My youngest one has been sick for about 4 days with a high fever so I decided to take her to the doctor.  Well….she has pneumonia!  That wasn’t news we wanted during Christmas.  After a couple of days down she was getting very bored.  She is one that isn’t able to sit still for long.  She asked if she could do some school!!  Really?  I knew with her special needs and learning style I need to take advantage of when she wants to do extra school work.  Creating diversity is a challenge at times but it is worth it in the long run.  Anything to keep her attention for a hour or so!

At the dinner table she was telling us what she had been working on.  Now let me remind you she talks fast because she has so much on her mind she wants to just spit it out before the thought leaves her brain.  Those are her words to be exact!  I am constantly telling her slow down and speak correctly.  When she gets that excited her vocabulary goes out the window.  Improving vocabulary has always been top on my list.  Telling her the way you speak tells volumes of your intelligence and self confidence.  Some day my girl will understand and hopefully thank me for taking the time to speak correctly.

There are so many decisions to make when you’re new to homeschooling that it can really be overwhelming!  Do I use one of the public school online programs, or go it alone and choose my own curriculum?  Do I use a curriculum that comes with all the subjects together, or should I piece something together from different publishers?  And even if I get through all that, how do I know my child is really learning?

Even the veterans remember back when they were new to homeschooling, and believe it or not, years ago starting to homeschool was even more difficult!  The first thing to do is reasearch.  Figure out your child’s learning style and what works for them, and go with that.  Some types of curriculum are better for visual learners, or kinesthetic learners; it just depends.  There are plenty of resources online, and in your local library as well, that will help with this.

Next you should review different sample curriculua to see what you like.  You can do this online too, and through books if you’d prefer.  Read about homeschooling enough and you’ll eventually hit on something that “fits”.  Homeschool books are great for ideas, and giving you a jumping off point.  And finally, ask your kids for some input too.  Being new at anything can be a frustrating experience, so give yourself and your children some time to adjust!

The home school groups I belong to have students with a range of abilities, ages, learning styles, and  learning disabilities. I got the chance to talk to a mother who has two children with sensory processing and autism spectrum disorders. She talked about the need to have a very scheduled day, yet she couldn’t have too much repetition or she would lose her children’s interest and attention. Distractions are the enemy in her attempt to keep her children on task and learning. She talked about needing to balance fun and learning. I thought, I’m fortunate that I can deal with the issues my own child has, and grateful that we didn’t have to deal with much besides a some ADHD symptoms. Then I realized that, to varying degrees, we all deal with some very similar issues. We all need to keep our children on task. And we all need to balance fun and learning. I’ve discovered that my child learns better when it is fun. We use games of all sorts when we run into a concept that is difficult or a subject that is giving us problems. For example, my child had a hard time over the past couple of years with spelling. I was convinced that she was never going to learn to spell, and the frustration level at our house rose on a daily basis. When I talked to some other home school parents, I got some very good advice. We started using spelling games, of all sizes and descriptions. I wasn’t sure it was working, but over time her spelling is getting better, and we are encountering less tension with regards to spelling. If we had continued to bang our heads together over spelling, she would not have made progress, so a little fun went a long way in balancing her learning needs.

This week we had some fun by combining a bit of language study with art.  It’s called “language arts“, right?  So that’s what we did! 

Together, we made a list of all the compound words we could think of.  Of course, this required me to explain what a compound word is, and we talked about the various examples at length.  When we had a pretty big list, we broke the words down into their parts and wrote them on index cards.  Then we shuffled up the cards and had some fun by picking 2 word parts and making them into a word.  Sometimes it worked out and “mailbox” or “cowboy” appeared, but some of the combinations were silly, nonsense words like “catman”, “batstorm”, and “snowboy”.  Lots of giggling ensued, but it drove home the point!

Then we drew pictures of our nonsense words.  I let the kids use colored pencils, crayons, paint, and whatever else they wanted to make some form of art to represent their word.  We had some very interesting creations.  The “batstorm” picture was especially intense!  But it was lots of fun and the kids learned with a neat compound word game while indulging their artistic sides too!

I have already mentioned my 12 year old daughter has expressed she might want to go to public school.  Well now…the school we are looking at is a cyber school.  We already use a homeschool online curriculum so how different could this school be?  With that along with her online writing class that she already takes will she be ahead or right with her peers I ask?  I know they will do testing to place her but I question to her how different is this than being homeschooled at your own pace.  It really isn’t for the socialization because she goes a one full day and one half day.  I know I am fighting this but I hope she can see my point!