Advertise Here

Enter to Win Mighty Miracle Mist ~ Say It-Spray It

Enter contest to win one (1) 4-pack of Mighty Miracle Mist! You just have to see this new product! Perfect for parenting, grandparenting, daycare, teachers, home-schooling!

These bottles of “miracle” sprays are designed specifically for children, each adorned with a cute little teddy bear mascot. If your child needs help believing there are no monsters in her room at night, simply spray the Good Night spray around her bed and in her closets. Other sprays include: Good Thinking and Pay Attention, Cooperation and Sharing, and Kind Voice and Good Manners.

Where: Moomettesgram’s Musings
What: 2oz Spray bottles of Mighty Miracle Mist
How To Enter: Leave a comment after visiting the sponsor’s site
Deadline: November 26, 2008, at 11:00 pm EST

See Blog Post for Details

Creating A Life-Routine That Works For You

This is Part 4 of our Homeschooling series by Deb Gallardo of The Story Ideas Virtuoso.

This article is a kind of wrap up for the character building homeschooling article series. By now you should have given your family’s needs, personalities, and your own commitment to character building enough consideration to create the structure, however strict or loose you choose, for your household. With that in mind, here are some final considerations and suggestions on character-training.

Consider insisting on a definite bedtime and enforcing it (with predetermined consequences). You would be wise to put a halt to those late-night reading sessions under the blanket with a flashlight, as well. There is plenty of time during the normal homeschool routine, and during quiet times throughout the day and evening, for your voracious readers to inhale more books. You want to foster reading, not create an environment where it’s an illicit activity.

Bedtime can be as much a time of conflict as getting up. Don’t let it turn into a battle. Start training your children to wind down their activities one hour before they get ready for bed. Establish a bedtime routine for everyone, including parents, so you are modeling this good habit. (This doesn’t mean you must go to bed when the children do, but show them that you have your nighttime rituals, too.)

You might read something as a family, have devotions, sing songs, or play quiet music while everyone puts things away and otherwise prepares for the next day. Keep to calming activities and avoid those that stimulate. Agreed, this is easier said than done, but if you’re serious about getting your children to bed so they will be healthy and alert, you absolutely must help them to wind down. Some children just keep going until they fall over. (So do some parents!)

For the first month or two, have the same bed- and wake-up-times 7 days a week. After this, schedule one day a week when wake up time is one or two hours later, BUT without allowing a later bedtime. Our internal clocks can get out of kilter so easily that it’s best not to upset a routine once it’s established.

Remember that your academic schedule is your own, and education is going on all the time if you provide an environment conducive to learning. That would include a place filled with books, educational games and videos, supervised or monitored Internet learning and research, and lots of discussion about what the children are studying, what’s in the news, what books they’re reading, what they like best about each book, etc., using every possible “teachable moment.”

For example, let’s say it’s a Saturday and you are moving large furniture pieces. You must decide where you will put them, the best way to get them in or out of the rooms, how to maneuver through doorways, up steps, and in or out of the house. This is a great opportunity to teach problem solving, visualization and even some physics, disguised as “How do we best move this big sofa?” You could even include drawing the room and furniture items to scale. That helps with map skills.

Or perhaps you have a home business and are teaching the children how to fill orders accurately, how to do the bookkeeping, how to print shipping labels, how to pack a shipping box, etc.

Maybe you are opening bank accounts for each child and want them to maintain their own spreadsheets or Quicken files.

If you keep a blog, even 10-year-olds can cut and past information into your blog form and save for further editing.

Field trips to the library get everyone out of the house, it’s true, but don’t do it merely when no one feels like school that day, including you. Make it a regular part of your routine, as often as once a week. More often than that, unless your children are doing research that involves actual books (please don’t let them rely solely on the internet for their research!), cuts into your schedule.

If you tack a grocery visit onto the field trip, be aware that middle-of-the-day shopping with school-aged children still raises eyebrows, so have a polite answer ready. Use the trip as a multi-faceted lesson on nutrition, best prices and budgets.

Plan real field trips to interesting places, preferably mid-morning. You’ll avoid crowds and rush hour traffic on either end and midday.

When you get home, have each child immediately create a report about the experience while it’s still fresh. This should include drawings, digital or “instant” photos, paraphrased information from the website, plus handouts and souvenirs.

Present the information as written reports or PowerPoint presentations to Dad, and email them to grandparents and other interested relatives.

Submit field trip reports online at homeschool sites that accept such submissions.

Set up a homeschool blog AHEAD OF TIME (easiest type of website to create) where they can post their work. This is yet another valuable learning experience!

Once again, your ultimate goal is to help your children to develop their maximum human potential. There are any number of “correct” ways to do this. Only you can decide what is best for your household.

Your Homeschool Routine and Character Building

This is Part 3 of our series by Deb Gallardo from The Story Idea Virtuoso.

When it comes to schedules, one-size-fits-all just doesn’t work. This article continues offering guidelines to help you create a tailor-made schedule that is neither as confining as a straitjacket nor so loose as to be “Que Sera, Sera.” It respects the uniqueness of each family member, yet still allows for building important character traits like:

  • Being on time
  • Not being chronically lazy
  • Fulfilling responsibilities
  • Being productive
  • Using time wisely
  • Staying on task
  • Treating others, their things, their space and their time with respect
  • Having a cooperative spirit
  • Not being a complainer
  • Supporting and encouraging others

And the list goes on. Whole books have been written on this subject!

Another related topic has also been the subject of several books and countless articles, and that is which curriculum should you choose? Helping you to choose curricula is beyond the scope of this article series, but we must address curriculum content to a degree in order to fully cover the matter of scheduling and character building.

Some givens include:

  1. It will take you time to settle into an academic routine. You’ll tweak your lesson plans as you learn to gauge how long it takes each child to complete certain tasks. Obviously with maturity they are able to do more for longer periods. The younger they are, the shorter and more frequent the time chunks should be.
  2. Not every subject needs to be studied every day. The big four should be addressed daily: Math, Language Arts (includes reading, writing, spelling, vocabulary and grammar), Science and Social Studies (history, geography and world culture). The rest should be “salted” in liberally, including during non-school time.
  3. One of the advantages of teaching at home is that our children don’t stop learning just because school is “out.” And you don’t stop teaching when it’s time to make dinner. This helps them to get out of the mentality of learning information just for the purpose of passing a test. Instead, it teaches them that learning is something we are constantly doing and that it is a lifelong process.
  4. The best learning environments are those in which children know, in general, what to expect. There’s a place for spontaneity here, too, but establishing a framework or a system of procedures will take the guesswork (and most of the conflict) out of “what comes next?” questions.

What To Teach:

  • Mathematics
  • Language Arts
  • Social Studies*
  • Science
  • Technology
  • Visual and performing arts
  • Physical education and health
  • Outside activities

* Some topics needs to be discussed, and not just during “school time.” Dinner conversation can be a perfect venue, as can time doing dishes, folding laundry, and other household chores.

Enlist grandparents and great grandparents in offering first-hand perspectives on any number of historical, sociological and cultural topics. If family members aren’t available for interviewing, ask around your community, at church and civic meetings, as well as inquiring about programs at local assisted-living centers where seniors are active.

Family travel, even through day trips, can make local history and geography interesting and exciting. Writing and illustrating reports or books, creating PowerPoint presentations, as well as writing and performing skits are some ways to reinforce these excursions and “out of the classroom” learning experiences and make them cross-curricular. Killing several birds with one stone is a good thing, which is why so many families like the unit study model.

Putting it all together

Barring the specific choice of curricula / learning methods, you now have most of the pieces you need for setting up your schedule. The goal is not to create an impossible-to-achieve ideal. You want a plan that is practical and workable.

The beauty of homeschooling is, you can tweak your schedule by tiny degrees until you get it just the way you want it. It may not be perfect, but if it works for your family in helping your children to achieve their maximum human potential, then it’s as close to perfect as you could ask for.

About the Author: Deb Gallardo is a published author for adults and children, an educator, and former home instructor for her daughter (now in college). She hosts a blog, “The Story Ideas Virtuoso,” where she helps fiction writers find story ideas, and offers creative writing tips, advice and inspiration. In her spare time, Deb performs in semi-professional musical theatre productions and dinner theatre venues in and around Central Ohio. You can tweet with her too.

When your Homeschooler Hits College Age

When you first decide to homeschool your child, it can be overwhelming. All sorts of questions abound: what should we study; how; am I qualified? After you’ve gotten yourself into a routine, though, many of those uncertainties seem to fade away as you and your child discover the world together. However, after you’ve been at it for a few years, you’re bound to notice that your child is reaching the age where people start asking about college.

That opens up a whole new can of worms for a homeschooler, and a whole new set of questions pop up. Will my homeschooler get into a good college? Will admissions officers look negatively on the homeschooling experience? Will my child fit in with the other students who are coming from a traditional school environment? The list is practically endless!

However, as most homeschooling parents are pleasantly surprised to discover, homeschooling doesn’t work against your child when it comes time for college. In fact, many of the nation’s top schools seek out homeschooled students because of their diverse learning experiences and broad knowledge base! The admissions process may be a little different for homeschoolers, who may or may not have completed many of the standardized tests that are offered in traditional school settings.

Many of the top schools take the time to interview every student they are considering for acceptance. An interview is the best place for the homeschooler to shine. It’s a chance to show all the knowledge and skills that are gained from homeschooling and it’s also the best place to show the independent thinking and maturity that often results from staying out of the traditional school setting. Since homeschoolers tend to be surrounded by adults more than children, they often demonstrate an ability to relate to the college environment more easily than a traditional student who has been indoctrinated in deference to authority and obedience to random rules designed to handle the herd.

The fact is, the college life is a lot different from a high school atmosphere. Most courses a student will take throughout their postsecondary education require few prerequisites that don’t come directly from the college experience. A high school course in history is quite different from one in university: high school courses are designed to teach facts and basic skills, while a college course is designed to teach theories and independent thought.

The one aspect of the college admissions process that your homeschool student may miss out on is some of the scholarship opportunities. Many of the sports or club scholarships require participation in a high school environment. However, there are many scholarships available that aren’t tied to these activities, or will accept participation in community teams or clubs as equivalent. Make sure that you put the same effort into researching your college applications that you do into creating your homeschool experience.

Article by: Kim Yonkers has been home schooling her three children for several years. She also works as a freelance writer for Homeschooling Plus – a site that provides information on home school curriculum, and more.

3 Approaches To Homeschooling Your Children

There are almost as many approaches to homeschooling as there are parents undertaking homeschooling but over the years several general approaches have appeared. Here we look at just three of these.

The first approach is known as School-At-Home. This is perhaps the most commonly seen form of homeschooling and is the approach that most parents will try first.

Because the majority of parents have no experience of schooling children at home they turn to the ‘experts’ to design a curriculum for them and to supply them with the necessary teaching materials. The affect of this tends to be to simply transfer teaching from the pubic school classroom into the home.

Although this is not a bad starting point, parents often find that this approach is very hard on them and they struggle to cope with the amount of work it entails. They also find that teaching in this manner is not as easy as they thought it would be and find themselves uncertain of how to move forward so that progress is slow and frustration sets in quite easily.

In addition, where parents have removed their children from the public school system to continue their education at home, they often find that the teaching materials used in the School-At-Home approach are essentially the same as those which may have contributed to their child’s lack of support in public school.

The second approach is known as Unit Studies. The principle here is to focus attention on the natural interests of the children and to build your teaching around these.

From our very earliest years we have a tendency to show an interest in certain things and to express our dislike of, or boredom with, others. We might for example express an interest in mathematics and science and boredom with literature and poetry. Similarly, we might demonstrate a love of nature and of being outdoors and a dislike of organized games and sport.

Unit Studies allows parents to take advantage of a child’s interests and to structure a curriculum centered on these and which also incorporates these into subjects which are of less interest, but which are nonetheless necessary to ensure a rounded education.

The third approach is that of Classical Homeschooling. This is similar in many ways to the School-At-Home approach but makes use of superior teaching materials and is grounded in the classical methods first developed during the Middle Ages in the monasteries of the day. This is not to say however that this method today is centered on religion.

Classical Homeschooling aims to teach children to think, and ultimately to learn, for themselves and contains a great deal of what most parents will probably remembers as very dull rote learning. Nowadays techniques have been developed to remove much of the boredom from rote memorization and this is also helped considerably by allowing a child to learn in an ordered fashion.

Whatever approach you adopt you will almost certainly find yourself struggling a bit at first. However, with a little bit of trial and error you will be surprised how quickly you will find a method which suits both yourself and your child.

Article by:

Parenting4Dummies.com provides information on all aspects of parenting from parenting teenagers to homeschooling programs

Come Get To Know Us :)

We're Very Social!