As a mother I am always aware of the dangers of the internet for my children. I know most of the things my children view are innocent enough but with social media becoming so prevalent in our society it is nearly impossible to keep everything clean. Our family sets rules that keep our children off the internet until they are of an age where they can self monitor what is appropriate and not. We train them in Biblical principles so they know what constitutes sin in this area. Even this vigilance is not going to always keep them safe from everything, however. Action Alert internet safety is one way to keep a constant watch over our children.
I am an avid reader but my children, while they enjoy reading to an extent, do not share my passion. In an attempt to help them get the most out of the literature we chose last year we decided to take a couple weeks to really focus on 1 or 2 books. I had decided to use Progeny Press Study Guides. This year I was given a chance to use one of their high school guides and to check out their new interactive PDF formats. All of the study guides are now available in this new format which allows the student to type in the answers directly in the PDF document.
I have to say I never thought I would be teaching Logic to my high schooler when we began thinking about homeschooling. Lately, however, my wise husband and I have been discussing our children’s need to be able to clearly and effectively get their point across. Things like Speech, Debate, and Logic have been tossed around. When I got the opportunity to review a Logic course from Classical Academic Press I was grateful.
Cruise post goes live every Tuesday
I thought since my blogging has been a bit review oriented lately, what with being pregnant and exhausted and all, I would join the TOS Blog Cruise and talk about what our favorite Science resource is this year. I am by no means a science person, I much more prefer History, Art, and Language Arts. Yes I do know that makes me strange. I understand the need for my children to be taught Science and taught well.
I am always looking for a way to allow my kids to have fun while learning. They are huge into video games and so online learning websites really appeal to us. We had a chance to review K5Learning, an online math and reading enrichment program for k-5th grade.
There are 4 components to the program:
I recently began trying to teach my 3 y/o daughter her alphabet and it really has been hit or miss. She never wants to stick with one letter long and tends to not want to work on the activities I set out. So far it is all play and we are ok with that but I want to begin a more structured lesson with her. It has been a struggle with her resistant and me frustrated. Lucky for me I was given the chance to check out Reading Eggs.
The one thing I always worry about with each of my children and being a homeschool mom is whether or not I will do an adequate job teaching them to read, and read well. I tend to be a perfectionist and scripted lessons are ideal so I can adjust what I need to, yet still feel I have a solid grasp on what I am teaching since I have no teaching experience other than what I learned in college ages ago. All About Reading Level 1 fits this so well for me.
I have to tell you about something that has been a true life saver for me. You see I just gave birth to my fourth child and have some pretty sore back muscles. I received a product from Beeyoutiful health and skin care called Ow!-Ease which is meant to relieve the pain of bruising, strains and similar ailments.
Last year I was blessed to be able to review the first volume of Apologia Press’s new line of worldview curriculum, What We Believe series . You may read that review by clicking here Who Is God. This year when I had the chance to review the second volume I was thrilled to say the least. Who Am I is everything I expected and more. This time I received not only the textbook but also the MP3 audio CD, coloring book, and journal. I am blown away by the company’s generosity.
Recently my daughter has been asking to do school which has me thrilled beyond belief. My problem is that she is not yet 3 and I firmly believe structured school time for her is better late than early. I am familiar with lapbooks and having done a few with my boys decided to pull their old ones out for her to look at. She was hooked and began asking for her own books.
I found some free ones online and while they were ok I really wanted one that could become her Pre-K book. I looked for something that had colors, numbers, letters, shapes, basically one we could do a bit at a time and it would last us a long time. I was having trouble so I asked my trusty fellow homeschool moms and was directed to a new-to-me-resource, A Journey Through Learning Lapbooks.
One of the important reasons we decided to homeschool was to combat all the bad attitudes/behavior our children were bringing home from traditional school. I began realizing even my youngest at the time in kindergarten was coming home with nastiness in his heart. It only took a short while for us to implement a study on Christian virtues.
While this is something I have always planned myself I often wondered if there was a really good curriculum out there that would be already planned out for me. It turns out there is some wonderful plans out, one of which I recently had the pleasure of checking out myself.
Have you ever tried incorporating classical music into your children’s school? It is something we try to add in each year and each year it just kind of gets put on the back burner. It just seems like we lose steam trying to pull together resources on the time period, composer, and pieces. If you are finding this to be the case with your attempts I am so excited to tell you about an amazing resource that takes all the work out of learning classical music.
We were contemplating our choices for next years foreign language studies since my teen will be doing his first of two high school credits. He has tossed around the idea of either Japanese or Spanish, so we were blessed to have an opportunity to review a very good Spanish curriculum geared especially to home schoolers called R.E.A.L. Home School Spanish.
I have always wanted to learn Spanish myself but never thought I could teach it unless I did. R.E.A.L. Home School Spanish is a very simple approach to learning a foreign language. In fact R.E.A.L. stands for RELAX, ENJOY, ASPIRE, LEARN SPANISH. sounded like something I could do but would it be enough for my teen.
