Welcome to A Better Way to Homeschool Thank you for hopping over to my blog from my Teachers Pay Teachers Store! Before you leave, please subscribe to my blog. (enter your email on the right! Why? I have special giveaways and freebies for my readers often. I would love to bless you with my next “Insider Gift”. I update this blog a few times a month with new homeschooling ideas, tips, and words of encouragement. One more jump. When you are done browsing, please return to my Teachers pay Teachers store and follow me. I always have new products in process. When you follow me, you will be the first to see these new creations! Last thing. If you have any questions about homeschooling, or if you have need for a specific product to meet your needs, email me here. Have a wonderful day! Thanks for stopping by.
Homeschooling: Where do I Begin? So you have made the decision to home school your children, but have no idea where to start. Today, let me give you a jump start. Understanding that you should: Establish your family mission statement Pick the subjects/topics/curriculum to study Determine how you stay organized … you can still get started today. First. Pick a subject that interests you and your kids. I highly suggest going to the local library (or browsing your own bookshelves). When I first began homeschooling I discovered my library did not have a book limit. What that meant was every time I took the kids to the library, we would leave with 20-40 books! (Words of wisdom: teach your children to respect books. Keep your library books in a separate location, like a basket. Mark your calendar to remind you when the books are due. I suggest giving yourself a few days cushion just in case the baby gets sick. Late fees at the library are minimal unless they are multiplied by 40 books…) Second. Learn everything you can about that subject: Together! Read. Research online. Search Netflix. Search YouTube. Get deep into learning!! Third. Choose a project to showcase what you all have learned! Project Ideas: Mini books, notebooking, lapbooks, pocket books, and power points are just a few suggestions. Third. Spend a week (to a month) becoming and expert and making that project! (approximately). Fourth. Ready, Set, Learn! Have a blast learning along side of your kiddos. The more excited you are, the better. Enthusiasm is contagious. Fifth. This step is vital. The kids (and you) have worked hard to create some amazing project. No matter how simple the final product turns out to be, make sure the kids share it with someone. Have them walk daddy through their creation, explain it to grandma, or teach it to a neighbor. This will do two things: Reinforce what the kids have learned Let them bask in the spotlight! Here are a few resources to help you set up your project: Sign up here to receive freebies, deals, and resources!! A wonderful resource for mini-books~ Lapbooking templates My Favorite Pocket Projects How to create a power point
Pinterest for Homeschoolers! Have you found me out on Pinterest yet? I am constantly browsing this wonderful site for the best resources to help you with your homeschooling adventure. There is an endless source of inspiration out here. Hop on over to my page and follow me. See What I Have to Share with you! Click here:) Be sure to click on the follow me button!
Math is Just Like Christmas! Math is Just Like Christmas! is a post from Bekki @ A Better Way to Homeschool where we learn to train our children to become lifelong learners. If you have enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Bekki on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+! I introduced the boys to their manipulative math bin today. It was like Christmas Morning! This little guy was so excited that I never could get a picture in focus! I gave them no agenda, just “Explore”. They had a ball handling all the fun things: base 10 blocks, practice clocks, counter markers, math mats, and rubber stamps. The older boys had fun “making things” out of the different sets. Squishy created a unique game while Giggles built with the blocks like they were Legos. The most surprising discovery was the set of rubber stamps. These have become, not only a fun activity, but a necessary component of every lesson. My kids no longer want a 100% written on their work, they want a 100 block stamp instead (the older kids want the 1000 block stamp). A really simple, yet surprisingly challenging activity is to write numbers onto a blank piece of paper and then to have the kids stamp the correct block representation of each number. I was surprised that it was as challenging as it was for the younger boys and we have incorporated it into our weekly math activity schedule. What’s in our math manipulative bin? Base 10 stamps Base 10 Starter Kit Learning Clock Geometric Patterns Teddy bear counters …and more… Preview of the Heart of Homeschooling God’s Way Master Class. We need to STOP measuring success by grades, achievements, awards, and worksheets.
Boy Heaven Boy Heaven is a post from Bekki @ A Better Way to Homeschool where we learn to train our children to become lifelong learners. If you have enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Bekki on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+! Boy Heaven! My husband recently bought me a new printer for my office. He surprised the boys today by handing them the old broken unit and a few screw drivers. They were busy for hours! Yes, they are wearing helmets. They were riding bikes and scooters until the surprise project was presented. They were so excited they left their helmets on for quite a while… Favorite discovery. Circuit boards galore! The boys were astounded at how many parts, pieces, springs, electronics, ribbon cables, gears, and screws were hidden inside this simple machine. What a great lesson!
Disclosure Policy This blog is a site written and edited by me, Bekki Sayler. I am the homeschooling mama of 5 amazing boys and LOVE the homeschool life. A Better Way to Homeschool was born out of my passion for coming alongside and equipping and encouraging new and frustrated homeschoolers. I believe the Lord has blessed me with a vision to help many homeschooling families. I work daily to provide homeschooling tutorial videos, homeschooling guidance, coaching, inspiration, and much more. If I thought I could create a brick and mortar business to meet your needs I would do so in a heartbeat! My gifting is in my ability to boil down decades of homeschooling and practical family life advice to share it with you all on-line. This is my “other full-time job”. I honestly believe it is more than fair to be compensated for my many hours of hard work that are invested in bringing you the best resources I can create or find. As this site continues to grow, so do my expenses. This blog contains custom products created by me and affiliate links. That means you and I are partners keeping this blog alive. I make a small percentage in commission when you purchase my creations or follow the links I share. In return, I am committed to bringing you only high-quality products and services. The money I earn helps cover the costs of running this blog, like domain name and web hosting and allows me to stay at home with my children. I do make you this promise: I promote only those products and services that I would use personally. I always share my honest opinions and experiences, even for products and services whose ads appear on my web site. If I am compensated to write a blog post, I will make full disclosure. All content on A Better Way to Homeschool is copyrighted, and it may not be reprinted in full form without my written consent. This disclosure is provided in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR § 255.5: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. Amazon Affiliate Advertising Policy A Better Way to Homeschool is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.” Affiliate Policy with other Bloggers and Advertisers A Better Way to Homeschool is partners with other bloggers and advertisers such as, but not limited to They Call Me Blessed, Teach Them Diligently, CJ Affiliates, Moolah, Early Bird Mom, and more. My husband and I pray about this site and its content. Our prayer is that you will find resources that truly bless and equip you and your families on your homeschooling journey. My Christian integrity is more important to me than making a profit. I will never intentionally share any content or endorse any product or service that will compromise my integrity. If you find any products that are of concern, please contact me and I will remove them immediately! Compensation received will not influence what I share with you or my ability to express my honest opinion. Again my integrity is not for sale! Please check the total on any purchase at checkout. Although I make every effort to post the current information, offers are subject to change without notice. It is your responsibility to make sure FREE items ARE STILL FREE at check out. Last revision: December 10, 2018
Our Daily Homeschool Schedule I get quite a few people asking me about our homeschool schedule. They want to know how I homeschool multiple ages and grades without having a nervous breakdown. It all comes down to planning, flexibility, and a healthy dose of reality. Master Chore List: As Promised!! Learning from the Past The card catalog has been replaced by computers. There was a day when you could walk up to a cabinet filled with actual drawers holding small cards in alphabetical order. The cards were created as a trilogy, where the information listed was rearranged according to the categories of Author, Subject, and Title. When looking up a certain book you could physically walk up to a drawer, open it, and flip back through the cards until the exact book was identified. From that point, you would hand write the information necessary to help you locate the book on the library’s shelves. Antiquated, I know, but relevant as we look to homeschooling our children. We cannot allow our minds to be trapped back in the era of the card catalog, for that is certainly completely irrelevant to our children. If our kids actually walk into a library, they will walk up to a computer to complete their search. With a few swift key strokes, they will have the appropriate information right before their eyes. While we can appreciate how far we have come, our kids are miles ahead of us. They are born into this technology driven world. They think its normal to watch a television show and watch a person pop up in the corner and tell them some fact about he character that is performing the show, the actor, or the location. They are not annoyed by the “pop up’s” on the computer screen as they search for information; in fact they absorb 12 times the information in one 15 minute sitting that we ever could. (I made up the 12 times, but you know what I mean) Our card catalog mind wants to physically touch, smell, and see our one piece of information. Their computer savvy mind wants to scan through the 3.2 million search engine results, filter for the top 4 relevant sites, and laugh at the funny pop-up. They are being programmed to soak up information like a sponge. So how is this relevant to homeschooling. Besides the obvious “we shouldn’t try to teach them about how to find a book through a card catalog” we should embrace this information driven world while teaching our kids to focus. The challenge with a our new world is that our kids can quickly acclimate to this alternate universe. They can believe that its OK to buy a movie ticket while texting their friends simultaneously, or sit at the dinner table and be watching a YouTube video and chatting as they eat and communicate with the people sitting at the same table. As homeschoolers in the new millennium we must learn from the past. We need to teach our kids to categorize their technology-filled world into a few essentially vital categories: people relationships knowledge entertainment If our kids can recognize that everything fits into one of those categories, then they can be taught to prioritize them. People first, knowledge, entertainment, and so on. While we cannot change the world to look like it did when we stood in a library at age 12, we can teach our kids to treat this new world with the proper perspective. We need to teach our kids to focus on people and relationships (not the touchy-feely kind, but the “you are more important than this cell phone” kind) and embrace the benefits that technology provides. Our kids are sponges. We need to teach them to absorb knowledge and to seek hard after those subjects, topics, and fields that they are passionate about. We need to not be intimidated that they can do 12 times more than we could do in the same amount of time, but rather train them to use that ability to become a better student, family member, and human being. Preview of the Heart of Homeschooling God’s Way Master Class. We need to STOP measuring success by grades, achievements, awards, and worksheets. Using Notebooking to Add Creativity to your Lessons Laying a New Foundation Love of learning. What does that phrase mean to you? When I began homeschooling, I figured my children would naturally love to learn. I would not need to teach them how to do this. Instead, my goal was to fill their minds with as much knowledge as I could possibly pour upon them. My experiences as a public school student and teacher taught me that children could easily make it from K-12 and beyond attaining titles such as “top of their class” without truly learning anything more than how to study, memorize, and regurgitate facts. I was one of those types of kids and I definitely wanted my children to get more than this from their education. Determined to set a full plate before them, I scoured over homeschooling magazines, catalogs, and websites and purchased more books and curriculums in those first couple of years than I have the last six combined. It soon became apparent that we would need to add extra hours to our day in order to finish all of the prescribed scopes and sequences. With schedules and assignment sheets in hand, we began to plow our way through our curriculums. Now, obviously, we hit a few bumps in the road. Who doesn’t? During those years though, all skeptical eyes were upon us from family to friends to the local social worker that paid regular visits to our home (we were fostering at the time). All bumps were neatly swept under the rug and we kept right on plowing. From the outside looking in and according to the standardized tests, everything was great. Eventually though, the pace and the bumps began to wear on me and I became restless about our homeschooling. The kids, on the other hand, had adjusted fairly well. They had grown accustomed to the long hours, the lack of playtime, and mom’s perfectionist tendencies. However, when I finally took stock one day in what we were doing, I realized that instead of helping my children to rise above my own educational background, I had trained them to be just like me. They were pro’s at marking off their little check boxes, filling in the blanks, and regurgitating information in nice little pre-packaged amounts. Additionally, they had sacrificed their own interests and desires so much to this point that they really did not know how to “just be a kid”. This was not what homeschooling was supposed to be like for our family! What happened? In retrospect, I know that my mistake was not in having high aspirations nor was it my perfectionist tendencies or the pressure from our skeptical audience. The problem was I began building my children’s education without first laying a proper foundation. I continued to add layer upon layer to our educational structure with the goal to build it as tall as possible. Therefore, when the building became too heavy and burdensome, it all came crashing down without much more than the materials to show for all of the labor. This is the point where those in my situation begin selling off all of the “materials” in exchange for new ones thinking that will somehow fix the problem. Instead, we should focus our time and attention on laying that proper foundation. So how does one go about this? First, give yourself permission to break whatever mold your family is currently conforming to and let go of whatever is entangling you. (Unfortunately, it took me about three years to really do this and to let go.) Then, invest some time to research “homeschooling philosophy” online or at the library and begin writing your own philosophy of education. This will be your foundation. Seek ideas that will preserve the unique personalities, desires, and interests of your children as well as remain true to your family’s vision. Define what “love of learning” means to you. Weave this into your foundation. You may find that your philosophy is a hodge-podge of some of the popular homeschooling philosophies floating around out there. Perfect! Take the best points from those that really mesh with your family and make it your own. Having defined this for my family has freed me from my own misconceptions about education as well those from outside sources and “experts”. It has freed my children to be kids again, opening the doors of discovery and ushering in a true love of learning that will build larger storehouses of information and wisdom than I could have ever hoped of building! (Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com) Explore, Discover, & Create . . . with Notebooking! At the end of each school year, are you finding yourself swimming through mounds of worksheets, quizzes, tests, and half-finished workbooks wondering just what to do with it all? Where does the organization begin? What do you keep? Where will you keep it? How much should you, dare I say, throw away? As you begin to tackle this heap, your brain recalls the many hours that went into creating this voluminous collection. You may start to wonder just how well spent those hours really were. You remember the great ambitions with which you started the school year and the many good intentions that fell to the wayside in order to finish this massive collection you are now faced with sorting. Finally, you conclude that if most, or perhaps all, of your children’s work is going to get tucked away somewhere never to be seen again, how much value can it possibly hold? Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it doesn’t have to anymore! Our family has been introduced to an ageless tool of learning that keeps us from creating these questionable mounds of paper throughout the year. There is nothing left to sort. There is nothing left to pack away. There is nothing to throw away. Instead, another volume (or two or three or more) of our children’s prized work gets added to their personal library at the end of each year. No more busywork. No more second-guessing if our time has been well spent. As a matter of fact, this tool has freed me from the seemingly never-ending search for the perfect curriculum! It can literally transform the way you approach your children’s education and set afire a love of learning within each child. Spend your precious hours exploring, discovering, and capturing the knowledge that awaits you and your children each day. Make learning a journey instead of a list to be checked off at the end of the day and a pile to be sorted at the end of the year. How do you do this? Let me introduce you to the tool that has breathed new life into our homeschooling. It’s called . . . notebooking! Notebooking is the coined term for what one may refer to as educational journaling or scrapbooking. Essentially, the idea is to take your planned school subjects and activities as well as the areas of your child’s interests and create notebooks, compilations of created pages collected in binders. Your child will fill his notebooks throughout the year with what he has learned about these topics. Written narrations, drawings, maps, and photographs are just a few of the items he may include. The pages of his notebooks will capture both the new knowledge he has discovered as well as his own personal reflections of what he has learned. Through the process of creating a notebook, you will likely watch him become a storyteller, a teacher, and most undoubtedly, an expert in some of the topics he studies. Unlike some of the more traditional tools of learning, like worksheets and tests, notebooking allows your child to develop a deeper relationship with what he is learning. Instead of finding out what he doesn’t know about a topic or study, which is what a worksheet or test usually reveals, he is given an opportunity to express everything he does know. By cutting out the busywork that is involved in some of these more traditional methods, you open a window of time and opportunity for your children to dig deeper into topics, to really get to know the people, the places, the events, the concepts, the ideas, and so on of what they are studying. Then, they take this information, digest it, and produce a notebook that tells all about what they have learned. After following this process, there will not be that sudden “unlearning” phenomena that usually takes place after the traditional chapter or unit test. The knowledge that your child gains during his notebooking experience will stick! Most importantly this process fuels a love of learning as your child begins to discover how exciting and fun it is to learn with notebooking! As your children become more experienced with notebooking, you will begin to see the evident benefits of this great tool. The richness of what they are learning will be apparent as their notebooks become filled to the brim with stories, pictures, maps, quotes, and photographs of the people, places, and events encountered. The depth of what they are learning will be told as new layers are added each year to certain notebooks, such as their language arts and math notebooks. The process of learning they have experienced will be unveiled as you note the ways they organize and choose the material they include for their notebooks. You will begin to see certain notebooks take on your children’s personalities as they learn to express themselves in the variety of ways they have been gifted. It is an amazing joy to sit down with your child while they lovingly and passionately share all that they have learned through the process of creating their notebook. Their hearts and hard work have been poured into this notebook and they beam with confidence at the turn of each page. Each year, as you take time to look back through the increasing volumes of notebooks being added to the shelves, you will see that notebooking has become an amazing “living” record of your children’s journey of learning. Instead of tossing the year’s work into a box in the back of the closet, you’ll be looking for ways to add more bookshelves to house these treasures! So how do you begin notebooking with your family? Start simple. Start with one topic or one study for each child or for the whole family. Perhaps the easiest way to start is to let each child begin a notebook of one of their favorite hobbies or passions. Do you have a child that loves dinosaurs? I do! My youngest son would find spare moments throughout the day to notebook his knowledge of dinosaurs. His head would be stuck in any number of books from the library trying to gather information. That’s where it began for him! Today, he is our leading expert when it comes to dinosaurs. Perhaps the easiest place to start notebooking with the entire family is with any history or science topic because there are so many ways to dig into these subjects. You could start very simply by asking your children to give a short narration of what was read on a particular day either during your read-aloud time or their independent reading time. If they give you a blank stare, ask them what they found to be most important or interesting about what was studied and encourage them to write about that. If you have younger children, you may need to write down their narrations for them until they are more proficient with the physical skill of writing. For children who are accustomed to giving short fill-in-the-blank type answers to questions, narration will take some practice to develop. I highly suggest researching the topic of narration for more help in this area. Narration is an invaluable skill that will prove most beneficial in their notebooking studies. As your family or child continues to dig deeper, add new material to the notebook. The notebook may include any number of pages and collections including, but definitely not limited to: written narrations from material studied in books they have read or real life experiences collections of quotes from philosophers, experts, missionaries, statesman, etc. photographs, ticket stubs, and information from field trips maps of places and events studied timelines drawings from your child’s imagination that express his ideas about the particular topic sketches of objects, animals, famous art, or places being studied collections of items such as leaves, pressed flowers, and seeds for a study like botany pictures from hands-on activities or experiments completed during the study nature photos, sketches, and journaled thoughts your child’s handwritten copies of favorite scripture, poetry or selections from favorite literature Ready to get started? (Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com) Cut Out the Busywork . . . try Notebooking! Before notebooking, our school days were chocked full of a variety of learning activities and curriculums, but the learning was so dry and dull. By the end of the day, and I mean the-END-of-the-day, the kids were wiped out and so was I. Do you have days like these? Notebooking will refresh and rejuvenate your homeschooling. It opens the door for meaningful learning while saving you time, money, and those precious hours you currently spend (if you’re like most homeschooling moms) trying to tweak everything that you currently do to make your day better. Today, I want to help you get started. Notebooking is a very simple tool. Basically, we just want to help our children get what’s in their brain onto paper using both what they can “see” and what they can verbalize. I have been amazed out how effective this has worked with my children. Over the past few years, we have been able to completely eliminate the worksheet/test method from our schooling. We now use notebooking for just about e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g! We have saved time, money, and SO much frustration by using this tool. Now, instead of a trashcan (or tote that gets tucked away in the back of the closet) full of oodles of paperwork that we’ll never look at again, we have beautifully crafted and individualized notebooks full of their best work–their OWN work–their very OWN homemade books! You will pull these notebooks out time and time again throughout the years, just like your old photo albums, to treasure over and over again. Terms of Use Statement Terms of Use Updated July 2017 I make all of the printables you see on this site unless otherwise specified. Therefore, the downloads on this blog and its contents are copyright of Rebekah Sayler @ A Better Way to Homeschool. All rights reserved. While I provide the materials on this site to you free of charge, or for purchase, there are a few things that I ask from you in regards to the resources found here. Personal Use Only: My downloads are provided to you for your own personal use. Accordingly, you agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content from my downloads, except for your own personal, non‐commercial use. You may post pictures of your family using my downloads on your personal blog provided that A Better Way to Homeschool is properly attributed in the post. You may print a copy of the materials provided on my website for use with your own family only. No Redistribution. You may not reproduce, repackage, or redistribute the contents of A Better Way to Homeschool downloads, in whole or in part, for any reason. No Commercial Use. My downloads may not be used for commercial purposes. For example, you may not do any of the following: use the downloads to sell a product or service; use the download to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales. Any use of the downloads that infringes upon the intellectual property rights of A Better Way to Homeschool or that is for commercial purposes will be investigated, and the owner shall have the right to take appropriate civil and criminal legal action. Modifications of Terms. I shall have the right to modify the terms of this Agreement at any time, which modification shall be effective immediately and shall replace all prior Agreements. You are more than welcome to: Save the files on your computer and print off copies for yourself {or classroom} whenever you would like. Link directly to my site {or blog} to share my files with others. Post blogs using my files as long as proper credit to A Better Way to Homeschool is given. YOU MAY NOT: Host any of my files on your own or other sites. Alter or sell any of my files. Sell files to make a profit: All files are for personal use only. You may NOT make items for sale or profit. ~ i.e. print them off, laminate them and sell them to others. Transmit or store any resources on any other website or another form of electronic retrieval system. All downloads are copyright protected. Not to be distributed, transferred, or shared in any form. If you have any questions please feel free to email me directly. I will do my best to respond promptly. I do host an sell my printables on additional sites such as Teachers Pay Teachers, Educents, TES, Teacher’s Notebook. All terms apply to all of my created materials. Thank you! Bekki Acorns and Perspective A Blast from the Past We live in the central mountains of California and are surrounded by beautiful Oak Trees. This year the kids and I are busily learning about how to sprout acorns in the spring and have been harvesting the newly fallen acorns during our daily 2-mile morning walk. We have a neat little park near our home that we share with our little community. As Homeschoolers, my kids are the only munchkins on the trail each day. We pass the same walkers every morning, quite a few of them are elderly. This year we are all excited about the acorns that have been landing on the path each day. We gather a few handfuls and bring them home to test them and store them for the spring. I learned a valuable lesson this week. Actually relearned. While we all look at the same world, everyone looks at life from their own perspective. photo by Aaron Burden While the kids and I were looking at the acorns on the ground as our own oak tree store, the elderly walkers we meet every day on the path were seeing them as stumbling blocks. You see, apparently one of our friends had slipped on an acorn just a few days ago. Praise the Lord, she’s OK, but I cannot see the path the same way. Yesterday, Peanut and I took action. We pulled up some mustard sticks and created our own broom and cleared part of the path. He was so excited to help our friends out that we decided to bring an actual broom and do a good job. Today we walked 1/2 a mile before reaching the villainous part of the trail and he happily brushed away most of the “safety hazard”. Actually, all the boys helped, he is the only one that made it on film. The walkers we so appreciative. Perspective is everything. I was surprised that I had only seen the fun little nuts on the ground, rather than the danger to others. It was a good lesson. My challenge to you is to find something in your life to point out perspective to your own children today. I’d love to hear about it when you do! « Go to Previous Page Go to page 1 Interim pages omitted … Go to page 29 Go to page 30 Go to page 31
Learning from the Past The card catalog has been replaced by computers. There was a day when you could walk up to a cabinet filled with actual drawers holding small cards in alphabetical order. The cards were created as a trilogy, where the information listed was rearranged according to the categories of Author, Subject, and Title. When looking up a certain book you could physically walk up to a drawer, open it, and flip back through the cards until the exact book was identified. From that point, you would hand write the information necessary to help you locate the book on the library’s shelves. Antiquated, I know, but relevant as we look to homeschooling our children. We cannot allow our minds to be trapped back in the era of the card catalog, for that is certainly completely irrelevant to our children. If our kids actually walk into a library, they will walk up to a computer to complete their search. With a few swift key strokes, they will have the appropriate information right before their eyes. While we can appreciate how far we have come, our kids are miles ahead of us. They are born into this technology driven world. They think its normal to watch a television show and watch a person pop up in the corner and tell them some fact about he character that is performing the show, the actor, or the location. They are not annoyed by the “pop up’s” on the computer screen as they search for information; in fact they absorb 12 times the information in one 15 minute sitting that we ever could. (I made up the 12 times, but you know what I mean) Our card catalog mind wants to physically touch, smell, and see our one piece of information. Their computer savvy mind wants to scan through the 3.2 million search engine results, filter for the top 4 relevant sites, and laugh at the funny pop-up. They are being programmed to soak up information like a sponge. So how is this relevant to homeschooling. Besides the obvious “we shouldn’t try to teach them about how to find a book through a card catalog” we should embrace this information driven world while teaching our kids to focus. The challenge with a our new world is that our kids can quickly acclimate to this alternate universe. They can believe that its OK to buy a movie ticket while texting their friends simultaneously, or sit at the dinner table and be watching a YouTube video and chatting as they eat and communicate with the people sitting at the same table. As homeschoolers in the new millennium we must learn from the past. We need to teach our kids to categorize their technology-filled world into a few essentially vital categories: people relationships knowledge entertainment If our kids can recognize that everything fits into one of those categories, then they can be taught to prioritize them. People first, knowledge, entertainment, and so on. While we cannot change the world to look like it did when we stood in a library at age 12, we can teach our kids to treat this new world with the proper perspective. We need to teach our kids to focus on people and relationships (not the touchy-feely kind, but the “you are more important than this cell phone” kind) and embrace the benefits that technology provides. Our kids are sponges. We need to teach them to absorb knowledge and to seek hard after those subjects, topics, and fields that they are passionate about. We need to not be intimidated that they can do 12 times more than we could do in the same amount of time, but rather train them to use that ability to become a better student, family member, and human being. Preview of the Heart of Homeschooling God’s Way Master Class. We need to STOP measuring success by grades, achievements, awards, and worksheets.
Laying a New Foundation Love of learning. What does that phrase mean to you? When I began homeschooling, I figured my children would naturally love to learn. I would not need to teach them how to do this. Instead, my goal was to fill their minds with as much knowledge as I could possibly pour upon them. My experiences as a public school student and teacher taught me that children could easily make it from K-12 and beyond attaining titles such as “top of their class” without truly learning anything more than how to study, memorize, and regurgitate facts. I was one of those types of kids and I definitely wanted my children to get more than this from their education. Determined to set a full plate before them, I scoured over homeschooling magazines, catalogs, and websites and purchased more books and curriculums in those first couple of years than I have the last six combined. It soon became apparent that we would need to add extra hours to our day in order to finish all of the prescribed scopes and sequences. With schedules and assignment sheets in hand, we began to plow our way through our curriculums. Now, obviously, we hit a few bumps in the road. Who doesn’t? During those years though, all skeptical eyes were upon us from family to friends to the local social worker that paid regular visits to our home (we were fostering at the time). All bumps were neatly swept under the rug and we kept right on plowing. From the outside looking in and according to the standardized tests, everything was great. Eventually though, the pace and the bumps began to wear on me and I became restless about our homeschooling. The kids, on the other hand, had adjusted fairly well. They had grown accustomed to the long hours, the lack of playtime, and mom’s perfectionist tendencies. However, when I finally took stock one day in what we were doing, I realized that instead of helping my children to rise above my own educational background, I had trained them to be just like me. They were pro’s at marking off their little check boxes, filling in the blanks, and regurgitating information in nice little pre-packaged amounts. Additionally, they had sacrificed their own interests and desires so much to this point that they really did not know how to “just be a kid”. This was not what homeschooling was supposed to be like for our family! What happened? In retrospect, I know that my mistake was not in having high aspirations nor was it my perfectionist tendencies or the pressure from our skeptical audience. The problem was I began building my children’s education without first laying a proper foundation. I continued to add layer upon layer to our educational structure with the goal to build it as tall as possible. Therefore, when the building became too heavy and burdensome, it all came crashing down without much more than the materials to show for all of the labor. This is the point where those in my situation begin selling off all of the “materials” in exchange for new ones thinking that will somehow fix the problem. Instead, we should focus our time and attention on laying that proper foundation. So how does one go about this? First, give yourself permission to break whatever mold your family is currently conforming to and let go of whatever is entangling you. (Unfortunately, it took me about three years to really do this and to let go.) Then, invest some time to research “homeschooling philosophy” online or at the library and begin writing your own philosophy of education. This will be your foundation. Seek ideas that will preserve the unique personalities, desires, and interests of your children as well as remain true to your family’s vision. Define what “love of learning” means to you. Weave this into your foundation. You may find that your philosophy is a hodge-podge of some of the popular homeschooling philosophies floating around out there. Perfect! Take the best points from those that really mesh with your family and make it your own. Having defined this for my family has freed me from my own misconceptions about education as well those from outside sources and “experts”. It has freed my children to be kids again, opening the doors of discovery and ushering in a true love of learning that will build larger storehouses of information and wisdom than I could have ever hoped of building! (Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com)
Explore, Discover, & Create . . . with Notebooking! At the end of each school year, are you finding yourself swimming through mounds of worksheets, quizzes, tests, and half-finished workbooks wondering just what to do with it all? Where does the organization begin? What do you keep? Where will you keep it? How much should you, dare I say, throw away? As you begin to tackle this heap, your brain recalls the many hours that went into creating this voluminous collection. You may start to wonder just how well spent those hours really were. You remember the great ambitions with which you started the school year and the many good intentions that fell to the wayside in order to finish this massive collection you are now faced with sorting. Finally, you conclude that if most, or perhaps all, of your children’s work is going to get tucked away somewhere never to be seen again, how much value can it possibly hold? Does any of this sound familiar? Well, it doesn’t have to anymore! Our family has been introduced to an ageless tool of learning that keeps us from creating these questionable mounds of paper throughout the year. There is nothing left to sort. There is nothing left to pack away. There is nothing to throw away. Instead, another volume (or two or three or more) of our children’s prized work gets added to their personal library at the end of each year. No more busywork. No more second-guessing if our time has been well spent. As a matter of fact, this tool has freed me from the seemingly never-ending search for the perfect curriculum! It can literally transform the way you approach your children’s education and set afire a love of learning within each child. Spend your precious hours exploring, discovering, and capturing the knowledge that awaits you and your children each day. Make learning a journey instead of a list to be checked off at the end of the day and a pile to be sorted at the end of the year. How do you do this? Let me introduce you to the tool that has breathed new life into our homeschooling. It’s called . . . notebooking! Notebooking is the coined term for what one may refer to as educational journaling or scrapbooking. Essentially, the idea is to take your planned school subjects and activities as well as the areas of your child’s interests and create notebooks, compilations of created pages collected in binders. Your child will fill his notebooks throughout the year with what he has learned about these topics. Written narrations, drawings, maps, and photographs are just a few of the items he may include. The pages of his notebooks will capture both the new knowledge he has discovered as well as his own personal reflections of what he has learned. Through the process of creating a notebook, you will likely watch him become a storyteller, a teacher, and most undoubtedly, an expert in some of the topics he studies. Unlike some of the more traditional tools of learning, like worksheets and tests, notebooking allows your child to develop a deeper relationship with what he is learning. Instead of finding out what he doesn’t know about a topic or study, which is what a worksheet or test usually reveals, he is given an opportunity to express everything he does know. By cutting out the busywork that is involved in some of these more traditional methods, you open a window of time and opportunity for your children to dig deeper into topics, to really get to know the people, the places, the events, the concepts, the ideas, and so on of what they are studying. Then, they take this information, digest it, and produce a notebook that tells all about what they have learned. After following this process, there will not be that sudden “unlearning” phenomena that usually takes place after the traditional chapter or unit test. The knowledge that your child gains during his notebooking experience will stick! Most importantly this process fuels a love of learning as your child begins to discover how exciting and fun it is to learn with notebooking! As your children become more experienced with notebooking, you will begin to see the evident benefits of this great tool. The richness of what they are learning will be apparent as their notebooks become filled to the brim with stories, pictures, maps, quotes, and photographs of the people, places, and events encountered. The depth of what they are learning will be told as new layers are added each year to certain notebooks, such as their language arts and math notebooks. The process of learning they have experienced will be unveiled as you note the ways they organize and choose the material they include for their notebooks. You will begin to see certain notebooks take on your children’s personalities as they learn to express themselves in the variety of ways they have been gifted. It is an amazing joy to sit down with your child while they lovingly and passionately share all that they have learned through the process of creating their notebook. Their hearts and hard work have been poured into this notebook and they beam with confidence at the turn of each page. Each year, as you take time to look back through the increasing volumes of notebooks being added to the shelves, you will see that notebooking has become an amazing “living” record of your children’s journey of learning. Instead of tossing the year’s work into a box in the back of the closet, you’ll be looking for ways to add more bookshelves to house these treasures! So how do you begin notebooking with your family? Start simple. Start with one topic or one study for each child or for the whole family. Perhaps the easiest way to start is to let each child begin a notebook of one of their favorite hobbies or passions. Do you have a child that loves dinosaurs? I do! My youngest son would find spare moments throughout the day to notebook his knowledge of dinosaurs. His head would be stuck in any number of books from the library trying to gather information. That’s where it began for him! Today, he is our leading expert when it comes to dinosaurs. Perhaps the easiest place to start notebooking with the entire family is with any history or science topic because there are so many ways to dig into these subjects. You could start very simply by asking your children to give a short narration of what was read on a particular day either during your read-aloud time or their independent reading time. If they give you a blank stare, ask them what they found to be most important or interesting about what was studied and encourage them to write about that. If you have younger children, you may need to write down their narrations for them until they are more proficient with the physical skill of writing. For children who are accustomed to giving short fill-in-the-blank type answers to questions, narration will take some practice to develop. I highly suggest researching the topic of narration for more help in this area. Narration is an invaluable skill that will prove most beneficial in their notebooking studies. As your family or child continues to dig deeper, add new material to the notebook. The notebook may include any number of pages and collections including, but definitely not limited to: written narrations from material studied in books they have read or real life experiences collections of quotes from philosophers, experts, missionaries, statesman, etc. photographs, ticket stubs, and information from field trips maps of places and events studied timelines drawings from your child’s imagination that express his ideas about the particular topic sketches of objects, animals, famous art, or places being studied collections of items such as leaves, pressed flowers, and seeds for a study like botany pictures from hands-on activities or experiments completed during the study nature photos, sketches, and journaled thoughts your child’s handwritten copies of favorite scripture, poetry or selections from favorite literature Ready to get started? (Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com)
Cut Out the Busywork . . . try Notebooking! Before notebooking, our school days were chocked full of a variety of learning activities and curriculums, but the learning was so dry and dull. By the end of the day, and I mean the-END-of-the-day, the kids were wiped out and so was I. Do you have days like these? Notebooking will refresh and rejuvenate your homeschooling. It opens the door for meaningful learning while saving you time, money, and those precious hours you currently spend (if you’re like most homeschooling moms) trying to tweak everything that you currently do to make your day better. Today, I want to help you get started. Notebooking is a very simple tool. Basically, we just want to help our children get what’s in their brain onto paper using both what they can “see” and what they can verbalize. I have been amazed out how effective this has worked with my children. Over the past few years, we have been able to completely eliminate the worksheet/test method from our schooling. We now use notebooking for just about e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g! We have saved time, money, and SO much frustration by using this tool. Now, instead of a trashcan (or tote that gets tucked away in the back of the closet) full of oodles of paperwork that we’ll never look at again, we have beautifully crafted and individualized notebooks full of their best work–their OWN work–their very OWN homemade books! You will pull these notebooks out time and time again throughout the years, just like your old photo albums, to treasure over and over again.
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Acorns and Perspective A Blast from the Past We live in the central mountains of California and are surrounded by beautiful Oak Trees. This year the kids and I are busily learning about how to sprout acorns in the spring and have been harvesting the newly fallen acorns during our daily 2-mile morning walk. We have a neat little park near our home that we share with our little community. As Homeschoolers, my kids are the only munchkins on the trail each day. We pass the same walkers every morning, quite a few of them are elderly. This year we are all excited about the acorns that have been landing on the path each day. We gather a few handfuls and bring them home to test them and store them for the spring. I learned a valuable lesson this week. Actually relearned. While we all look at the same world, everyone looks at life from their own perspective. photo by Aaron Burden While the kids and I were looking at the acorns on the ground as our own oak tree store, the elderly walkers we meet every day on the path were seeing them as stumbling blocks. You see, apparently one of our friends had slipped on an acorn just a few days ago. Praise the Lord, she’s OK, but I cannot see the path the same way. Yesterday, Peanut and I took action. We pulled up some mustard sticks and created our own broom and cleared part of the path. He was so excited to help our friends out that we decided to bring an actual broom and do a good job. Today we walked 1/2 a mile before reaching the villainous part of the trail and he happily brushed away most of the “safety hazard”. Actually, all the boys helped, he is the only one that made it on film. The walkers we so appreciative. Perspective is everything. I was surprised that I had only seen the fun little nuts on the ground, rather than the danger to others. It was a good lesson. My challenge to you is to find something in your life to point out perspective to your own children today. I’d love to hear about it when you do!