What a difficult decision! I want more good adult influences on my Kindergartener, and reinforcement of her Catholicism. The main groups suggested by other home school moms are Girl Scouts (GS), American Heritage Girls (AHG), and the Little Flowers. The last has no group here. Leaving Girl Scouts and American Heritage Girls as the sole options at this time. Girl Scouting, at the national level, holds many positions and alliances with which I do not agree. I will leave the listing of them up to other persons. On the up side, the local troop is run by Catholic Moms, meets … Continue reading
Category Archives: Home Education
Starting to do daily home schooling. I am taking advantage of the ipad and some apps that build skills that will translate to handwriting. I can see that the younger set want a turn with the fun educational programs. That is good, will give them a turn later. The main goal at the moment is to gently build a habit of schoolwork in the mornings. I will be pulling out the curriculum bit by bit and we will be using the workbooks in the various subjects. Right now, the preliminaries are being honed so that the math and language arts … Continue reading
LECTURE MODE: Everyone has met someone who gets onto their favorite subject and goes into so much detail you want to scream and run away. Some of us share our families with people like that. In our family we have learned to laugh at what we call “LECTURE MODE”. We are all brainy, and we all tend to get into a groove with our favorite subjects, and so as a family we’ve worked on learning to control this tendency. The trick is learning to see it happening and do something to cut it off before the other person begins to … Continue reading
Teaching History in a Home School setting can be a challenge, especially when we are faced with teaching ages 11 and up through High School. Most of us learned what little history we know from textbooks that sucked the life out of the stories and bored us nearly to death. A few of us were fortunate enough to run across writers of histories who are anything BUT boring. Historians like Dr. Warren Carroll whose books (like the very short 1917, Isabella, and Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness, and the heavy duty Christendom series) challenged and delighted … Continue reading
Oh my home school book loving friends I have run across a new to me author who is MARVELOUS! Henry Melton writes books with teen age protagonists who face real science fiction scenarios in the modern world. The writing is fast paced, the characters well developed, and there is none of that anti-parent propaganda so popular in most modern youth books. Themes in his books encourage communication between the generations, respectful relationships, learning about the sciences, and becoming active rather than passive in living. Breaking Anchor is the first of his books I read. I found in this book a … Continue reading
I enjoy The History Blog and thought it might be useful for home school. I could see that reading it could help students select topics for papers, and learn about what is out there in general. All sorts of history comes up on this blog: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/ For example, an item stolen at the end of WWII, returned by the auction house: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/24059 There is a post with the picture of a cradle from around 79AD: http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/24035 This is a varied and fascinating blog and just reading it could make a person better educated. Dear Lord, thank You for marvelous blogs … Continue reading
Beginning to home school preschool/pre-K and selected some materials for a classical curriculum and some materials from Catholic Heritage Curricula, I have purchased a home copy of the music program Making Music Praying Twice. This is a really well done early music education program. First, it is fun and can be done very informally. Mom sings and dances and enjoys the music while supplying shakers and other small instruments and scarves of light flow-y material, and the children join in as they please. It is aimed at demonstrating the DOING of music and not passive enjoyment. Second, there is a … Continue reading
The very BEST writing curriculum is designed in the family with good reading and child-interest directed writing assignments. It has two stages. STAGE ONE: Read lots to your children. Read good quality writing from every genre that you want to teach your child to write. Journalism? Read great journalism to the children. Speeches? Read the great speeches to your children. Mysteries? Adventure? Drama? Science Fiction? Fantasy? All of the written word, provided it is quality, is the right material to read to your children. Also part of reading is allowing your children access to lots of good quality writing. Encourage … Continue reading
I am a teacher. Certified for 1st-8th grades and experienced in classroom and home school settings. I love teaching and find that most things I do in my life include teaching in some form or another. This explains why I love blogs that are about home school. Today I read the blog, My Life in the Domestic Church, and she was writing about how they do summer school, which is merely a variation on how they do school year round. Excellent post so be sure to go read her blog. I could relate to what she wrote about doing school … Continue reading
I have recently discovered the joys of browsing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Online Collections. It began with my favorite time period and region to study which is Byzantium during the reign of Basil II. Someone pinned a photo of a bracelet from around that period on their pinterest page and I saw it and followed the link to see more historical information on this artifact. Thus began a several day, every spare moment, fascinating walk through the website. I pinned lots of bits of fabric from around and before my period to aid in finding embroidery patterns that would … Continue reading