Category: General

Writing It Down

writThere are so many ways to get your kids writing and enjoying the writing process. Here are a few of these magical ideas to get the creative juices flowing. These ideas come from a great website that is filled with homeschooling inspiration.

1. Make a comic book.
2. Create an ideas jar where you put strips of paper. Pull out one strip at a time and have students create a story from the idea. Or pull out two or three strips and challenge the kids to make a story that incorporates all of the ideas.
3. Design and write a blog.
4. Watch a movie and then write a movie review. Make sure to model it after movie reviews that you’ve read.
5. Write a haiku or a limerick.
6. Write a play and then perform it.

Writing Tips to Get the Mind Flowing

writing ideas One of the most fun activities to have with homeschooled children is to get them writing. There are hundreds of writing ideas and tips that can keep the ideas flowing and the fun expanding. Here are just a few of these ideas.

1. Newspapers: The newspaper is a great location for ideas. Have your kids look at the headlines and then write their own stories about what they think the headlines are reporting. Have them take a picture and write a story around that picture.

2. Script: Write and perform a script for a puppet show or a play.

3. Journaling: Give the kids 10 minutes each day to write in their journals. You can either say that you will collect these journals and look at them, or you may decide that this is free writing for the kids and that you won’t look at it.

These are just a few of the ways to get the kids glued to their classroom furnitureand enjoying the writing process during their day.

Making Homeschooling Work for You

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Homeschooling may sound daunting to some people. How do you go about teaching your child everything that he needs to succeed when he either enters high school or college? What if you don’t have a wealth of knowledge about history or math? How will you help your child? Here are some suggestions, whether you’re setting up a traditional school environment in the home with school chairs and tables or whether you’re planning to go on field trips and have experiential learning.

1. Join with other families: Maybe you are highly skilled with the language arts and your friend is skilled with math and science. You can create a barter system of sorts so that you are teaching the language arts to both your children and your friend’s children; and then she is teaching math and science to both.

2. Look for great resources: You can find tutorials online for just about anything. Use the amazing resources at your fingertips to find ways to each your child about tricky subjects.

3. Hire a tutor: Yes, even though you are homeschooling, you just might need to bring in another resource. You can hire a tutor for those tricky subjects and help to take the pressure off of your teaching and your child’s learning.

Before Homeschooling…

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If you’re considering homeschooling, here are a few considerations before you begin. First, you need to know the homeschooling laws in your region. You’ll need to be very clear about what studies your child needs to do and to what level. You will be responsible for ensuring that your child fulfills all of the requirements.

Look for a home school support group in your area. You can either meet with these people or chat with them online. This will allow you to share ideas with others and to exchange concerns, tips and challenges. It’s very important to be able to share your frustrations and concerns with other parents experiencing a similar process.

Make plans for field trips. This is a large part of the home school experience. Go outside of the house and break away from the school furniture to experience real world educational opportunities.

You can find a wealth of information online about home schooling. You’ll find many online resources that will allow you to print out materials, order workbooks and much more.

Unschooling

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You may find the term funny, but unschooling is actually a branch of homeschooling. Inspired by John Holt, the basis for this movement is to promote nonstructured, child-led learning. It includes no set curriculum or schedule. As one mother doing this program, Colleen Paeff, explained, “learning is not the main objective [of unschooling], it just happens as a side effect of living your life with passion and exploring our interests.”

One mother, Sandra Dodd, explained that “You can only learn things that you are interested in. My best definition of unschooling is creating and maintaining an environment in which natural learning can flourish.”

Unschoolers argue that children will learn on their own. They will learn to read when they want to decode a word or figure out instructions for a video game. They will learn math by counting the coins for their allowance and geometry with woodshop.

Unschoolers have a word called “deschooling” which is the process that children go through when they start to unschool. They have to get used to not having worksheets, school chairs, tests and other structured school requirements.

Entertaining the Homeschooled Child in the Winter

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As the winter sets in and the days get colder, the home schooler may wonder how to keep the kids busy indoors. In reality, while it may not be as exciting to spend the entire day inside, there are still plenty of things to do indoors to educate children. Here are a few suggestions to start out the window.

* Make fairy wings and learn about fairies.

* Create a family artwork on a large canvas or work on a mosaic together that you could put on the front of the house.

* Print coloring sheets online and let the younger kids color and learn their colors this way.

* Make a robot out of cardboard boxes.

* Make a treasure map and tie this into reading a book about pirates.

* Make boats out of milk bottle lids, a straw for the mast and paper for the sail and learn about boats

* Make sock puppets

* Make a long paperclip chain

Advice for Homeschooling the Preschool Kid

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On SheKnows.com, there are many pieces of advice about homeschooling the preschool child. Here are a few of the ideas expressed in the article:

Don’t push the preschoolers to read too early. Let them come to it on their own time.

Let the entire home experience be part of the learning experience. Any activity in the house can be one that teaches. Have the children do the dishes with you; have them help you to clean. The more that they help around the house the more they will feel part of the process. Everything doesn’t have to be learned with the classroom furniture – there are many ways to teach through doing.

Encourage your child to use her imagination. Ask open-ended questions, model creative thinking, encourage experimentation, let your kids get messy. Use manipulatives like LEGO pieces and Cheeries.

Use music to teach. The more that students listen to music, sing and dance the more that they will increase their reading, math, control, balance and self-esteem.

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