head on over to the Schoolhouse Review Crew to find even more opinions on the site before you buy in. It’s always best not to rely on just one person’s opinion, after all.

Happy learning!

–Wendy

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K5 Learning Reading and Math {Review}

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Disclaimer: I was given a free 6-week trial to K5 Learning. I was not compensated in any other way or paid for this review. This post contains affiliate links. If you subscribe to K5 Learning using a link on my blog, or list me as a reference when you sign up, I will receive a small commission. All words and opinions are my own.

K5 Learning is an online program that emphasizes reading and math in various grade levels. You start by creating a login account for yourself, the parent, and one for each child. My kids loved having their own login information and password. You can make it easier for the kids to be sure that they’ve typed their password correctly by having it show up as they type it (as opposed to bullets) if you want.

The next thing to do is to have your child(ren) take the assessment “test.” I’m hesitant to use that word, test, but it’s the best one I can think of right now. That involves a series of problems to solve, some at the grade level you’ve assigned them, some below, and some above. This isn’t designed to frustrate your child, but rather to get a true assessment of where they are academically. Once they’ve finished, you can log in to the parent-side of the site and view their results, or you can wait a few hours and receive and email with the results in it. I printed a copy of the boys’ results for my own records.

Once your kids have been placed in the appropriate grade-level for the program, the fun starts!  There are animated lessons in a variety of topics. The program placed Seahawk in “upper 4th/lower 5th” grade for math, so he worked mostly on place value. It challenged him a lot more than our workbooks because it went up through the millionth place. That was good for him, even though it took him a little longer than he was used to. (Previously, he’d only gone up through the hundred thousands in place value work.) Munchkin was placed in “upper 1st/lower 2nd” in the program for math, which I’m not 100% sure was right for him. He does 3rd grade math at home. His work was mostly geometry – shapes and colors. It was really easy for him. I’m sure I could have gone in and adjusted what it had him doing, but for a fun, supplementary thing, I didn’t stress about it.

Because we do a Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling (using real books and real life to learn instead of textbooks), we didn’t use the reading side of the program past the assessment. My kids are prolific readers, and we insist that they read a lot, plus we read a lot to them, so a reading lesson isn’t necessary for our family.

The only thing I would change about the program is to allow it run on mobile devices. We only have one computer in our home, and my husband works from home doing a graphic design business, so he uses the computer during the work/school day, which made it impossible for the kids to get to use the program every day. Having been able to access it on our Kindle Fire would have been much better for our particular situation.

The assessment I mentioned is free on the site. You don’t have to sign up for anything to have it done. Once you’ve done that, if you want to continue on with the program, it costs $25 a month for the first child and $15 for each additional child. Or you can purchase a year at a time for $199/$129. They also have a 14-day trial that’s absolutely free – you don’t even have to put in your credit card and remember to cancel before the end.

–Wendy

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The Old Schoolhouse Magazine {Review}

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I was recently invited to do a review of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine (November/December issue), so here we are :).

The Old Schoolhouse Magazine is a magazine specifically geared toward homeschool parents – right up my alley! I’d never read it before, but I have been following their blog for a couple of months, and they always have loads of good things to say there, so I was confident the magazine would be great too, and I was not disappointed. I especially loved the Christian focus of many of the articles. Providing a Christ-centered education for my boys is of utmost importance to me, especially as we begin to enter the Advent season, and there were so many great pieces that not only provided ideas for keeping Christ at the center of our lives, but why we must do so.

I particularly loved the article Having a Holiday Heart: Seven Reasons to Celebrate (even when you don’t want to). Pulling examples directly from the Gospel of Luke, the author offered food for thought on the breakdown of the word “holiday” (holy day) and the fact that every day is holy to God, and therefore should be holy to us, even when we’re having a “down” or “off” day, and how each participant in the original Christmas story had a celebratory heart, even in less-than-ideal circumstances.

The article on using the public library to create your own homeschool curriculum was a fascinating read for me as well. I’ve been homeschooling my boys since Day 1, and only this year (Seahawk is in 4th grade, and Munchkin is in 2nd grade) feel like I’m doing something “right.” Things like this article serve as great reminders for how to put together a simple unit study without spending a dime. Always good for people on a budget! The emphasis in this month’s issue was science and history/social studies, and was Part III, so I’m very interested in going back to the past issues and catching up on the series.

We all know that the holidays are coming – can you believe Thanksgiving is next week already?! So the piece surrounding the history of our traditional holiday foods was excellent in both timing and content. Did you know that even hares and dormice were stuffed in the early days? Me neither. Or that stuffing (or dressing, depending on how you cook it) was traditionally a way to use up leftovers, not as its own dish? Kind of reminds me of a quilt (which is another of my passions, as you know) – in the early days, quilts were a way to use up extra fabric, but now there are specific “quilting fabric” sections in the stores. How far we’ve come. Those are just two of the interesting food histories touched on in the article. There are also histories for pumpkin pie, gingerbread, turkey, fruitcake, and candy canes.

Even the ads in the magazine were fascinating to me since this is the first year I’ve really thought about homeschool curriculum (beyond just the workbooks for every subject that my kids hated). I don’t use any purchased curriculum, except for our math books (the one holdover from our workbook days), but it’s still interesting to see what other people are using. And I’m not opposed to purchasing something if I think it would be a good fit for my sons. I spent the first three years of my homeschooling not having a clue what I was doing, which wasn’t good for them or me, but now that we have a bit of a system down, I’m feeling open again toward traditional curriculum (my last experience, the infamous “workbook period” of our homeschool,  while necessary for my own confidence boosting, was not of the “super positive” variety).

The magazine is available for free online bi-monthly; I’ll definitely be reading it again! I wish I’d known about it years ago, but as the saying goes, “better late than never.” I barely scratched the surface of what’s in there in this review. For any of you who are experienced homeschoolers, newbie homeschoolers, considering homeschooling, someone considering going the homeschool route, or even just parents of kids (of any age – articles cover educating children from elementary through college prep years) I definitely recommend checking it out. With well over 150 pages, there’s bound to be something in it for you.

For more information on the Schoolhouse Review Crew, click HERE (and I highly recommend visiting their site, too – even if you don’t have any intention of homeschooling; the current post is about creating your own Christmas traditions, which is a topic dear to my heart this year, and I’ll touch on it in a future post). To read this month’s Old Schoolhouse Magazine, click HERE. For a list of mobile apps the Crew offers, click HERE.

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K5 Learning

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K5 Learning has an online reading and math program for kindergarten to grade 5 students. I’ve been given a 6 week free trial to test and write a review of their program. If you are a blogger, you may want to check out their open invitation to write an online learning review of their program.

I haven’t tried this with my kids yet, but I plan to start it tomorrow. I’ll let you know in six weeks what I think!

–Wendy

Spear a Potato

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Would you ever think you could stab an ordinary drinking straw into a potato? Neither did I. Or my kids.

Until our science experiment last week.

But here it is.

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A straw in a potato.

Here’s how to do it. You know, in case you have littles at home you want to teach about inertia.

First, soak the potato in water for about 30 minutes. Don’t worry – it’ll still be raw (read: hard). Using a strong, fast thrust, push the straw into the potato.

It won’t break. The straw, that is. The potato will. Its skin, anyway.

Why it works: basic inertia. An object at rest (the potato) wants to stay at rest. An object in motion (the straw) will keep moving until it can’t anymore.

Each time we do an experiment, the kids also do a little paper. Very basic. It lists the name of the experiment, the procedure, what the kids think will happen, what actually happened, and why it worked.

–Wendy

Science Experiment: Fun with Colors

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We did a science experiment in our homeschool last week – those are the boys’ favorite things to do! I looked through the book on simple experiments I’d picked up from the library and found one that didn’t require a trip to the store first. Here’s what we came up with.

Tear a paper towel into strips and put a dot of green food coloring (or marker ink) about two inches from the bottom.

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I made sure to get a strip of towel that didn’t have any printing on it when we did this.

Next, place your strip in a glass of water, making sure the green dot is about an inch outside of the water (but inside the glass). Wait 10-15 minutes.

What’s supposed to happen: your green dot should disappear, leaving your water yellow and your paper towel blue as the dyes separate.

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Ours didn’t work perfectly, but we did a get a bit of blue on the paper towel, so it wasn’t a total misfortune.

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And the most important part was that the kids had fun learning!

Happy weekend!

–Wendy

Before and After

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We started school last week. That’s made things quite a bit busier for me, but I must say: I don’t hate it. Summertime is nice, but I also like the structure of the school year.

Here are a few things related to the post title I wanted to share:

Before last Tuesday, the kids were dreading “back to school.” After Tuesday’s lessons, they were excited for Wednesday. That makes me happy!

Before last week, I was gung ho to teach (and learn) Spanish. After trying for 4 days, I realize/accept that I can’t teach something I don’t know. So we’re adopting French as our foreign language instead. (I took 3 years of French in my public high school and did quite well. It’s been years, but it will come back quickly. I’m sure of that.) We started with numbers 1-10 today and all 3 boys (hubby’s learning with the kids!) have it mostly down.

Before yesterday, the kids and I all desperately needed haircuts.

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After yesterday afternoon, we’re all shorn.

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(don’t mine the glare in the corner… that’s where the light hit the mirror and I’m too lazy to crop it right now lol)

Before August 27th, Small Fry was still crawling. It was so funny to see – he crawled like a bear, on hands and feet instead of hands and knees. After August 27th, he’s pretty much walking exclusively.

That’s about it… What have you been up to in my absence? 🙂

–Wendy