Practical Help & Encouragement for Your Homeschool
I don’t want to write this.
As I type, next year’s curriculum books are staring at me. “Plan ahead with us!” they beckon.
I just don’t want to spend time looking back when there’s so much to do to prepare for next year! Full speed ahead, I say!
But no. Not yet.
Continue reading “Looking Back on 2020: A Homeschool End-of-Year Review (Part 2)”
2020 has been quite a doozy so far, hasn’t it?
Most of us are still reeling from the unexpected spin COVID-19 put on the last few months of this school year. And just when we thought things were looking up, we find ourselves in the midst of another set of trials and civil unrest.
It seems like a lifetime ago that I was planning out our curricula and wondering what the year would bring. I definitely didn’t expect all this!
Continue reading “Looking Back on 2020: A Homeschool End-of-Year Review (Part 1)”
I can’t bring myself to send out “just another post” this week. There’s too much unrest. Too much turbulence. Too much to process to move forward without pausing.
Before we can even attempt to reflect on the last school year or make plans for the next one, we simply must stop and acknowledge all that 2020 has brought so far.
Continue reading “Pause to Pray”
The final stop on this Tour of Our Homeschool is the history shelf.
Early in this shelf’s career here in my home, it had the misfortune of being partly empty. And, since no empty space remains empty for long around here, it’s now become the “History-and-Geography-and-Health-and-Art-and-Bible-and-Character-and-Whatever-Else-I-Can-Cram-In-There” shelf.
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today so I’ll get right to it. If you missed the beginning posts in this series, click here to catch up.
Continue reading “A Tour of Our Homeschool: History (& More) Shelves”
Early in my homeschool mom career, language arts caused a lot of confusion for me. There are so many subcategories within the subject – I just didn’t know where to begin.
Handwriting, reading (including phonics and sight words), spelling, grammar, composition, poetry, literature, public speaking…. What do I teach when? And how? Ahhh! 🤯
Over the years, I’ve been able to make better sense of it all. My curriculum shelves, however, still reveal the winding journey of trial and error I’ve gone through in the search for language arts resources for my kids.
Continue reading “A Tour of Our Homeschool: Language Arts Shelves”
Our tour continues!
(If you missed the first posts in this series, start here to get caught up.)
First, though, a quick note…
I’m not sharing the contents of our homeschool room and shelves because I found the BEST or MOST PERFECT stuff that all homeschool families need to own.
I’m doing this tour because I remember how much it helped me to see how others homeschool. It helped me decide how home education could work for our family. I loved seeing how people organize their spaces, what kinds of school things they had on their shelves, and what worked and didn’t work for them.
Continue reading “A Tour of Our Homeschool: Science Shelves”
In the previous post in this series, I introduced you to the curriculum shelves in our homeschool area. Now let’s zoom in and see what’s filling up those shelves.
Note: If you missed the first couple posts in this Tour of Our Homeschool series, start here to get caught up.
Right now, it seems to work for us to have a shelf (or two) for each main subject area and a coordinating bin for the non-book materials for that subject. So, for example, here are the math shelves and the storage cube drawer where I keep the curricula and math supplements we aren’t using this year.
Continue reading “A Tour of Our Homeschool: Math Shelves”
Asking what a homeschool room should look like is like asking what someone’s backyard should look like. That is, there’s no one right answer. It totally depends on the needs, desires, resources and situation of each unique family.
So far, in this Tour of Our Homeschool series, I’ve shared about the desks and tables we use for homeschooling all over our house. Now I’d like to focus in on the corner of our lower level that we call our “school room”.
Continue reading “A Tour of Our Homeschool: School Room”
You never imagined yourself doing school at home. Or maybe you did, but not yet… and definitely not because schools closed suddenly during a pandemic! You don’t have the luxury of researching and planning over the summer months – this is happening NOW!
But for now – right now – you want to make the most of this. For the next three weeks or three months or however long it lasts, you want to take the lemons and make lemonade.
Continue reading “How to Survive School at Home During the Coronavirus Pandemic – Tips From a Homeschool Mom”
Over the years, I’ve spoken to many people who are considering homeschooling or just starting out. At some point, almost all of them have asked some variation of the following question:
What does homeschooling actually look like?
And they don’t mean it in some vague, theoretical way. They mean: What does it literally look like?
They want to know things like… How is my school-room setup? Do I even have a dedicated school space? What shelves do I use? How and where do I store my homeschool curricula? Do my kids have binders or cubbies or how do they keep their work organized? Do they each have their own desk?
So, in this series of posts, I’ll be giving you a detailed look into the physical set-up of our homeschool.
Continue reading “A Tour of Our Homeschool: Desks and Tables”