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…
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…
As a homeschool mom of 5 who works part-time from home, I have a lot to manage. Between working, keeping up with my teenagers’ schedules, teaching my younger children, and managing my home, free time is rare. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my lack of close friends. I’ve tried to analyze the reason. I…
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…
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…
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…
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…
As a new homeschool mom, I wasn’t always confident that I was doing things “right”. Looking back on those early years, I think I pushed too hard sometimes. And then at other times I didn’t push enough. (I tend to swing between extremes.) I wondered if David was reading enough. Was his handwriting too messy? Were…
I’m sure I’m not alone. I want my children to be creative and have opportunities to be artistic. But finding time to do art projects with my younger ones is tough. And letting them have free access to paint? No way. So most of their art consists of coloring with crayons or colored pencils. I’m…
Here are our 7th grade curriculum choices. William will be in the 7th grade this year, though he works behind that grade level, so these might be more accurately titled 6th grade curriculum choices. I already have him one grade level behind his age, so I don’t want to move him back further. That is…