One of the main goals I set early on in our homeschool was to give my children a love of learning. Creative homeschooling is the mode I’ve used to successfully do that. Don’t think that you can never put your child in front of a textbook or computer screen to homeschool creatively! Instead, think of it as offering your children curriculum and styles to meet their needs. Sometimes that will be a textbook or computer class. Other times, it may be a unit study, living literature, field trips, games, project-based learning, co-op classes, or interest-based studies. These articles show you how. Be inspired!
Remember the Field Trip Journals? We’re still using them this year and I couldn’t be happier with them. They are proving to make great writing assignments, and I’m finding the kids absolutely love looking through them for the memories. I love to watch the kids sort through brochures, ticket stubs and pictures trying to decide what to include and how…
Summer break has officially begun for us, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. Have you ever met a bored child in the summer? That’s one of the worst types of children to be around! 🙂 Children homeschooled Charlotte Mason-style are usually good at keeping themselves busy, but I have a trick up my sleeve…
Mahayla and one of her best buds have been planning a camping trip since January. Yes, that’s FIVE months! After many revised lists, faxes to one another and late nights on the phone planning, the trip finally happened this weekend. The two girls and two other best buds (along with a couple of Dads and,…
School is officially out for the summer, but that won’t stop us from taking advantage of many great learning opportunities! This week we visited our local water treatment plant and the neighboring electric generation plant. If you’ve ever read The Magic School Bus At The Waterworks, then you’ve visited our water treatment plant! 🙂 I…
As a fitting end to our Keepers At Home year, we had a little scrapbooking party. What great memories come from this group! (And, yes, even our boys have fun. But, ahem, shooting a foam deer with a bow and arrow in his Contenders of the Faith class at co-op was MUCH more manly! Thank…
Creative Memorization Ideas My all-time favorite creative memorization tool so far has been Times Tales! My oldest daughter had struggled with the upper multiplication facts for months. In ONE day of this program, she knew the facts! I’m not kidding! It uses little stories to tell about each fact. After doing the program with her, I still…
Sometimes funschooling can be as simple as spending time in the kitchen creating super-easy themed food and reading a giant stack of really good books. Enjoy a laid back day of St. Patrick’s Day fun that will still go down as a wonderful memory in the minds of your children. This post contains affiliate links….
I just wanted to share what a hit this math activity was last week. Using the information sheets that the website provides, the kids had to fill out a chart to show how many presidents have come from which states. Then, they used graph paper to create a bar graph to show the information from the chart. Fun…
(This post contains affiliate links.) No Guilt Required Do you find your family to be in the car more often than you care to admit? Whether you’re on the way to co-op, ballet, music lessons, ball practice, chess club or doctor’s appointments, all this car time can make a mom feel quite guilty about the…
There’s a Toyota Plant not too far from us. For years I’ve been wanting to go on the free tour they offer, but my children have always been too young. Children have to be at least 1st grade with a parent chaperone for safety reasons. Anyway, this year, we left baby toddler Eli with Grandma and…
Enjoy Language Arts at the Library Here are some ideas for a scavenger hunt at the library that will build all sorts of academic muscle. Questions can easily be altered for younger or older children. This was planned for my 5th grader and it will probably take a couple trips to finish. (By the way, the…
After the last couple of living math posts, I promised to share some of our non-textbook lessons. Here are some of the fun things we’ve been doing/have planned to do this winter on our living math days. My hope is to encourage you that…. 1.) Living math really is thoughtful, meaningful math. 2.) Living math isn’t hard to…