We all want our kids to have a well-rounded education, right?  Homeschooling parents want plenty of opportunities for their kids to explore sports and other activities in addition to setting a high academic standard for them.   It all comes down to making sure they get everything the kids in public schools do, but kicking it up a notch too.   It’s easy enough with sports, clubs, and activities we can sign our kids up for.

But what about art?  I don’t know about you, but I’m really not the artistic type.  I had no idea there was thought and technique put into creating art, and instead thought, until pretty recently too, that it was all about making something aesthetically pleasing.  That’s important, sure, but wow – there’s so much more to it!

My kids are doing an online art program through Time4Learning, called Creativity Express.  It’s kind of neat to watch over the shoulder and learn a little something too!  This program is awesome for parents who have no idea about art, and therefore really aren’t in a position to teach art to their homeschooled kids.   It covers art history and has fun, interactive lessons covering the main concepts of line, form, color, etc.  And it does all that with fun cartoon characters that keep even fidgety kids interested.

You could always pay for private art lessons, but – ouch – they’re expensive!  One year my kids took art classes through a homeschool co-op we joined, but the teacher had a thing for “texture” and it seemed almost all of the projects involved creating texture of some kind, and skipped plenty of other important techniques.

The web is always full of possibilities, and there are some great art games to supplement the heavyweight stuff with a little fun.  But oh, why couldn’t I have been born with some artistic talent?  Sorry, kids! 

What kind of homeschooler are you? Why do you home school? There are probably as many answers to those two questions as there are homeschoolers. The vision many people have of home schoolers is of devoutly religious families with many children gathered around the kitchen table, learning from text books, in a very traditional schooling manner. While that is not an inaccurate picture, it is, perhaps, an incomplete picture. My family might be as close to the other end of the spectrum from the above picture as you can get. We do not home school for religious reasons, so we fall into the realm of secular homeschooling . The reasons we home school and the style we use go hand in hand. I want my only child to have the most tailored and individualized education she can get. Our core curriculum is Time4Learning, but we pull from many resources to round out her education. This individualized approach is sometimes call ecclectic home schooling. Other home education methods include unschooling, classical, and Charlotte Mason, but when all is said and done, homeschoolers are more alike than we are different. We all want the very best that we can offer in education, and we are committed to personal involvement in that education. As homeschoolers, no matter our style or our reasons, we should recognize our differences, and celebrate our similarities. Happy home schooling.

I found this hilarious word game that my kids love.  It’s called “Hig Pigs” and I kid you not…my kids were rolling on the floor laughing over this riddle game!  You’re supposed to answer the riddle with 2 words that rhyme, and have one syllable each.  Sounds complicated, but here’s an example:

Q:  What’s a wonderful piece of dinnerware?

A:   great plate!

See how this works?  The homeschool-mom in me loves to find original ways to improve their spelling skills, but the kid in me thought this was awfully fun!  My kids were whooping it up so much that Dad even popped his head into the room to see what the fuss was, and ended up staying to play too!

I’ve found that even after eight years of homeschooling, I’m still making a lot of adjustments to make it fun to learn. This coming year some of the adjustments are due to the fact that my two girls work independent most the time and prefer it that way. 

As usual, I reserve the right to change up learning ideas to suit their needs throughout the year. I have some hands-on books that I use to enhance their social studies experience, but I am totally digging this social studies curriculum. My 5th grader loves the U.S. presidents games.  I think because of the games and songs makes it easier for her to learn.  You see I had to teach her how to spell her name in a song way back when. So for a long time we would be out shopping or running errands and my oldest and I would be skipping and singing the spelling of her name.  She still tells the story to her friends or who will ever listen that she learned how to spell her name through a song. 

 I just know my daughter would be looked over in public school.  At home I can teach her in her learning styles not someone else’s.

Children like using the computer to learn. Time4Learning’s homeschool curricula engages and challenges your children, letting them work at their own pace.

Parents like that it tracks

My daughter has avoided word games like the plague in the past. She really didn’t like doing plain word lists, or vocabulary lists. Last year I even asked a fellow home schooling mom to “teach” my daughter spelling because it was just a serious point of friction with us. This year, I tried a different method. One of the things we tried was word ladders. Suddenly, the spelling, and having to come up with the word from a clue seemed to click into place. She loves this. By now you probably know that I am an advocate of learning through games. Here is another game we are going to try soon. It’s a rhyming word game called hig pig or higgy piggy. The clue is a riddle and the two words of the answer must rhyme. Here is an example. The riddle would be “a smelly chimp” and the answer would be a “funky monkey”. Now, if you are more traditional and just need a spelling list, or want to create your own lists for special projects or unit studies, the good news is that there are many online spelling lists where you can either find a subject matter list or create your own. I worried for a long time that we were just not getting the amount of spelling and vocabulary that we needed, but thanks to a few games, and a few lists, things are looking brighter. Why not give some of these tools a chance to work in your child’s education?