Today I’m at Heart of the Matter, giving away the complete works of James Herriot, courtesy of Library and Ed. They are also offering readers a terrific coupon code, which you can use to purchase the set for less than half the normal cost!
Click over to enter or claim the coupon code.
Today I’m at Heart of the Matter giving away two more Classroom Friendly Pencil Sharpeners! Head over to enter!
We have had ours for over 6 months now, and I love it more each time I use it! It’s perfect for homeschoolers.
It’s that time again!
I LOVE the Not Back to School blog hop! It’s so fun! I love finding other weirdos homeschoolers and reading about how they operate their homeschools. I have been homeschooling for TWO WHOLE YEARS now, so get ready for some Amazing! Insight!
We started back to school last Monday after a very short summer break. I have been very disorganized this year. I didn’t even finish making the schedule until about 11 o’clock on Sunday night. That’s partly because I didn’t get started until Sunday afternoon and partly because I managed to lose not one, but two schoolbooks in the last few weeks and wasted a lot of time tearing apart the house looking for them.
I am still missing one.
I finally gave up and ordered another, which guarantees the lost one will mysteriously fall on my head the minute the UPS guy knocks on the door.
It’s okay though, because the schedule needs to be re-done anyway since we got behind on the VERY FIRST DAY due to a Giant! Math! Hissy Fit! my son decided to throw fourteen seconds into the exciting new school year.
ANYway!
I have two kids, my son Big, who is 6 1/2 and my daughter Little, who is 4 1/2.
Do you need a moment to admire what are quite possibly the most innovative blog pseudonyms ever?
No?
This is the first year that Little will be joining us with real schoolwork instead of having sticker books chucked at her to keep her quiet sitting beside us, sweetly playing with a basket of special educational toys that I lovingly selected.
And so here is The Plan:
Little
Big
I love love LOVE Math-U-See and All About Spelling and anticipate using them all the way through (in fact, I am an affiliate of All About Spelling and you can read my review of it here.)
We do everything together, so Little will do Literature and Science right alongside us.
Last year I realized that my kids actually retain more when we do less formal schoolwork, so I have really cut back on the scheduled workbook-y type things. Math, Spelling, and eventually Latin will be our top priorities. I discovered Notebooking, and my kids love it, so we will be doing some Interest Led Notebooking – we are still working on a 50 States in 50 Weeks study, and there will also be random book reports and science stuff. They also enjoy activities like Phonics Ad-Libs, Lollipop Logic, and Dr. DooRiddles. Last week after the Giant Math Hissy Fit, I purchased a one month trial of IXL.com and both of my kids love it – the math drills are excellent, and they’ve each spent over 4 hours playing so far.
I also spend a truckload of money at Amazon (don’t we all) to keep them in interesting, living books. In fact, today we are expecting one of the largest orders I’ve ever placed, containing books like Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Aesop for Children, The Story of Inventions, all of the Little House on the Prairie books, the entire One Small Square set by Donald Silver, and a bunch of biographies by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire.
Dadgum it. I just realized that I spent a fortune at Amazon and did not get one single thing for myself. That is not right, yo.
I can’t wait to see who links up and read all about your homeschooling adventures! Happy NOT back to school!
(ps – if you are still undecided on a grammar/language arts program, I have Emma Serle’s Language Lessons for sale. Read more about them here)
I am at Heart of the Matter today, blathering on about organizing with these cute containers:
(don’t you hate that? “If you want to read me, click here! Dance, monkeys, DANCE!”)
For those of you who did not win the Classroom Friendly Pencil Sharpener Give Away I did a while back, I’m giving away 2 more over at Heart of the Matter today!
We will accept entries for a week, so hop over there and try to win!
I have to go to Jury Duty today. The jury duty part doesn’t bother me – it’s interesting and I can pat myself on the back for doing my Civic Duty and all that – but there is NO PARKING at the courthouse, and they won’t even let me bring a bottle of water. No water! That’s inhumane. I drink a lot of water and the idea of being separated from my giant cup is making twitchy.
It’s all those damn terrorists fault.
And I’m gonna have to get up all early, too. Dadgum it.
Should I take knitting? They said no sharp objects. I don’t want my stuff taken away by some Visigoth who doesn’t appreciate hand knitting. I suppose I’ll stick with a trashy novel. I don’t even have a decent phone to play Words With Friends! Poor, poor, poor me.
Plus, I’ll betcha the chairs are uncomfortable. All chairs are uncomfortable when your feet don’t reach the floor.
If my ass starts hurting, I can’t promise I won’t whine about it tomorrow.
Blame the terrorists.
(oh lookie! I’m on a watch list now!)
You know how little kids always have a bazillion questions?
And how a lot of them are the same one? Over…and over…and over….?
Well, I finally did something about that and I’m at Heart of the Matter talking about it today.
I have a craft project up over at Heart of the Matter - making Valentine’s Day Cards! If you are brave enough to turn your kids loose with glue and tissue paper, check it out.
Now then, peeps, let get to some more Ask a Homeschool Graduate Questions!
Kristy asked:
Yes, I did like being homeschooled. We slept in, went to the library in the middle of the day, and had jobs. It was a much more relaxed lifestyle than going to public school had been. When I was about 16, my parents bought a used 5th wheel. They took several months off from work and we traveled all over the eastern part of the United States. It was cramped and we were broke, but I have so many memories – fall in Tennessee, a campground right on Lake Ontario with the biggest spider webs I’ve ever seen, riding the subway in New York City, watching my dad see names he knew on the Vietnam Memorial… So yes. I did like it.
From what I remember, there were pretty much only two choices when it came to curriculum back then – Abeka and A.C.E. We used A.C.E. It was ABYSSMAL. I would never, ever recommend it to someone wanting to homeschool, even though it’s been over 20 years since I used it and they surely have changed things by now. It was just horrific. I remember specifically in math being given problems that could only be solved using concepts that had not been covered yet. French was the same way – they threw words around that I had never even seen before. And the memorization! Pages and pages of it. I hated that. And it was BORING – a thousand black and white workbooks that all looked the same. Gah. Just talking about it is bringing up bad memories.
It occurs to me as I write this how contradictory that is - I liked homeschooling but hated the curriculum. I never thought about it like that before. I guess the curriculum was such a small part of the homeschool experience that it’s not the most prevalent memory when I look back. My sister and I were pretty much done with our work by noon and had the rest of the day to do other things. We both worked with my dad who was a general contractor. I learned how to pour concrete and operate a sandblaster. We read a lot. I had a job working 3 or 4 nights a week in a restaurant from the time I was 13.
College was not a huge transition. Remember, I had attended public school up until the first few weeks of 8th grade, so classrooms and changing classes were not completely new to me. I was very lucky to make several good friends right off the bat and was close to them all through college. In fact, my friend Sarah is the one who invited me to the campus Bible study where I eventually met my husband. I met my Best Friend in some math class or other and we’ve been friends for twenty years.
(dude. how is that possible that I’m old enough to have done something 20 years ago - and I was IN my twenties when it happened?
Oh, right. I’m old now.)
As far as feeling prepared, it actually wasn’t too bad. I’d had such a bad experience in high school with math, I was convinced I sucked at it. When I took the college entrance exam, my math scores were so low it changed my overall ACT score by almost 30 percent. But when you go to school to become an engineer, there’s not really a lot of room for a math phobia. So, I took a remedial algebra class, realized I didn’t suck at math – A.C.E. did – and went on to successfully take many, many, many more math intense classes.
The moral of the story is this: Life does not begin and end at 16, 17, or 18. Not doing something well or not liking something at 17 does not mean your kids are doomed to an entire life of sucking in that subject. If your kids don’t seem to be picking up math or essay writing or biology as well as you think they should, DO NOT let yourself feel like a failure. If you are making yourself crazy because you can’t find The Exact Right curriculum that makes advanced calculus or applied genetics a breeze…then stop trying. You can’t teach your kids every single thing by the time they are grown, and they won’t excel at every single thing, either. Many, many things can be learned after high school.
In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that virtually EVERYTHING we all know, we learned after high school.
In fact, there are times when I am convinced that the specifics of the subjects taught before the age of 15 are completely arbitrary and matter not a whit when it comes to anything that happens in real life. I want my kids to know HOW to learn and HOW to think. That way, when I miss something or screw it up somehow – they can fix it themselves.
Lookit. You teach your sons how to pee IN the toilet and not AROUND the toilet, and I say you will have accomplished everything you really need to.
You won’t just be doing your future daughters-in-law a favor - nay, you will be doing THE WORLD a favor.
Even though I have resigned myself somewhat to this whole child-led learning idea, I haven’t quite beat back my need for Checking Stuff Off A List. I am still trying to find a middle ground that satisfies all parties. I flailed around and finally came up with a starting point that works for me. I wrote about How to Create Your Own Unit Study at Heart of the Matter last week.
And yesterday they graciously printed one of my favorite Christmas recipes – Quick and Easy Cake Mix Cookies. These are unbelievably easy, with only a few ingredients. They are a true staple of mine. One year I gave away something like 50 dozen of them.
As a matter of fact, I think I have all the stuff to make another batch…
Before I get to this week’s blog hop, I’d like to say how very, very honored I am to have an article posted at Heart of the Matter Online today. My take on Education Meets Real Life. Check it out.
Here we are at Week 4 of Good Gravy, I Hope This Blog Hop Motivates Me To Finish Something Already!
This week I managed to finish two hats!
Actually, if I were being completely honest, I would have to admit I finished them at 11pm on Sunday night. Let’s hear it for Procrastination!
This one will be for Little, who loves frilly pink things. It’s being modeled by an unfortunate, nameless, faceless fellow who normally resides on the fireplace mantle as a vase. Try to ignore the filthy kitchen table in the background, and also The Real Housewives playing on the television.
I knit it with Plymouth Confusion yarn, which was not in a skein like I thought, but a hank that needed to be wound on a ball winder. ALL sorts of cursing happening when I realized this, because I had already picked it to death looking for the end and turned it into a disgusting tangled mess. Even though I bought this yarn on a 50% off sale, it was still too expensive to chuck it in the trash and flounce off in a snit. I persevered, and think the finished hat is super adorable. Little is super adorable as well, so it should be a good match.
This one will be for Big. I don’t love it for some reason. It came out humongous, for one thing. For another, I can see all the mistakes (naturally), which is what happens when I “just wing it.” It’ll be okay, though. My son also happens to be beautiful and will distract people from my inability to count the correct amount of rows between color changes.
Other than that, I really didn’t accomplish anything. Between going to the funeral and being sick, I feel like I’m two weeks behind on my life. Jim made noises about helping me; but when I showed him my To Do list (which takes up two full pages of my notebook) he sort of chuckled uncomfortably and turned up the teevee.
Next week, though – next week I am going to Kick Some Ass!
Maybe.