flynn011

I've just read a book by Rob Parsons about nurturing children's faith, called "Getting Your Kids through Church without them Ending up Hating God". I highly recommend it. Rob Parsons runs a charity in the United Kingdom called Care for the Family.  I might be wrong in likening it to Focus on the Family in the US, but it seems to be an organization along the same lines. You can see my review about it at amazon.co.uk.

I have been home-educating my children for over seven years now, and though I have dabbled in various curricula from unit study to biblically based, they all have one general thing in common: a sympathy to the methods espoused by Charlotte Mason over a hundred years ago. If you want to know more about the Charlotte Mason method, you can Google the name, or start off with this website. In the meantime, I thought I would share with you the kind of schedule that my son, Killer, has responded to so well over the past year. I have made it myself using the "table" function in Word, printing it out, and then laminating it.  That way, he can use a water soluble pen to mark through his work every day, then wipe it all off for the next day, to start over again. To reproduce it here, I had to save it as a JPEG in "Paint", so it's got a bit garbled in translation.  I think you can get the gist of it, though.

This is a blog topic that deserves more attention than the 5 minutes I'm about to give it, but I've just got to get the thoughts off my chest right now (at 12:30 am!). What I should be doing now instead of blogging!! I've been home-educating for seven years, many of which were with a baby or a toddler and, as anyone with aforementioned personnel in their home-ed environment knows, they make for very challenging times. Now my youngest is 4 and a pretty good reader, plus well-focused and enjoys being at the school table with the others. Meanwhile, my 8-year-old boy, whom caused me many-a-problem with behaviour until we went to a cranial osteopath a couple of years ago, is turning into a really top-notch narrator a-la-Charlotte Mason method, showing me he actually can listen to my reading aloud, and can indeed tell back to me what I've been reading, including our latest nightly story of the Shakespeare play, "Merchant of Venice". So the long and the short of it i...

Just wanted to remind you all that ShillerMath has offered you an extra $100 off either Kit 1 or Kit 2 if you order before the end of June and use the special code available only here: KatPat11. That's an AMAZING deal -- less than $100 a year for a kit that lasts all your children.  Snap it while you can!

People often ask about math curriculum -- which one is best, which one do I use, which would I recommend, which would be a good change from "x". Mathematics can be learned without a textbook When it comes to boys and math, I think there are three things to keep in mind: first, young boys especially are spatial learners, so a curriculum using manipulatives will probably be better; second, boys will probably prefer math to other subjects because there's not as much writing, so a curriculum that they could sometimes do independently will be useful so they can spend a lot of time doing it as and when they feel like it; finally, boys are not all the same, so what suits one, may not suit another. And likewise, girls.  But that's another story .... Probably the biggest surprise, however, is that research has shown that it's not so much which curriculum you choose and use, but whether or not you, the teacher, are excited by it. Homeschoolers in the US and UK tend to choos...

I'm very pleased to introduce Amie Plumley, the blog-owner of  Sewing School , as a guest blogger for today's topic of boys and sewing.  Her details can be found at the end of this article. Amie writes: This semester, we had a record number of boys join our weekly sewing club.  We’ve realized that sewing with boys does require something extra on the teacher’s part.  I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because I’m a girl.  I dunno, but I thought I would share my thoughts on sewing with boys.  I am mindful of boys sewing.  What do they want to sew?  What do they need to sew?  Why will they want to sew? Sewing strengthens fine motor skill s I have come to a few conclusions.  First, from my own experience, kindergarten is the perfect age to introduce boys to sewing; however, I’m sure they can start earlier with some extra one-on-one help.  They get super excited about it and really, really see the possibilities.  They like ...

"Scratch" is a programming language for everyone to enjoy -- free to download and developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab. In a downloadable paper by Peppler and Kafai, you can see the argument for that "learning the language of creative coding is essential to expression in a digital medium." In other words, it's not just about viewing or playing the games, but constructing them oneself through coding that make essential connections to art expression. Anyway, why not?  It's cool and it's free.