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!
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…
(This post contains affiliate links.) Cheating Just a Little Okay, so my Charlotte Mason friends may raise their eyebrows to this post. I can get overwhelmed with all the “stuff” that’s out there to teach. Good stuff like artists, composers, Latin…. Things that just seem to slip by the wayside sometimes when the phonics and…
A friend from Singapore asked this question recently: I have a 6y+ son who just started public school in Singapore. He can read pretty well but he can’t spell. He has simple spelling list from school which he has problems learning. Do you have any advice? Many children need hands-on or movement-based lessons when they…
(This post contains affiliate links and links to my business website, Shining Dawn Books.) I hated math when I wad a kid. Hated it. It didn’t make much sense to me, I had a hard time memorizing facts, and my teacher’s didn’t spend much time helping me to understand. I remember my poor dad spending…
I know I gush often about our Keepers At Home Group, but it really is a wonderful thing! Yesterday we took a break from “practical” stuff to party! Each of the girls was asked to prepare a dish and bring the recipe. (We’re putting the recipes together in a little booklet for them.) After reading…
Here’s the latest edition of the Westward Gazette.
Our Keepers group has started up again. At the first meeting, the girls made potholders that turned out SO cute! Thanks, Edith, for such a fun, easy and cute sewing project. Our second meeting was a tour of a 1700’s house that’s in the process of renovation. The owner of the house gave us a…
A question I hear quite often is, “Am I really qualified to homeschool? Am I going to ruin my children by schooling them at home?” Read This First: Animal School by George Reavis Once upon a time the animals had a school. They had four subjects ~ running, climbing, flying, and swimming ~ and all…
I’ve got a fun math activity for you! It’s important to me that my children not only know how to read graphs, but know how to create them as well. Mahayla is a pro at gathering information and creating her own graphs on paper. Caleb is just beginning, though, so I wanted him to make a “concrete” graph…
Why is it that you usually feel dirtier after showering at a hotel than you did before you showered? Why is it that once the baby finally falls asleep in his carseat, somebody else in the car decides they have to use the bathroom and can’t possibly hold it – thus waking up the baby…