Okay, you’ve probably read several of my homeschool success stories articles. Perhaps you read the one about the homeschool graduate who received a scholarship to Georgetown; perhaps the one about Brad, the economist in New Brunswick; or the one about Nathaniel and Hannah and their honors scholarships; then there was the Fox News article about the growing recognition of homeschoolers.
As an English teacher, I am always looking for one more course; one more way to present writing, grammar, or literature; or that perfect speech course that teaches both presentation skills and how to write an effective presentation.
So when I found what is now Bridgeway English, I had to buy it. Developed by top educators in the country, Bridgeway English is a remedial or review English course set up to take a struggling student from failure to success in just one year.
Are your kids are struggling with math and although they seem to get it now and then, you are back to the same old struggles year after year? Or perhaps you have a child who just keeps falling further and further behind?
You’ve tried all the typical homeschool math courses–Saxon, Singapore, ACE, Horizons . . . but the struggle continues. Perhaps you are a homeschooler seeking a better option for math or maybe you have a student who is attending school but needs a remedial math course that will help him or her finally master the concepts.
Do you have a homeschooler who hates math? Or perhaps you have a math whiz who needs a challenge!
Math contests can provide that extra challenge for your gifted math student or that extra motivation for that student who struggles with math.
If you’ve read my blog
in the past, you know that I am passionate about writing. I believe that with the right motivation and the right approach, any child can learn to write and write well.
The ability to convey ideas in writing has become even more essential with the advancements of technology. An individual who can communicate well, earns respect. And with email becoming the communication tool of choice, we must ensure that our children have the tools to write well.
As a homeschool evaluator, I have on occasion encountered families who have been through the ringer in a given year. I have met two families who lost their homes in a fire; many who have seen the death of a loved one; several who have worked together to care for an aging or ill mother or father; one family who was forced to live in their car for several months and homeschool in the local library, and two families where the homeschool Mom died during the school year.
One of my children absolutely loves games. She would rather pull out a good game than just about anything, including a trip to Rita’s (for Italian Ice).
Tonight she rallied all of us together to play a good game of Pit. Soon sounds of “Two, two, two, one, one one, three, three, three,” filled the kitchen along with a few screams and a lot of laughter.
I don’t know about your kids, but mine just seem to go wild in December. Their energy level just never drops, they are filled with what we in Pennsylvania Dutch country call “Schnick Schnutz”. No idea what it means nor if it is spelled correctly but it is used to communicate “mischief,” or “silliness.”
And that is what we have going on in our family right now.
You know, there are JOYS of homeschooling and there are the “joys” (tongue in cheek) of homeschooling. We have our good days and our bad days. But at the end of each year, or perhaps sometime during the summer, homeschoolers evaluate whether they will do it again next year.
And many of them do. Why? Because the JOYS of homeschooling always outweigh the “joys”.
Did you know that nearly one million members of our military are parents?
This means that there are at least one million children in our country who face the uncertainty that comes with having a mom or dad away at war. And there are countless men and women in our country today who face the challenges of single parenting combined with the worry of whether their loved one will make it home from active duty.
Combine that with those who find themselves transferred often and moving from place to place and it is clear that our military families are constantly sacrificing for our country. Time, certainty, watching their children grow and learn, the arms of their husband or wife . . . these are just a few of the many things they sacrifice on a daily basis.
