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.
Keeping kids interested can be tough. By the time they are teenagers kids need to have some kind of ownership in something. Something that gives them value and helps them to see just what they can do. For many that will be a job or an entrepreneurial endeavor; for others it might be a ministry or even just a hobby.
Just wanted to share this little smile with all of our moms out there! By the Go Fish Guys.
My additional verse for the homeschool mom:
If you set aside your needs to teach your kids to read, you’re a Homeschool Mom
If addition and subtraction were much more than a distraction, you’re a Homeschool Mom
If your dining room slab looks like a science lab, you’re a Homeschool Mom
If you are a high school student looking for help with homework, ideas for papers, research tools, organization skills and ideas, online libraries, study tips, help with college placement or scholarships, or almost anything else you can imagine, then you want to visit this site.
An awesome resource for every high school student.
A reader asked if I had any recommendations for a good consumer math program for homeschoolers.
There are a number of good Consumer Math programs out there. Let me just outline my favorites and give you a brief overview of each. Hopefully that will give you a good starting point.
Days Ten to Twelve
We pulled out of our campground early on day ten to head for Yellowstone Park. In my mind’s eye, we were heading for a large forest with Old Faithful somewhere inside. Was I wrong! Not only was Yellowstone enormous, but it had such a variety of terrain that we could have easily spent a full week and left feeling like we had only scratched the surface. The park touches three states (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) and includes beautiful mountains, a huge lake-Yellowstone (as well as a number of smaller lakes), breathtaking canyons, vast plains, forests, geysers and hot springs.
When to be a teacher and when to be a coach is sometimes a challenging decision.
Often we are sure we can speed up the learning process if we just impart our wisdom and academic expertise to our children through a “lesson.” So, we set aside time to go over whatever it is we are sure they need to know next, we prepare what we want to say, and we conduct our “class.” Okay, okay, most of the time we don’t go through quite the formal process explained above, but you get the point.
The recent decision by a court in North Carolina requiring a mom to return her kids to public school despite the fact that the judge agrees that “Ms. Mills had done a good job [in homeschooling],” is not one to ignore.
