Category: Homeschooling Essentials

Four Tips to Time off

8/10/2016

You know what every home school needs? TIME OFF.

Yep. My home management tip for today is TIME OFF. Take a break, go on a vacation, or a stay-cation, or a week break for doing things out of routine.

As you know... I am not actually here this week, I am doing what all good parents do.. I"m taking a break! We are blessed enough to be able to leave our home for our vacation, but I know two families that are staying home this year for stay-cations, and having a blast with their families. So it all works. :)

Tips from my house to yours.

1. Pack well. Seriously. If you are gone for two weeks, pack enough for five-six days max. Give a limited size of container for your children or they will try to take the world with them, this way you teach them important skills of prioritizing and space management. This picture is of my clothes for two weeks. More tops than bottoms, I need to toss in a jacket as well yet. Everyone gets a container this size. Roll your clothes as they take less space. Save your loonies and quarters for the laundry and you are good to go.

2. Pack Food. Admittedly I don't have a picture as it's the first and last thing I pack. We do canned goods when we travel rather than prepare from scratch as we go to bear country and the less they can smell the better. We don't need mid-afternoon raiders on our campsite thank you very much. You'll notice the box of single serving chips... means no open bags of chips for bears to enjoy. We pack the fresh and frozen food last of course...We'd hoped to find dry ice this year to keep food frozen longer, but I think we'll be doing lots of ice instead...

3. Pack Carefully. I have changed how I packed things up this year. I had all the pans and whatnot under the seat, but it felt like too much wasted space on top of them, so I moved them over and was able to pack a ton of things on top. Even managed to roll the tarp and ground carpet up.. Used to take up 3 x 3 feet and was miserably awkward to move, rolled it fits under the seat for the most part. So rethink how you pack and you might be surprised at how you can make it work.

4. Be Delighted in the skills your family possesses. :)
We know have kayaks instead of a canoe as it offers more flexibility. I LOVE sales. :) anyways, how to travel with three kayaks was more problematic than move a canoe, buy my husbands ingenuity lead us to this great solution. We had to refit the bike rack to make it work (the bikes now travel backward) but it works and I am so thrilled with how he worked it all out. :)

So this post is part of the homeschool crews five day blog hop. In case you couldn't guess, the theme of the day was home management. :)

To see what others have to say, go a visiting, starting by clicking the image below. :)

Homeschooling Budgets : Mistakes and Blessings

8/3/2016

Money and homeschooling.. it can be such a hard topic to deal with you know?   People LOVE free, but the question is .. is free always worth it?
On the flip side.. are those high priced curriculum always worth it to?
How does one determine what they should spend? Where they shall put their dollars?   Not always easy decisions to make.

So here's what I can tell you.

You will make mistakes. Really you will.

You will buy something and it disappears into the shelves in your house and you will forget about it.
You will buy something and realize it doesn't fit with how you do school.
You will do what I have done and accidentally buy two of the same item without realizing it until you organize your shelves and say... "oh that was dumb".

You will also do what I have done:

Buy something on sale and realize it was JUST THE THING you needed.
You will have someone tell you about a program that didn't work for them but stimulates your thinking and before you know it, you get that program from that person and it's exactly what you needed. Buying it cheaper than it would have cost new
You will bless others with items just as you have been blessed. Because in the homeschool community I find that people give things away freely so often.

This is how you make your budget work.
By realizing that mistakes will happen but so will blessings.   You will balance the good with the not so good. You will research and hunt and discover and celebrate the good with your young, and persevere through the bad with them (or find a better home for it).

And you will learn.

This is why you are doing that right?   To Learn.   So go ahead learn. Let your children see you working it all through, and they too will learn about budgeting.

It will all work out in the end.

To that end, let me tell you about a sale that starts today and runs through til the 8th. It's a sale that is featuring products put together by Canadians, it covers a whole range of topics from history to science, french and rabbits, chocolate and timelines.   A bit of something to please anyone looking to learn more about my beloved country of Canada and more. :)   Cost? $27 a savings of almost $150 off the list price.

New Routines, New Materials

9/9/2014

We homeschool all year round in this household, but that doesn't mean we homeschool intensively all year round.

Over the summer we do the basics plus fun stuff.. the basics are .. Math, English and the various books we read.
The fun stuff this summer was... doing some music, working on some science, Veritas Press history and enjoying God's creation.

About six months, off and on throughout the year we work harder, we add in geography, focused science, Phys Ed, history n(reading/hands on etc), arts and bible.   One month here, two months there and such like.

LAST year we homeschooied in bits and pieces throughout the day. So we'd some reading in the morning, take an hour to do whatever, then we school a bit and then do whatever .. so our schooling happened but it was very spread out.. and that at times proved to be problematic in that if something came up.. we'd miss out on doing work. Not so good for our long term goals.

This fall semester we have an international student living with us, this forces us to be up and at 'em earlier in the day, and take in turn allows us to be more focused on getting work done before lunch. (WOOT WOOT).

Today was a bit tough.. I had some rebellion going on, but I introduced the lad to some changes.     For some reason this helped. :)   Go figure.

1. A new list.   I bought this whiteboard, meant for going into lockers, with this wipe off crayons.   I can put our task list on these boards and they can be wiped off when completely. See that blank spot.. that's stuff wiped off already.   Dailies are done in black, cleaning in orange, changes daily in read, and hope to do in green and blue.

The fun past is I bought TWO of them. So my arty boy can draw things while I read books or instructions and keep the wigglies out. :)

See we hate schedules in this house.. we really do. BUT we like lists. :)   So we can make our lists, colour code them so we know what's most important, and then it works! At least for us it works. :)

2. Our most used supplies are right at hand. Solutions was having a "we're closing this store and moving to another site" sale so we got these handy little drawers. one in black, the other in white so we can tell them apart. My crayons for the boards go on the top of the black one (they were currently in use).

Everything is right at hand. Pencil sharpeners, erasers, pencil crayons, pencils, cutting tools, pens (and white out), and markers. It's so handy the lad was quite pleased. "I don't have to look for things anymore mom!" :)

3. Another change is we'll be dividing our time up. So no more doing ALL our computer work all at once. We'll do some computer stuff, then do the breakfast dishes, then do some our black and red list upstairs in the bookroom, then have lunch and if there is any computer work left do that right after lunch (or before lunch if we have time). I hope this will keep us more focused and keep the boy moving so he won't be feeling weighted down by "I have to do all this stuff and don't get a break for nothing).

It overall worked well once the lad got into the groove of schooling again. The lad seemed quite pleased by the end of our day. :)

Tabs Open In My Browser

4/26/2014

Solomon's Portico from Bible History.   I can't remember why I looked this up, but I thought it interesting reading. History is just fascinating. :)

Oxford Owl.    A homeschooling friend recommended this site to me.    Oxford Owl is an award-winning free website with 250 FREE tablet-friendly eBooks and activities to help you support children’s learning.

Someone also recommended Imagination Station to me.    Science Studio Is an exhibit space at Imagination Station where you can explore science on your own terms. At our activity bench you can make slime, build rockets or look at bugs under microscopes.

a free frog resource book. Do you have frog-loving kids? If so, this unit is for them! Below you’ll find lots of links, videos and activities that will guide you and your children on a fun learning adventure about frogs and toads.

then there is sprouting tadpoles history memory cards, these are for ancient history.

Deliberate mom talking about Kidoodle TV. I signed up for it but never got a chance to really use the free trial. Sometimes that's how life goes.

Lighthouse Classical Academy talking about some favourite math books. I thought some looked interesting and wanted to keep the tab handy.

Here's a rather large book list you might find interesting. I did. :)

This post on gamifying your homeschool intrigued me.

bible copy work pages.

Lego for upper elementary. I want to do lego chemistry with my homeschool group.

Jesus and Lazarus.    Science with bible. A good thing this.

10 neat science experiments. I'll be putting this on my science page as well. :)

Life of Christ series.    This month on Coffee for the Soul we are going to do something a little different. We would love for you to join us as we chronologically cover the main events of the Life of Christ as accounted in the Book of John. We would love to have you join us as we learn about who Christ is and what He did for us

This Chocolate Sauce lesson intrigued me. I think it's missing something, but haven't quite figured that out yet....

A Child’s Book Of Art: Free Printable Discussion Questions.   You can actually use many of the questions to discuss the artwork in whichever books you own. In fact, using these questions will help teach you how to talk about art with your child whether you are looking at books or walking through an art museum.

and last but not least
the Visual Periodic Table. :)

Why I love homeschooling

4/22/2014

So I while back I was using a random topic generator... I was just curious about what it might suggest to me as topics to blog about.   I was impressed at first and then I started plugging in different words and discovered that it really wasn't all that impressive.   It just had a bunch of sentences and then just plugged the words you gave it into the different sentences.   So I got "why I love homeschooling (and you should too) as well as the variation of rabbits, guns, babies, boys, places etc... so it was a bit of a let down after that.

Anyways, I put this suggestion into my drafts folder just in case I ever felt like doing a "why I love homeschooling post" and since I'm needing a reminder I thought I'd talk about why I love it.

1. My son.   I adore my boy and I love spending time with him.   He's a bright, inquisitive lad with a firm love for critters of almost all sorts.   Tonight when we were reading we were learning about a fish that spits water at bugs to make them fall into the water and I asked him "did you see that when we were at Ripley's?"
He was shocked.. they had them at Ripley's?   "Where, where were they mom?"
"In the same spot as the mudskippers son" was my quiet response.   "You may have been off with J looking at the sharks or something.."
He was so upset to have missed them and wants very much to go back so we can see them again.   So I told him I'd go see if I could find the picture I took and he was somewhat mollified.

2. Time to learn at one's own speed. This is important you know. To be not rushed or left behind or held back. It's good to savour the learning you know?

Like when we went the Elgin County Museum. It was such a nice visit and we had the place virtually to ourselves.

taking our time at the Elgin County Museum last year. We so enjoyed our visit there.

3. To learn new things together. Did you know there was such a thing as a eusocial animal? This was actually something hubby and son taught me after they learned it. Rather neat eh? To think of a mammal living much like an insect. Just blows me away the creativity of God.

I know that there is much more to homeschooling. And I could list the whys and the wherefores of why and what we do....but what I wanted to do here was just talk about what I love about homeschooling. My son, time and learning. That's what's good to me.

Tell me please my reader... what do YOU love about homeschooling? If you don't homeschool, what do you think you might love about it?

Homeschooling Essentials, Day Four: Affording the Homeschool Life

1/23/2014

Welcome to day four of the five of blogging about homeschool essentials. :) Today I am going to talk about affording the homeschool life.

I was originally going to call this post, let's talk about money, and it is about money, but it's about more than that you know. It's about time and family and money and... well, kinda everything. :)

It's about the time you spend as a family... Time spent together. It's take it's toll sometimes doesn't it? I know in my household I crave silence... I just crave time to my own thoughts without any background noise. I live in a household where hubby often works best sitting in front of the tv with it running some show or other as he types out his sermons, or works out thoughts for sermons, or simply puts together an agenda. He works best with noise. Then I have a lad who likes to talk and play video games and talks as he builds with his lego. Like his mother, words come to him easily. And don't take me wrong, I love having my son and hubby around almost all the time, but I also relish when hubby needs to go out on visits or to a meeting as then I can more easily control the sound in the house. :)

It's about family.. whether it be your church family or your birth family or extended... Homeschooling sometimes means it's harder to be with family. When you have things that need to be done, and family lives 1.5 hours away and you can't do it in the car... sometimes you just need to plan out your days really well and sometimes things just can't happen as often as you would like. And then there's the family expectation that children should be reading well by a certain age, or being doing everything at grade level or should behave perfectly all the time, or be more fiercely independent. It's balancing out expectations and needs and wants. Sometimes it is a bit of a challenge to work out, particularly if you have ill members who do need and deserve your time.

Visiting Dad in the nursing home. The love my parents hold for each other continues to amaze and encourage me. :)

There's also the financial aspect of things.   Most homeschool families that I know are single income family. One parent works full-time while the other cares for and teaches the children.    It means there are things you simply can't afford to do. Bills that take longer to pay off, curriculum you can't afford to buy and budgeting that needs to be done.    It's just the way it is.

When you are in situation where your pay gets cut or you lose your job it makes it harder to continue to homeschool when it seems like you have the option to send your children to public school and get a job to help pay off the bills and such like.    But if homeschooling is what you are called to do, then you figure out how to make it work.      There are lots of frugal ways to homeschool available on-line.   I have some of them listed on my pages.

In our household we raise critters for pets and show. We have rabbits, guinea pigs and mice. :) My son raises the mice and sells them for $1 each. We jointly raise the guinea pigs and I raise rabbits. :)    This not only teaches my lad animal husbandry/stewardship but how to manage his money, his time, and teaches business skills. Just like when he grows vegetable plants in the spring and sells them as starter plants.     The show aspect of the rabbit world encourages him to learn good sportsmanship, listening to rules and presenting himself and the rabbits well. These are all useful skills for him to develop.

Raising our animals is a rewarding hobby that also helps to make ends meet. It is what works for us.

my lad's rabbit at last summer's show

Different families have different pulls and stresses on their journey into homeschooling, figuring out how to manage them is an essential part of the journey.

What are things that you have to a balance as you work to afford the homeschool life?

Come read what some of the other 89 readers are doing. :) Here's 10 of them, you can find the rest over here. :)

Shalynne @ Wonderfully Chaotic
Jody @ Because I’m Me
Melanie @ A Year of Jubilee Reviews
Emilee @ Pea of Sweetness
Nikki @ Angels of Heart
Sara @ Embracing Destiny
Heather @ Only Passionate Curiosity
Jennifer @ Simblissity Cottage
Kathy @ Kathys Cluttered Mind
Annette @ A Net in Time

The rest in the series
Day One Language Arts.
Day Two Questions.
Day Three Faith.

Homeschooling Essentials: Day Five: Scheduling

1/23/2014

Do you like schedules? Filling out Day Planners and weekly minders and such like?

I hate it.
I try all the time as everyone it seems says you must be ever so organized to homeschool well... and so I think I'm a certified failure since I just can't do it.
I can't. I try, it just doesn't work.
So I'm rather defunct.

The closest I've come to that sorta works is this... but even this doesn't really work for me. It adds stress to our lives rather than taking it away.

Now that said there is a schedule I more or less maintain and that is the reading of books with my boy.

Seriously....that's something I can regularly and easily.
Read the paper and one chapter book over breakfast. :)
Read books in-between doing workbooks and while completing hands-on tasks. :)
Reading for 30-45 minutes before bed.. all kinds of different books.

This I can do.
and in doing so I know I'm also schooling my boy. He knows lots of information and he can pull it out months later which surprises me quite regularly.

So perhaps I'm not quite as defunct as I think I am... But I don't really believe that. Reading comes easy to me and I love the look on my lad's face when he learns something new, or when I read something that causes him to ask questions. I LOVE IT. So the reading I do, I just don't call it scheduled....

So tell me something... Am I the ONLY person out there that can't keep a schedule if her life depended on it? Am I really the only defunct one out there?

Come read what some of the other 89 readers are doing. :) Here's 10 of them, you can find the rest over here. :)

Shalynne @ Wonderfully Chaotic
Jody @ Because I’m Me
Melanie @ A Year of Jubilee Reviews
Emilee @ Pea of Sweetness
Nikki @ Angels of Heart
Sara @ Embracing Destiny
Heather @ Only Passionate Curiosity
Jennifer @ Simblissity Cottage
Kathy @ Kathys Cluttered Mind
Annette @ A Net in Time

The rest in the series
Day One Language Arts.
Day Two Questions.
Day Three Faith.
Day four: Affording the Homeschool Life.

Homeschooling Essentials Day three: Faith

1/22/2014

5 The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" 6 And the Lord said, "If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you. Luke 17:5-6

It's a struggle I think many a homeschooling parent has. Will their efforts in schooling their children be successful?

In particular for the Christian homeschooling parent the fear is often there that someone they will mess up their children. I know that fear is there for me.

And when I read this verse me IMMEDIATE initial reaction is... My faith isn't like that. My faith isn't that strong.   How could my faith possibly move anything?

But the point is that my faith does NOT have to be great. My faith merely needs to be.   This point was taught to me here.
I firmly believe that God has called me to teach my boy at home.
I believe it's the path that God has set out for me.
And as such.. even though my faith so often seems as small as a mustard seed, what God has ordained will turn out in the manner he has so ordained. It's not on me. It's on God. I merely need to live in accordance with what he has called of me.
And on that FACT I have to put my trust. I have to. There's really no other way to live as a Christian homeschooling parent.

If I do as God wills for me, then he will work on the details out.

Doesn't mean it will always be easy.
Doesn't mean I can just slouch around depending on God to just infuse my lad with knowledge.
There is work involved in teaching a lad, in raising him up in the fear and knowledge of the Lord.
But it does mean I don't have to worry on it.   I can put my worry elsewhere (NOT!) -- but that's a whole other post isn't it?   :)

Come read what some of the other 89 readers are doing. :) Here's 10 of them, you can find the rest over here. :)

Homeschooling Essentials Day Two: Questions

1/21/2014

One of the biggest things I do in teaching my son is I answer questions. It doesn't much matter the question asked, I do my very best to answer it. If I don't know the answer then I'll do my best to find it.

Whether it be "mom, what is this word?" when we are reading something to the questions that just pop up as we are engaged in other activities. how do water striders live in the water? That question came up on a recent walk, so I pulled out my android phone and pushed that into the search bar.

We try to go through the paper everyday, and that often brings up questions as well. From the soul searching.. mom why do people have to hurt each other, to mom.. that's funny, I didn't know that. It's a good way to help teach a boy to think.

Answering questions sometimes leads to the building of frog habitats and toad habitats and having critters in the house that one might prefer NOT to have in the house. Over the winter my son is caring for three toads, one jumping spider, four crayfish, mealworms, an orb weaver and some creek fish. He learns and that is what is important to me. He has had a failure or two: rebuilding the crayfish aquarium, losing crickets in the house, having horn worms die and such like. But for the most part he is doing an excellent job.

Answering questions is sometimes fun, like when we had a fruit fly explosion and the lad wondered how we could get rid of them.

We've answered hard questions about refugees, easy questions about rabbits, normal questions about growing up, growing things, telling time by looking at the sun and so much more. Questions are a big part of our life and a huge part of our homeschooling journey.

What kind of questions have your children asked of you lately?
Do you make them part of your homeschooling journey as well?

Come read what some of the other 89 readers are doing. :) Here's 10 of them, you can find the rest over here. :)

Homeschooling Essential: Day One: Language Arts

1/19/2014

There are SO many ways of doing language arts. You can buy curriculum (which I have and a wee bit of it I use). You can hob nob stuff together (which I've done). You can read alot of books which may or may not interest your children. :) And you can avoid it to the best of your ability. Each person has their own style and reason for how they approach it.

My approach is
1. I use reading kingdom to teach well.. reading. My son loves this program, and it is one that I will buy after our review period with it finishes. We started it last year. You can find the review I wrote here. The amount of confidence my son has gained using reading kingdom speaks for itself. He's happy, I'm happy. He's a lad that using phonics doesn't work.. he can't hear the differences in many of the sounds... so the reading kingdom method works for him. :)

2. I do grammar as a page a day. We use the Complete book of Grammar and Punctuation. One page every day, the lad practices his writing, his spelling and he's figuring out some of this grammar stuff in a more formal way.

3. Our biggest method is simply to read. We read LOTS of books. To practice his recall and narration he often has to tell his dad about what we read together. I'll stop and ask him.. do you know what this word means? No. Well.. what do you think it means? And you know what.... he can often figure it out simply based on context. And when he can't, I tell him and if I don't know we look it up. So easy to do on my new phone. :)

We read chapter books (right now the Warrior series by Erin Hunter is a huge hit).
We read interest books (right now we're going through a stack of books on insects/bugs/creepy crawlies).
We read a Christian book of some sort .. biographies, missionary stories, short devotionals etc.
We read one book of poetry... right now we're between poetry books as I haven't found one the lad likes...

We just read and read. In that reading I ask.. so...did you notice the capital letters?   Did you see the period there.. oh look... what's wrong with this sentence?   And the lad learns and it is good.

THEN if we can, we take those books and we practice and do stuff with what we're learning.    In history we learned about Illuminations.   I was talking with the lad about how could WE do an illumination.   Should I copy out a passage from the bible?   Print out a black/white copy to colour in? Just what did he think would be good to do?

He said MOM.. can we make a poem from the Warriors book?   And so.. he does Language arts WHILE cementing historical knowledge. Check out the poems the lad has helped created. They are based on three of the characters from Erin Hunters Series.

and two others he helped write.

Crowpaw crowpaw
He loved Feathertail so
She died in a fight
On the Stalactite
So sad is Crowpaw
So much he saw.

Brambleclaw the bold
The story is told
Of a trail so long
The clan belong
The sun drown place
He set the pace
Midnight spoke
The trail home they took

I do hope you'll join us as we present to you our Five Days of Homeschooling Essentials. Here are 10 of the 89 people taking part this week. :)