I am a homebody.  It is easier to be at home.  We get more done, school and otherwise, if we limit our time out of the house.

It helps that we only have one car.  

We do enjoy outside activities, but stick to ones right here in our small community, with occasional family and friend field trips. 

It works for us, but I still need a little support.  So, I have several forums I hang out on.

I have a couple homeschooling forums, a notebooking forum and T4L forums that I go to regularly.  I don’t always post on them, but I learn a lot from previous posts.

I have one homeschooling forum I have been a member of for 10 years.  This one is like family.  I post there daily.

I also have a couple of CHD heart mom support forums I am active on.  These are very important to me by keeping me informed and giving me a place to talk or vent with other heart moms.

I consider these forums, the ones I am actively posting on and the ones I am actively reading on, a big part of my overall support as a stay-at-homeschooling mom.

Do any of you have children who seem to struggle with the whole concept of Time4Learning?

My 10 year old loves what he’s learning, but he really dislikes to read.  We’ve tried Peedy, but while that was a big plus in the beginning, the novelty has worn off a bit.  The distortion of the voice is just too much for him to work around.

Lately, I’ve been sharing the reading with him.  He reads a paragraph, then I read one.

He is loving the History lessons and seems to get much more from it if I read along with him. 

I just thought I’d ask.  In some ways I feel he should be taking more responsibility, but I want him to love learning. 

Do any of you with kids in the lower grades test your kids? I wasn’t going to when I started, but I am testing Tim all week anyway. I wanted to have something besides his work, to have in one place, that gave a sample of all our state requires him to know. He took the language arts test today, he’s doing math tomorrow, science on Wednesday, and social studies on Thursday. He only missed two answers out of 77 on the language arts, I was so jazzed! That’s the subject that he’s come the farthest in this year. When we started he didn’t even know all the names of the letters, much less the sounds they made. I had planned on reviewing for the rest of the year, but he really can’t stand repeating things, and I knew he had retained most of what we taught, so why drag it out? This way, if there’s some things that he doesn’t really remember, we can work on those for the last few weeks.

I also revised our school calendar. I originally had his last day of school in the middle of July, with only about two weeks off before starting 1st grade. But I decided to end on May 30, and then we’ll just use T4L and some of the other online sites we like to keep him on a schedule. It just won’t be anything I have to record or worry about, which will give me time to write up the lesson plan for next year. If I have something down on paper, I am terrible about thinking that I have to stick to it. So, changing our last day of school will take pressure off of both of us!

Are all of you aware of the Time4Learning forum?  Do you ever read it?  Impressions & reactions?  What other forums and newsgroups do you read/participate in?

Tomorrow(Monday 4/21) will be our second full week back to school.

It has been such a trying time. You may recall that on Easter Sunday, my husband broke his ankle in 2 places. It has been a LOOOONG journey. I guess we all have our struggles and heartaches that we deal with.

The neighbor who joins us for school seems to have a new lease on school. I am pleased the break suited him so well. I had already decided that I would not press him to answer (or make his answer better) when he has to type out a response. Also, I feel that he has gotten as much as he can from reviewing addition, subtraction, and phonics on the second grade level. He has not completely mastered those subjects as you would imagine a “normal” 12 year old would, but I don’t know that he will ever completely master them, so I figure just let him move up w/ the mastery he has achieved so I don’t frustrate him.

He seems happier and more relaxed so do I.