Very excited to announce the winner of “The 12-Week Year” book: her name is Geanina and she lives in Georgia. How cool is that?
Geanina from Georgia, a homeschooling mom of two teenage boys, with a third on the way. Congratulations are in order… twice!
One autographed copy of this New York Times bestseller coming your way, Geanina! Thank you for being a faithful subscriber to Homeschool Ways blog and newsletter.
Raise your hand if you want:
You can achieve all this (and more) through regular physical activity, a.k.a. exercise.
My exercise mat and weights
Some moms think of exercise as just another chore to do. But exercise can be fun. In fact, if you don’t make it fun, you won’t do it. It’s that simple. Continue reading
In our homeschool, we teach a range of subjects, but we focus mainly on the 3Rs this year. When we started in September, I realized the R of ‘Riting had to wait for a semester. We kept plenty busy with math and reading, as well as monthly science classes, weekly violin lessons, Home Ec., crafts, P.E., service projects, and Adventurers.
The overall task of getting into a routine took some time, too. Besides, I just knew my son was not ready for the effort required in learning good penmanship. He can print (that’s writing only upper case letters, manuscript-style, e.g. HOMESCHOOL). He signs his name on his worksheets and he can write a short card for somebody. This gave me time to look into several handwriting curricula.
Handwriting page from a Romanian workbook similar to what I use.
Here are 7 factors I considered when choosing handwriting curriculum:
1. The age of the student. Fine motor skills, essential for handwriting, don’t even develop until after the age of six.
2. The gender of the student. Boys mature more slowly than girls.
3. Cursive or manuscript? It’s a big debate. Personally, I only teach cursive and printing (needed for filling out forms by hand). I don’t teach manuscript at all.
4. Right-handed or left-handed student? The position of the hand and the strokes are different for a south paw.
5. Start with big letters and go smaller OR start at the letter size your student will use throughout his life? Again, a big debate. Some people say writing big letters equates drawing, which is different from penmanship. I tend to agree.
6. Should you use a curriculum that does not change the size of the lines? To me, changing from one line-spacing to another is like teaching somebody to play cello and then moving them to a bass a few months into it. Why make them re-adjust the strokes to a different size line-spacing?
7. Consider a curriculum that offers not only horizontal guide lines, but also slanted ones, so the child knows how far he can go sideways.
Personally, I am using a Romanian handwriting curriculum similar to what I grew up with. Initially, I planned on using Cursive First, which I really like, but they don’t have slanted lines, like the Romanian handwriting curriculum. I said it before and I will say it again: homeschooling allows for a tailored approach, so we might as well take advantage of it.
Voiceboks.com, a parenting website with the subtitle “The Voice of Parenthood,” just nominated Homeschool Ways for their Top 50 Nominated Homeschooling Blogs.
I am thankful and honored to share the nomination screen with inspiring blogs, which have been around for years.
Voting ends February 4, 2014. You can only vote for me ONCE from the same IP. Not once daily, just once.
You can vote by clicking on the badge below, or from the right side menu.
As always, I appreciate my readers and their efforts on my behalf.
It’s the first Monday of 2014. Is it already a busy, manic Monday? Or is it slow because you are experiencing the post-holiday letdown? Homeschool Ways will help you every Monday in 2014 through a new series called Mom Monday.
Please take two minutes to read some encouraging words or to find a few tips. These short articles will fall in one of five categories: spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual, and fun.
My life changed 100% when I became a mom. Yours did too, probably. I’m not just referring to the amount of laundry, cooking and cleaning I have to do, now that I care for two extra bodies. I also care for two minds and two spiritual beings. Continue reading
In homeschooling, just like in traditional schooling, it can be tempting to set music and art aside for when we have time (or money). How can a busy homeschooling mom add music and art to an already full schedule? Here are my solutions (besides violin lessons):
1. Can You Hear It? will start you on this quest to steal a few moments for classical music and art appreciation simultaneously. My kids love this book and CD, which we got from the library. We soon got our own copy from Amazon.
I play the music during meals, but, also, while I cook and they play nearby. We open the book and turn the pages as the tracks change. Sometimes I read to the kids from the book. Other times, we listen and comment on what we see.
My daughter listens to “Carnival of the Animals – Aquarium” while looking at the corresponding painting in “Can You Hear It” and enjoying a bagel and raspberry zinger tea; my son is not in the picture because he was finishing up a LEGO project before joining us.
2. A Year in Art offers us visual pleasure as we enjoy our afternoon tea time, a tradition we started about a month ago. Around 4pm, I put a tea kettle on the stove and get out some scones, or biscuits, or bagels, or graham crackers, or toast. I use what I have on hand.
We open the book and look at 3-5 paintings while sipping tea and enjoying something sweet. They have questions. We look for answers together. Sometimes we locate towns and countries on a world atlas.
3. Free concerts – We catch the Knoxville Youth Symphony concerts several times a year and, also, the Sevier County Choral Society concerts (December and May). I used to sing with the Choral Society before I became a mom, so it sort of feels like a reunion for me. If you check your local newspaper or Google free concerts in your area, you should find similar offerings where you live.
I have felt the liberating and relaxing effects of art and music in our homeschooling enough, that I am thinking about experimenting with doing music and/or art before math, reading or writing. I’ll let you know if I have enough courage to implement it on a regular basis. So far, I have done it once and we all loved it.
Last March, I decided to invest in a LEGO Education set for my son, who loves building with LEGO bricks. The Simple Machines Pack for homeschool seemed like the most basic set and a good place to start. It did not disappoint.
It presents four sets of simple machines: gears, wheels and axles, levers and pulleys. The target audience is students in grades one through three, but my son was not even in kindergarten in spring and he had no trouble building.
Of course, he needed guidance. At times, it seemed the concepts went over his head, so I did not insist on the theory. I let him building and play with his creations. He really enjoyed predicting outcomes and then testing to see if he was right or wrong.
I could follow the lesson plans easily, even though I am not mechanically inclined. The binder contains the same information as the CD-ROM, but I would highly recommend you get both, for your convenience.
Wheels and Axles, the second lesson of simple machines in this activity pack, showed my son how to build a go-cart and a wheelbarrow.
Levers provided further fun learning, with models like a catapult and a railroad crossing gate.
Finally, the fourth simple machines: pulleys. This complex model on the left is called crazy floors. On the right, my daughter is enjoying her go-cart.
We have since bought the Simple and Motorized Machines Activity Pack for our son, so the Simple Machines set has become my daughter’s set by default. She cannot build yet all by herself, as she is only three.
She enjoys watching me build these models for her. I tell her what I need and she helps by handing me the right bricks and plates – great exercise for reviewing colors and numbers in both Romanian and English.
I highly recommend both these sets for your homeschool and, if your children are small, I would definitely start with the Simple Machines Pack first to test the waters. For more LEGO projects, click here.
On January 14, Homeschool Ways will give away a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller “The 12-Week Year” to one lucky email subscriber.
“The 12-Week Year” has helped me replace self-defeating new year resolutions with achievable planning solutions. The authors, Brian Moran and Michael Lennington, have taken a concept from sports, called periodization, and applied it to goals and productivity. By thinking about four “year ends” instead of one, you will get a lot more done.
Enter to win a signed copy of this book by subscribing to Homeschool Ways via email
Whether you need to learn how to get things done more efficiently in your home, homeschool, business or career, this book delivers. For a more in-depth review of the book, please check out my newspaper column about it. The authors also offer a free course based on the book.
Godspeed in your homeschool in 2014!
Whether you homeschool or not, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day bring so much excitement. We all appreciate a new beginning, a clean slate, a fresh start.
Traditionally, we wish each other a Happy New Year. That’s nice, as long as we go beyond wishing and hoping.
My children with their new board and easel.
Salman Khan of the Khan Academy inspired me with his 2012 commencement speech at Rice University. He encouraged the graduates to take a pro-active approach towards happiness and challenged them to increase the net happiness of the world.
How do you do that?
1. Be positive in a delusional kind of way, even when the situation looks hopeless. “Sometimes I force myself to smile. Good things happen in your body when you smile,” he says.
2. Appreciate the smallest things people do for you and tell them so. A waiter, a bank teller, a sibling, a friend, a store clerk – they all need a word of encouragement and a compliment. By saying one nice thing, you might not only turn a bad day into a good one for someone, you might turn a career around. The ripple effects of positive words cannot be measured.
3. Travel forwards and backwards in time. Let’s say that you were 70 today, but somehow you could magically go back in time to today and re-live your life. You can re-live all your successes, and fix all your regrets.
What kind of things would a 70-year-old person regret?
There’s nothing on that list about bringing more work home from the office for the weekend or getting all the laundry done by a certain time each day.
Corollary: by homeschooling your children, you touch not only your children and grandchildren, but this world in ways you don’t even dream about.
On that note, let me wish you a Happy New Year and a successful homeschool in 2014.
Looking back at 2013, I can split the year in three sections, even though homeschooling is woven throughout:
1. January-May: preparing to start homeschooling in the fall, I spent my time reading and gathering curriculum. I taught the children in a gentle and relaxed way, with short lessons. We read a lot and worked our way through “Before Five in a Row.” They were both preschoolers.
My daughter gave herself a radical haircut in February and the incident haunted me for months. It still does, as her hair is still growing into what it used to be. I was running errands in town and my mom was watching my children. My mom forgot to put the scissors up. One can put the scissors up 99 times. It’s the 100th time one doesn’t, that the inevitable happens.
My children at Camp Wesley Woods in Townsend, a few days after she cut her hair. This cat looks just like ours. They could not believe their eyes.
2. June-August: my sister, her husband, and their 14-year-old son spent the summer with us. She is a successful blogger in Romania and provided the much-needed inspiration and push for me to start blogging. Yay for older sisters who help younger sisters take new paths!
From the left: the four of us, my sister, mom, nephew and brother-in-law. We enjoyed their company for almost three months – Europeans get amazingly long vacations, don’t they?
3. September-December: I started homeschooling my son officially, as he began kindergarten. My daughter is in preschool and I work with her too, according to her desire. She asks to do math every day.
My children working on their books in the beginning of the school year.
Homeschooling and blogging about it sure keep me busy. I enjoy it. I keep telling myself my children will grow up in a flash. Then, I will have all the time in the world to do whatever I might feel that I don’t have time for right now.
