This week’s topic for the Virtual Curriculum Fair is math. I love math. However, my love of math doesn’t equal a love of teaching math. I have written quite a bit about math during my years participating in the Virtual Curriculum Fair. In fact, I’ve written so much, that I don’t have anything further to add to this topic today.…
What About Reading Comprehension?
I would like to begin this week’s submission to the Virtual Curriculum Fair with a disclaimer. I am not an expert on special education, and I have no training in teaching children with reading delays. What I have is experience with my own 14 year old son who is on the autism spectrum. However, we have not found any…
Homeschool Goal Setting – Looking forward, Looking back
It’s January 1st. The first day of a brand new year always brings a level of excitement. For a perfectionist like me, it’s like a clean slate, an unmarked page, or a fresh untracked snow. I’ve been studying about goal setting over the last few weeks and I have learned a few things. Goals need to be concrete and measurable. You…
Speekee Accelerate – Homeschool Spanish
There are a few subjects that strike fear in the hearts of homeschoolers. Advanced math and high school science are a couple that are usually on the list. But there’s another equally scary subject and that’s… FOREIGN LANGUAGE! Why is foreign language so scary? The simple fact is that most of us in the US are…
Our Homeschool Curriculum Choices
We have finished 3 weeks of homeschool for this new school year: my 14th year of homeschooling and I’m still a homeschool curriculum junkie. Have I really been homeschooling that long? Many of my homeschool curriculum choices this year are back to my old favorites. My oldest son has started college and is living 3 hours away…
Modernity – Modern History from Compass Classroom
Compass Classroom recently released a new modern history class entitled Modernity, and they gave me the opportunity to preview the course. Covering a wide range of topics from modern history including the Enlightenment, Napoleon, the Industrial Revolution, and the World Wars, the high school level class consists of 27 weekly lessons. Each lesson includes 5 video segments with instructor…
The Sounds of Music
This is the last week of the Virtual Curriculum Fair for 2016 and the topic this week is the arts. I have probably mentioned that art is not one of the things that we do exceptionally well in our homeschool. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important, it’s just one of those things that gets…
Encouraging Curiosity about the World
I’m continuing my look back over the 13 years of homeschooling my oldest son, David. This week the Virtual Curriculum Fair focuses on Exploring Our World. I think that my statement of Starting Gently, Finishing Strong, may be less applicable to this topic. We did indeed start gently. We used Story of the World in…
From Counting to Calculus – Homeschool Math
Finishing Strong Starting Gently Last week I talked about my somewhat unusual position of graduating my first homeschool student this spring, and starting my (presumably) last student in Kindergarten this coming fall. David, my senior, is a math natural. But teaching him math was not without struggles. In fact, there were many battles fought over math.These included…
Finishing Strong – Starting Gently
A Unique Perspective I think I’m in a somewhat unusual situation this year. I am graduating my oldest student this spring. This will mark the end of the homeschool journey that started with him over 13 years ago. But as we’ve gone through all the college application process and getting ready for the next stage…