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You are here: Home / Archives for homeschool goals

homeschool goals

Homeschooling Is A Beautiful Thing!

As a parent educator, you have the freedom to weave your family’s
values, your educational goals, and your children’s passions into the
living journey of homeschooling.

You get to take a step back and look at
the bigger picture.

You do not need to become entangled or even
burdened with what the school down the street is up to, because you have
the ability to design a program that is perfectly suited for not only
each of your children, but your entire family as well.

To be a successful homeschooler you need a foundation, a plan, and sheer determination.

Foundation

This is the most essential piece to the homeschooling puzzle.

You need to lay a solid foundation for your children and your family.

  • What does your ideal homeschool environment look like?
  • What do imagine your daily routine to look like? How will the house run in the midst of your homeschool day?
  • Will your children help around the house?
  • What part will both you and your spouse play in their education?
  • Will you incorporate your faith into the school day?

If you are a new homeschooler, you should take a few days
to consider what your foundation should look like.

If you are a brand
new homeschooler, understand you may laugh at your ideas a few months
from now, but that should not stop you from laying an idea of your
foundation.

Plan

It is true, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

The
good news is, in homeschooling the plan is fluid and changeable. You do
not need to stick with plans that are failing, but you do need a plan.

  • What grade levels are your children?
  • What subjects are required in your state?
  • What topics would you like to teach your children?
  • Will you design your own teaching materials or acquire them from a big curriculum company?
  • How long will your school day/year be?
  • Where will you find coaching, mentoring, and encouragement?

Sheer Determination

Homeschooling is wonderful, but
it is also wonderfully hard.

It is a huge undertaking to not only
educate your child, but keep your home from falling apart
simultaneously. There will absolutely be days when you question
everything.

There will be more than one day, week, or year that you fear
that you are ruining your child’s education. This is normal.

Before you go any deeper into this thing called homeschooling, you should:

  • Determine that you will stay the course.
  • Determine
    to never quit out of frustration. When those days come that cause you
    to believe you should quit, declare it a free play day, go to the
    library, visit a veteran homeschooler, or go to the zoo.
  • Just determine to never quit out of frustration.
  • Understand
    that homeschooling is hard, but that just because it is hard does not
    mean that you are unqualified. Honestly there is no one more qualified
    to teach your children than you are. You know their strengths,
    weaknesses, and passions better than anyone else.

Homeschooling
can be extremely fun, rewarding and exhausting.

It is worth every bit of
effort to be able to see your child blossom into a curious learner.

If what you are currently doing is not working, go back and look at your foundation and plan.

As a veteran homeschooler, I can assure you that it is very common
for homeschoolers to go on tangents. It is also common to throw out
topics or whole curriculums that are not a good fit for your family.

Change is good.

Homeschooling is good. It is not for everyone, but it is good!


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8403195 (Yep, that’s me!)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: homeschool goals, Uncategorized

Homeschooling: Step Two

I don’t always fail, but when I do it’s with epic style.

photo by Maria

I threw an egg at a trash can and missed. Splat!

Tried to sit on a cooler at a tailgate party. A styrofoam cooler. Crunch!

Backed the car into a parking space at the library and hit a pole. Dent.
What do All of these things have in common?

…

Read More »

Filed Under: blog Tagged With: homeschool goals, homeschooling step two, how to homeschool, setting goals

Homeschooling: How To Move From Newbie To Veteran

Expert Author Bekki SaylerA Newbie Homeschooler is one who is still in that honeymoon phase
of homeschooling. It lasts for about one to three years and can
honestly hold you back from the best homeschooling has to offer.

So
how does one move from the newbie side of the homeschool line to the
coveted veteran side?

 It’s different for everyone, but it all starts
here: Do not quit.

Homeschooling is one of the more challenging
endeavours that a parent can undertake. Imagine sitting in your home,
surrounded by all of your children. You are the chief cook and bottle
washer. You decide what they eat, what they wear, what they learn.
Honestly, the task can be daunting.

Complicate the homeschooling
experience by the fact that humans are competitive by nature and we tend
to want what others have. That translates into having our children
involved in too many activities and ordering their school days with an
ivy league quality set of assignments to be completed each day.

New
Homeschoolers tend to make a huge mistake.

They run out and order a
curriculum because it looks good, long before they discover who their
children are as students and who they themselves are as teachers.

A Newbie still believes that “this curriculum” or “that curriculum” will help their child learn.

Veteran Homeschoolers are a different breed entirely.
While we are all unique, we do share some concrete similarities.

  • Veterans know their child’s strengths and weaknesses.
  • Veterans tailor their child’s education to fit in between the lines of their students passions and abilities.
  • Veterans are confident in their ability to teach, yet humble enough to ask for help when necessary.
  • Veterans are more interested in their child’s character than how many math facts they can fire off in 60 seconds.

So how does a Newbie move to the Veteran Side?

  • Spend more time studying what makes your child tick than you do shopping for curriculum.
  • Ask for help determining your child’s learning style and your teaching style.
  • Have fun learning along side your children.
  • Choose to ignore the laundry and play in the mud.
  • Realize that your primary goal is to teach your child to love to learn, not master XYZ of your states standards.

Being a newbie can be a wonderful season in your
educational career. This is where you can honestly glean wonderful
pearls of wisdom from educators around you. Enjoy the process of
discovering who you and your children are as homeschoolers. It is never
about how well your child knows page 214 of their science book. It is
about how well you equip your child to seek knowledge daily.

Your
goal should be to reach the veteran camp as soon as possible. 
Sure,
there is more laundry here, but 
the kids are having a blast at learning,
living, and growing!


Filed Under: blog Tagged With: homeschool goals, Uncategorized

Master Chore List: As Promised!!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: homeschool goals, homeschool organization, multiple students, Uncategorized

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.

Notebooking Pages Free Membership

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?

Notebooking Pages FREE Resource Member Program
(Reprinted with permission from Debra Reed, NotebookingPages.com)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: homeschool goals, homeschool resources, Honeschooling out of the box, Notebooking, Uncategorized

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