Last week I said I would drop a few suggestions as to what to do to prevent your child from completely losing all the information you’ve worked so hard to pour into their heads during the school year.

Well, I do have a few suggestions for you this week. First, if you are not an unschooler, have you ever given any thought about how they accomplish school if they are unschoolers? Summer time might be a time to make a small foray into their world. By that I mean, why not let your child lead some of the educational experiences during the summer?

There is no reason why your child can’t learn a lot of information on a subject of their choosing. Let them do the research, translate that research into activities, projects, and reports. Remember that it doesn’t have to be terribly academic for them to learn things. Mainly you just need to keep the gears working!

Another idea you might consider is having your own, at-home summer reading program. You can either let them read the book, or maybe read out loud so the whole family can participate. You can customizable vocabulary worksheets online that will help you document the learning they are doing with literature. Because there are many resources online that are customizable, you can print out book report pages, or even find a notebook at a school supply store that will let you document their summer reading program. Don’t forget to have rewards for each book and for completion of the list of books over the summer.

If you are looking for kindergarten or other early child education keep in mind that young children tend to like lots of lights, color, and sound. You can find this in online games as well as many educational videos either online, or one numerous science and nature channels on the television.

Summer is also a time when you can concentrate on one subject. For example, why not find a science curriculum to concentrate on for the summer? It might be a chance to do some extra experiments and hands-on activities that are difficult to fit in during the regular school year.

There are more ideas to come as the summer gets started, stay tuned!

Summer is almost here! Many homeschoolers who follow the public school schedule will be wrapping up their school year, and preparing to take a break for the summer.

Just because you are going to take a summer break does not mean that you can totally abandon learning for the summer. If you do, then it will be really hard for your child to get back into a learning frame of mind, and you will find that some of that hard earned learning in math and spelling will have to be reviewed hard to bring your child back up to the point where he or she was at the end of the school year.

So what do you do to let your child have a break from school and at the same time not let all that knowledge leak out their ears?

Well, that’s easy! There are so many summer learning activities up to and including summer high school programs that you can find something that will be fun and educational for your child without it seeming like they are not getting a break.

Whether you are looking for something as simple as handwriting pages or something like SAT or ACT review course you can find it online with a little creative searching.

Over the next couple of weeks I will try to drop a few more of these summer activity links for you to look at. And if you are like me and don’t take summer break from school you can still use some of these activities to keep it fresh and change things up so that homeschooling through the summer doesn’t become a drag!

People ask what type of homeschooling we do. There are many types of homeschooling. There is the classical approach, and the Charlotte Mason approach. Some people teach school-at-home, which is different than homeschool, sort of.

What we do is what I could call eclectic homeschooling. I define eclectic homeschooling as homeschooling that is truly tailor-made for my daughter. We use many different resources and styles, always picking something that will work for her.
In some subjects she needs a visual approach to learning. She likes to see videos and other visual teaching aids. Her math curriculum is very visually oriented and is online, so she can move at her own pace.

Sometimes audio learning works best for her. Her social studies curriculum is online, but is not very animated. There is a lot of reading, and while she reads just fine, it moves to slow for her, she gets bored and distracted easily. So we use a narrator program that reads to her. For social studies it works great, we still cover the same materials, and she enjoys it more.

In some subjects she is a very hands-on learner. She really likes hands-on science, and so we are adapting her homeschool science curriculum to meet that need. She loves to do experiments, and often takes the topic she learns within her curriculum and modifies it and applies it in different ways. Recently, she took an assignment in science that was about adaptations and then went to a popular game that allows you to create your own creatures, made a creature with certain adaptations. She then wrote several paragraphs explaining how those adaptations helped her fictional creature survived.

As she gets older, (she is in 7th grade now) we are pulling material from many different places to give her a well-rounded and individualized education. We do not operate our homeschool on a public school classroom model, but she does take some classes that are based on the classroom model.

I supposed we are truly eclectic homeschoolers because we choose different sources for different subjects. We used whatever method works, and vary the delivery according to my daughter’s needs and interests. We are a homeschooling family that would never be successful if we had to use only a boxed curriculum, it simply would not work for us.

As long as we can put together out own curriculum I think we will be successful. The flexibility to use what works for my daughter is a major factor in why we homeschool.

Don’t you love to see your children learn? I think it is amazing to watch my daughter when something “clicks” and she gets it. I have always wondered at parents who ask me how I know if my child is learning. I know she is learning because I can see it!

Whether it is something as simple as learning to use the correct word in a sentence by contextual cues or something more complex like the order of operations in a more advanced math problems, I never tire of seeing the moment when my daughter learns something.

If you are hesitating to make the commitment to homeschool because you worry about teaching your child or you worry that he or she might not learn from you, let me assure you that you can teach your child.

Homeschooling is not difficult, even when your child reaches high school and needs to take courses you might not be comfortable with such as an algebra curriculum. There are so many resources these days to help you in a homeschooling journey.

So, if this school year in traditional schooling has been less satisfying than you expected, or if you are searching for a way to turn up the excitement in your child’s educational experience you might consider homeschooling when school resumes in the fall. Take the opportunity to start your research now, and know that you will find many resources online that will help you make homeschooling possible, if that is what you think is right for your family. I will tell you that homeschooling is an adventure and a journey, and I would not give up the opportunity to homeschool my child for anything!

Are you considering homeschooling? Are you terrified that you might be getting in over your head? I understand your concerns…

I don’t know why I was so afraid of homeschooling when we first started.

I was terrified that I would miss teaching some vitally important piece of information, and my child would be ruined, ostracized, or have serious psychological damage from skipping some piece of her education. What if I ruined her?

Well, so far, so good…whew! We haven’t missed anything too vital in the six plus years we have been homeschooling. It is obvious when my daughter is learning, and if that forward progress seems to slow down or totally stall out, then we back up a step or three, and fix the problem.

Then I had that other fear…(remember: it was the middle of my daughter’s first grade year when I was having this fear, just to kind of put my out of control fears about homeschooling into perspective!) How could I possibly teach my daughter algebra? (I nearly failed algebra in high school, and dismally had to repeat two or three times in college to complete.) How would I prepare her to take the ACT test, or the SAT?

Again, I have grown past these fears. I’m not quite ready for my daughter to take algebra yet, but when she does, I will just find a good algebra curriculum. I will find a course, or a book, or something to teach her the test taking skills she needs for the ACT. While I believe I could also instruct her in how to write for the SAT, I will probably farm that out to a SAT writing tutor.

I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with my abilities to teach my daughter what she needs to know. I’ve also gotten more comfortable with the idea of admitting when I can’t teach her, and asking for help.

If you are a new homeschooling family, or you are still wrestling with the decision as to whether you can homeschool your children, try not to panic. I know that it looks terrifying, I’ve been where you are, and I remember my fears. I just want you to know that you will grow past the initial fears as you see your child learning. There is no question in your mind when you see them “get” a concept.

Each day, week, and year might bring new challenges and new fears, but you will gain confidence with each challenge you and your child master along the homeschool journey. You can homeschool, you can do it successfully, with support and resources you can be assured that your child will learn what he or she needs to know to move on to the next level.

Go ahead and take the plunge into homeschooling! You can do it!