Posts tagged ‘homeschooling’

As mentioned last Friday, each week we will be featuring a new Pathway here on our blog.  In addition, we will be giving everyone FREE access to this unit for a full week.  Each Pathway contains enough resources for a full week’s worth of learning.

This week’s Free Featured Pathway is all about Booker T. Washington.

Explore the life of Booker T. Washington in this unit. Your child will create a diorama, design a stamp, and make a collage. A map and an online story are included to help your child learn more about Washington. This unit is designed to last one week, depending on how often you teach history.

To access this Pathway, simply click the link above.  While there is no registration needed, we encourage you to sign up for a 7 day free trial to access all of our great Pathways!

*Booker T. Washington clip art courtesy of ClipArtGuide.com

It happens to the best of homeschool families: homeschool burnout. It’s the point at which you simply do not want to look at another lesson plan or spelling list or sit down and work on multiplication facts.  I’ve read many articles that discuss how to avoid homeschool burnout, but what happens if you can’t avoid it?

As homeschool parents, we’re often busy juggling multiple schedules, task lists, volunteering, taxiing children to and from activities, homemaking and sometimes even working at a job.  Sometimes, you never see it coming, but you wake up one day with zero motivation or desire to do “school.” While each family’s situation is unique, I’d like to offer a few suggestions for if you should find yourself in “burnout” mode.

1.      Let go of the guilt. In my previous blog post, “Homeschooling, You’re Doing It Wrong!,” I talked about letting go of the guilt in your homeschool.  This advice applies here as well.  You can’t be all things to all people at all times, and that’s okay.  Give yourself permission to feel unmotivated for a bit.  Remember, this is only temporary.  It will pass.  With a little time, you’ll be able to return to schooling, full of passion.

2.      Take some time off. If your state laws don’t regulate otherwise, take a few days off.  Maybe even take a week off if you need to.  You’ll be able to get more accomplished after a short break than by trying to dredge through the days.  Use the time to catch up on all of those “loose ends” you’ve been meaning to tie up, work on your favorite hobby, or just hang out with the kids.

3.      Liven up your studies. If you can’t take time off from homeschooling, consider varying your routine a little.  You can plan a field trip, watch a documentary or plan a day of educational games.

As with any other trade or craft, you need to hone your craft, keeping up with the latest news, techniques and tools.

4.      Meet with other homeschooling moms or dads. Attend (or organize) a parents’ night out with your local homeschool support group.  You can host an evening in your home or your local coffee shop. It doesn’t need to be expensive or time consuming.  It might be a good idea to have an idea of some conversation starters, just to break the ice.  By the end of the evening, you’ll likely find support and inspiration from other parents.

5.     Attend a conference. Homeschooling conferences can be a great source of inspiration and support.  Consider homeschooling your craft or profession.  As with any other trade or craft, you need to hone your craft, keeping up with the latest news, techniques and tools.  Many conferences for homeschoolers are family friendly with programming options for children.  This can be a fantastic way for everyone to make friends and ignite the fire.

6.      Take time for YOU.  You are wearing many hats: parent, educator, spouse and female (or male) head of the household.  Likely, most of your waking hours are dedicated to taking care of and doing for others.  While you can’t completely ignore these responsibilities without consequences, it is important to routinely incorporate time for taking care of you.  You’ll need to determine what works best for you and your family.  Some homeschool parents set aside a little time every day while others prefer to arrange for child care for a full day once a month.  Going grocery shopping without the children doesn’t count!

7.      Reconsider your curriculum. If you’ve been on the edge of “burnout” for a while, you may want to reassess your current curriculum.  Is it boring?  Does it actually meet your children’s needs and fit your lifestyle?  You might be able to spice things up by tweaking it yourself and supplementing with other resources, such as those you’ll find at LessonPathways. With the wide variety of options today, there is no need to be “stuck” with a curriculum you don’t like.

8.      Reconsider your commitments. Take an honest look at your schedule.  Too much “busy-ness” can lead to too much stress for you and your children.  As the homeschooling movement grows, so does the number of opportunities for our children to participate in playgroups, co-ops and extracurricular activities.  While we all want our children to have the best opportunities, it’s important to remember that we don’t need to take advantage of ALL opportunities.  Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.  Determine whether your current list of outside activities is truly enriching your homeschool or stressing it.

These are a few things I’ve done when I felt unmotivated.  If you find yourself in this same situation, I hope you find these suggestions helpful.  If you’ve experienced homeschool burnout before, I’d love to hear how you overcame it. Please feel free to post your experiences in the comments section.

This post was written by Christina S., a homeschool mom, living in Michigan, with her husband, two children, dog, cat, guinea pig and turtle.  You can read more about her by visiting the “Our People” page.

What does it mean, exactly, to use technology in teaching? The definition of what technology is changes almost daily. So what does it mean when you use technology in your classroom? Is it just the use of computers? The Internet? GPS? There’s always new software, a new gadget, or a new site to try.

It’s important to be flexible and engage your students. There are just as many ways to present technology to your students as there are ways to teach them to read. The way you use technology is going to vary with each class and each student’s interest and ability level.

As education evolves, technology increasingly becomes a channel for innovative teaching and learning practices.

In addition, technology can be used to motivate students. Each class has a wide set of children who vary in their learning style and have different interests. It is the teachers ability to figure out individual learning styles and interests of students; thus making learning more fun and meaningful at the same time. Being a teacher, I think its my responsibility to come up with creative ideas to make curriculum more interesting. It has been a proven fact that visual factor plays a very important role in learning and memorizing details. So, I have been encouraging my students to use the following digital tools :

1. A list of all the good Web resources for Education: NoodleTools

2. Online Library: Lii

3. Collaborative learning platform: FunnelBrain.
This platform is entirely user-driven. Anyone can contribute by submitting or editing or reviewing the electronic flashcards, as well as adding rich content such as photos, videos, audio voice recordings and math equations. In addition, students work in teams to create review materials, paired with video explanations, for their class and leverage a learning management application known as the “Funnel” that tracks and monitors learning progress with a spaced repetition algorithm.

source: http://teachers20.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1uu7ck4oyjsbo

Lesson Pathways is another site I would recommend that uses technology to meet the needs of a variety of learning styles and student interests. The units there provide a multitude of resources, all available online. I can print off worksheets, assign educational games, or have my students take online quizzes. The creators of that site have taken great care to be sure their lessons will cover a range of student abilities.

Technology has no doubt changed the way we run our classrooms. It’s changed the way we operate in our daily lives. If we approach these changes in our classrooms and strive to adapt our technology use to our classrooms, we will undoubtedly have many more successful and engaged students.

This post was written by Crystal P., classroom educator and LessonPathways.com contributor. You can read more about her in the “Our People” section.

If you asked your students what these things are, I’m betting they’d either stare at you blankly or ask if it’s the name of an “oldies band.” We are not just moving in a new direction for obtaining information. The movers have already arrived and your forwarding address is at the post office (you know, that place where you get that paper stuff called mail).

To say that the way we (and our students) obtain information has changed drastically in the last 20 years would be a dramatic understatement. Where we used to search for information, we now have to kind of “weed out” information because there is just so much available to us, literally at our fingertips.

Do you know what we did if there was a question we couldn’t answer and we couldn’t find the answer in our encyclopedias? We called the “reference desk” at the library. The nice lady there would try to answer any question you had, even if it took her a while to look something up.

So if you were researching something, you’d have to pull out a rack in the card catalog according to the alphabetized subject and flip through the cards. If you got lucky, the title of a book or a brief description would point you in the right direction. Then you had to actually find the book, skim through it, and hope that you’d find some information.

Quote: http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2007/05/information.html

The Internet is changing the way our students learn, and it’s changing the way we teach. If we don’t adapt our teaching to meet these changes, we’re going to lose our students. Those of us who are already teaching are going to have to keep up. Education students in universities are learning to teach this way. It’s not new to them. It’s already second nature. Along those lines, the kids we teach are already a step or two ahead of us when it comes to technology anyway. Kids can now study their spelling words online using sites like SpellingCity.com. Teachers use the Internet to generate their own quizzes, worksheets, and web quests.

I love that the information is so “easy” to find these days. I put easy in quotation marks because as I mentioned earlier, there is just so much out there that sometimes it becomes overwhelming. That’s one of the things I love about Lesson Pathways. When I want to find an activity or an online game or even just some reference material for a subject, it’s already there. It’s been screened for content and appropriateness. All I have to do is enter a search term into the search box and everything I need has already been found for me. I don’t want to be left behind when it comes to technology, and a site like Lesson Pathways makes it easy for me to look like I know what I’m doing–even when I don’t (which never happens…really, honest).

I’m glad information has become so easy to obtain. It gives me more time to focus on my students’ needs, and it gives my students more time to focus on synthesizing the information they have in front of them instead of spending all that time searching for a needle in a haystack.

Editors, synthesizers, and creators. That’s the new generation. They’ll no longer have hunt and gather for precious bits of information. Instead, they’ll be able to build something new and–we can hope–better.

Quote: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2140631,00.asp

This post was written by Crystal P., classroom educator and Lesson Pathways contributor.

Homeschooling parents are often looking for inexpensive ways to supplement their children’s learning experience.  Two resources I’ve found particularly helpful in our family include the library and Netflix video rental.

Using Free Books in Homeschooling Situations

Homeschoolers might be surprised at the amount of resources and learning materials available via the library.  We live in a very small community, so our county library is quite tiny and only has about 12 rows of books (total–for fiction and non-fiction alike).  However, through that tiny hub, I am able to access any book in the state library system via Inter-Library Loan.

Familiarize Yourself With the Inter-Library Loan System

Using the Inter-Library Loan system, I am able to get my hands on just about any book I choose. Often, I will bring a “wish list” of book titles, authoer nmes and ISBN numbers I gleaned from the internet and present it to my librarian.  Within the next two weeks, book after book arrives from libraries across the state.  The checkout times are very generous, usually much longer than the standard checkout times for the in-house books.

Be sure to find out what the rules and limitations are for your particularly library.  Some books are only available for a fee.  Often, that fee will be waived for teachers and educators, so be sure to inquire about the rules for use in an educational setting. Sometimes there is a limit on the number of inter-library loan books that can be requested at one time.  Ask your librarian for help!  I’ve even acquired full-sized textbooks this way when I wanted to compare a couple of potential books before making a purchase of the one I’d ultimately want to use.

Educational Programs

I recently took my daughter to a quilts-through-history seminar, which we later used to talk about decades on our history timeline.  We’ve also been to insect adventure activities, story hours, sewing demonstrations and many, many more wonderful educational programs through the library.  Sometimes they are geared towards adults, but my children still learn something.  Other times they are designed specifically for children.  Either way, these free learning opportunities give your children a chance to meet someone outside the family–in a supervised environment–who is an expert in her or her area of knowledge!

Don’t be afraid to approach the teacher afterwards and ask about additional recommended resources, for more information on a certin topic or when he or she will be speaking again.  Sometimes those contacts may lead to other learning opportunities for your family.  By taking advantage of the resources available at your community library, you will find that your children’s learning opportunities will be enriches, without breaking your pocketbook.

Angela England lives in rural Oklahoma with her husband and soon to be four children, where she works as a professional blogger in addition to homeschooling, doing childbirth work and massage therapy. England is the founder of The Untrained Housewife – a social site for homemakers, mothers and homeschoolers to exchange back-to-the-basic tips and tricks.

How Did We Go From 13 Colonies to 50 States?

Who Were the Native Americans?

Find Answers to These Questions and Learn More About Our Nation with This Fun Interactive.

The United States History Map is an interactive website where kids can learn about the geographic features, regions, and history of the United States. The site is broken down into five major sections: From Sea to Shining Sea, 50 States, Indians, Colonists, and The Nation Expands. Each section provides background information on the topic, an interactive, and a timed quiz.

Product Description: “Become a geography whiz as you learn how the United States was settled. Discover how the continent was irrevocably changed by European colonization, the events that caused the wholesale displacement and decimation of the land’s original inhabitants, and how the 50 states came to be formed.”

In addition to the U.S. history interactive, you can choose from other subject areas as well, which are located in the upper right corner of the site. You can pick from a list of subjects, including math, science, language, and additional history topics.

Uses: Use this interactive to teach or supplement a variety of history topics, as well as any other subject of your choosing. This particular interactive makes a great supplement for teaching children about the 13 Colonies and Native Americans. It’s also good for use with geography lessons relating to North America and the U.S. The use of interactives makes learning about history much more fun, especially with children. Rather than pouring through books and listening to drawn-out lectures (yawn), interactives allow children to take part in the lesson, bringing the topic at hand to life and making it more interesting.

Content and Safety: This site and its content was designed for upper elementary and middle school grades. However, all ages and grade levels can benefit from and gain a basic understanding of the United States and its history. The site requires Internet Explorer 5 (and higher) and Mozilla 5 (and higher) as well as the latest versions of Flash player.

Using the Product: I had the opportunity to explore this site and found it to be quite interesting—seems you’re never too old to learn (or re-learn). In the first section of the site, From Sea to Shining Sea, kids get a chance to learn how to read and interpret a map of the United States in order to understand its geography and how it has influenced our history. They will also be asked to identify major mountains, rivers, and oceans of North America.

The 50 States section focuses on the various regions and individual states. The other three sections focus on the original inhabitants of North America. Many distinct Indian tribes originally inhabited each of the regions that are now part of the country, and you can learn more about these various tribes in the Indian section of the site. Life for North American Indians began to change with the arrival of Europeans—or the Colonists, which kids will also learn about.

Under the Nations Expand section, kids will learn how the United States grew into the 50 states, expanding from the original 13 colonies. After reviewing interactive overviews in each section, you can test your skills by answering questions relating the U.S. history map in a series of timed quizzes, which will be scored and can be printed off for review. Check out my score and yes, I could use a bit more review!

Tutorial or Promotional Video of the Product: I did not find any specific tutorial for the site; however, once you get there, it is pretty much self-explanatory. You simply read through the sections following the “Next” link (or arrow) located on the bottom right side of each page.

Summary: I really enjoyed this interactive and look forward to checking out some of the other ones on the site. I think children will greatly benefit from the information, and the interactive lessons are good for holding their interest. Although much of this might already be familiar to older kids, they can still revisit and appreciate our history with this site. You may even learn something new, as I did.

This post was written by Nikki P., homeschool mom and Lesson Pathways contributor. You can find this original review of this product posted at ChoosyHomeschooler.

If you’re looking for some insightful articles on homeschooling, be sure to check out The Homeschool Connector newsletter. It’s FREE to subscribe too!!! This month, they are featuring the following articles:

• Top Ten Reasons to Homeschool
• Homeschool Field Trips – 7 Essentials on How to Plan and What to Take
• How to Enjoy Homeschooling
• Technology in the Homeschool Classroom
• And More!

Your Homeschool Connection

In case you missed any of the other giveaways, there are THREE more chanced to win a FREE YEAR of Lesson Pathways!

SecularHomeschool.com is hosting a giveaway for three free subscriptions to LessonPathways.com. You can find all the details and enter HERE! Good Luck!

This is the final post in a 5 part series written by Bethany of Confessions of an Organized Homeschool Mom. Be sure to check back to read more great tips for taming the paper beast!”

Welcome to the final segment of the “Put Paper in Its Place” series! If you’re a homeschooler and if you’ve been reading the entire series, this last section should just help you synthesize everything. As you may already suspect, I am not an advocate of keeping every single worksheet, piece of art, or diorama produced by the little darlings. Shocking, I know. Surprisingly, neither am I an advocate for trashing everything. You’ll be pleased to know that a middle ground exists. It’s called a portfolio.

The word portfolio usually strikes fear in the heart of homeschoolers. I have to keep a what? Why would I want to keep all that stuff? But all of the shadow boxes, insect project boards, wooden villages, and authentic medieval costumes won’t fit into a binder! Yes, I have heard all these comments and more whenever the topic of portfolios comes up. Yet, I always reply that a portfolio is not only a necessary thing, but also a good thing. Let me show you how and why.

What is a portfolio, anyway? I decided to look up the word in my official Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition to see what its normal usage is. After all, it’s a unique homeschooling word, right? At least, I thought the way that homeschoolers used the word was specific to us. I almost fell off my chair when I read this definition:

“a selection of a student’s work (as papers and tests) compiled over a period of time and used for assessing performance or progress.”

So much for being revolutionary! Regardless, a portfolio is a collection of your child’s scholarly achievements.

How do you gather all this stuff? Do you just grab the last three pages out of your kids’ hands on June 15 and call it good? Do you wait until your high school senior tells you that his prospective college wants to see his portfolio when he visits tomorrow? No, no, no! On the other hand, you really don’t need to have the exact same number of papers for every subject perfectly typed on the computer and color coded in a set of twelve filing boxes.

A meritorious portfolio does not include every single assignment from every single subject. It includes a representation of work completed: the best writing samples, the best test scores, the best artwork, the best notebooking pages, and the best worksheet pages. It also includes pictures of 3-D projects, field trips, and other activities that can’t be condensed into a single written document. Set aside some work from every academic year. Do it as you go through the year so that it will not be an overwhelming task at whatever point you close out records for each year. I take my children’s desk binders about once a month, choose papers to go into the portfolio, and trash the rest, unless they’re needed for a later test.

The further your child gets academically, the more you may wish to weed out some of the earlier work. You may end up with only one kindergarten handwriting page and one first grade math test by the time your child graduates. That’s fine. Don’t take all of it out, though. I’ve attended homeschool graduations where a portfolio containing selections from twelve years’ worth of work was displayed. It was really neat to see the child’s scholastic progression through the years. Your child may enjoy looking back over her progress as well.

Okay, you’re collecting all of these papers and photos (of larger projects), so where do you put all of them? The best place for a portfolio is in a binder. Yes, even for you file foxes. The main reason for this is that a portfolio should be portable. (Extra bonus points if you notice that both of these words have port as the root, from the Latin word porto, which means I carry.) It’s much easier to carry a binder into a college admission counselor’s office than it is to carry a filing cabinet. You’ll definitely want a 3-inch size for this project. Feel free to let your child choose her favorite color, or buy the kind with the clear pocket on the front and have your student design her own cover.

Put subject dividers into the binder. File the papers from earliest (kindergarten or whatever grade you started homeschooling or saving papers) to the latest within each subject. Just save one out of every ten, twenty, or even thirty pages. Save more tests than regular worksheets. Save the best essays, and choose just one of those essays to show all of the child’s work—outline, rough drafts, corrections, and final draft.

I can hear you now: Why am I making a portfolio? It sounds like way too much work, and it’s not even required by my state! Do I still need to make one even if my child is not headed to college? Obviously, some states make portfolios mandatory, but aside from that, reasons abound for making one. If you choose not to give actual grades or not to fill out a report card (or its equivalent), then a portfolio becomes even more important. A portfolio gives physical evidence that little Johnny really is a genius—just as you always thought! Portfolios preserve hard work, provide evidence for skeptical grandparents or other family members and friends, help with planning for younger siblings, and record grades and/or levels earned and completed.

If you have piles and boxes of papers, start slowly. Set up the binder first so you have a place to put the papers you’re saving. Then go through one stack or box a day, perhaps while you’re watching TV at night, and eventually you will have a lovely portfolio of your child’s academic successes. I’m cringing as I write this, but I just have to reiterate that you must keep up with a project this large or it will get away from you. If you put a few papers into the portfolio every month or so, it will be no big deal, but if you procrastinate, you’ll find it more difficult to subdue the paper piles.

I hope you’ve found this series on paper to be helpful. The more I wrote, the more I realized could be written; however, this is it for now. I’ve provided you with the tips and encouragement that you need to conquer the paper monster once and for all.

This post was written by Bethany L., homeschool mom, Lesson Pathways contributor and author of the Confessions of an Organized Homeschool Mom blog.

Teachers are always looking for new ways to engage their students. I’ve found one of the easiest ways to do that is by using technology. Kids LOVE technology. Tell them it’s time for math and they groan. Tell them we’re going to the computer lab to work tessellations on the computer, and suddenly I’m a hero! Lesson Pathways is a wonderful tool that assists busy teachers in offering Internet-based activities to their students. The best part? All the work is already done for them. What teacher wouldn’t love that?

I have personally spent hours sitting at the computer looking for a cool webquest or an online game. Sometimes I’ve looked for my whole class; sometimes I’ve looked for reinforcement or enrichment for a single student. I wish I had been able to access a service like Lesson Pathways all along. It would have saved me valuable time–you know, to fill out paperwork, call parents, attend a staffing…

Among the 36 weeks of curriculum per core subject, per grade (currently through grade 5), you’ll find a wealth of lessons, mini-lessons, hands-on activities, online games, videos, e-books…the list goes on. It’s so easy to use too! The Planner feature is such a useful tool. You can add your entire class in just a few minutes. Once that is set up, you can select the Pathways you want to assign. The part I really like is having the option to assign Pathways to individual students or to the entire class. Again, anything that saves some time is a good thing in my book.

I really like that I can use this anywhere. I can browse Lesson Pathways from home, school, the coffee shop… I don’t have to lug around those big, heavy teacher-edition textbooks. I don’t even need to have a pen with me, for that matter. That’s generally a good thing. I never have a pen when I need it. (I think I was absent the day they taught organization at my university.) I just click on the Pathway I want to use and assign it to either the whole class or just the students I want to use it. I can also print out a worksheet from home and take it to school for copying the next day. I don’t know about you, but I do my best thinking with my bunny slippers on–and well, administration tends to frown on me wearing them to school.

Differentiated instruction is one of my favorite education buzzwords, and Lesson Pathways has a handle on it. The creators of Lesson Pathways are aware of the distinct needs of individual learners and of teacher’s requirements to differentiate instruction for their students. For this reason, the lessons offered address a wide variety of learning styles and methods. The search feature on the site will allow you to find just what you need. For example, type “Mesopotamia” into the search box and 49 pre-screened and carefully selected choices will pop up. You can then filter your search further if you’re looking for, say, a video. All of the Pathways are tagged to help you find resources for special needs or instructional methods.

We all know how overpaid teachers are, right? We just love to spend our own money in the classroom and buy supplies for which we’ll never even dream of being reimbursed. Hmmm…maybe not. The good news is Lesson Pathways isn’t going to break your classroom stipend (if you’re lucky enough to get one). Compared with a tutoring service, boxed curriculum, and other learning sites, you’ll find this service is incredibly cost-efficient.

If you’re still not sure, sign up for a FREE trial with Lesson Pathways. For more information, contact one of the team members at ContactUs@LessonPathways.com.