Homeschool 101: Hand Over the Reins!

Homeschool Help for High School: Hand over the reigns to your high schooler! Let your high school students take ownership of their education. This is a simple statement which takes quite a bit of time to finally accomplish. What I mean to say is, the process of handing the responsibility over to your student is…

Homeschool 101: Challenge Middle Schoolers to Do Big Things

Homeschool Help for the Middle Schoolers: Do Big Things! My daughter was the first in our family to accomplish the National Novel Writing Month challenge (www.nanowrimo.org). During middle school, she wrote a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I had never heard of NaNoWriMo, but I let this challenge fulfill her homeschooling requirements…

More High School Tips: Preparing for SAT II Tests

SAT II tests in science, math, and foreign languages evaluate skills which take more than one year in a subject to develop. In other words, if your student is required or desires to take a SAT subject test, my advice would be for them to take at least two years (or the equivalent) in that…

Day 29: Homeschooling Tip – Don’t Neglect Service

The majority of our homeschooling days center around our children and meeting their physical, emotional, social, and academic needs. It is easy to become so wrapped up in their lives and their future we neglect to teach them to be sensitive to the needs of others. Service is a wonderful opportunity to teach our children…

Day 28: High School Tip – Register with the State

For Florida homeschooling parents: Make sure your high school student is registered as a homeschooling student their junior and senior years. Even if you registered when they began kindergarten and keep an active portfolio and submit annual evaluations, verify that your student is registered in their last two years of high school with a call…

Day 21: Homeschooling Tips – Focus on Your Child’s Strengths

As a homeschooling mom, I had the tendency to focus on my children’s weakest areas, giving them the most attention and criticism. Spelling was an area of weakness for all of my children when they were young. And although they were good writers, I would read their papers and rather than looking at the content,…

Homeschooling 101: Give your students time on the computer

I know this seems like a contradictory statement, just a couple of days ago I encouraged homeschooling parents to limit electronic use in their children’s lives. But they do need to be competent when it comes to working with computers, so it is necessary to prepare them adequately. In the grammar school years, it is most…

Day 16: High School Tip – Encourage Literary Devices

My hair is a nightmare!  Metaphors   Encourage the use of literary devices. Surely students survive the stress of statistics.  Alliteration Childhood disappears like the morning dew on a mountain lake.  Similes The drama followed her like a Jane Austin novel.  Literary references The waves appeared to be guided by the hand of God.  Thematic…

Day 15: Homeschooling Tip – Write, Write, Write

I remember reading a book on teaching children to write in my early years of homeschooling called Anyone Can Write. I have misplaced the book and cannot give the name of the author, but what I remember loving about the book was that it gave specific examples of a progressive approach to teaching our children…