Feeling a little blue?  A little cooped up?  Are the kids stir-crazy?  Is anyone (or everyone) complaining about school work?  Yep.  It’s February in the life of a homeschooler.  There’s no need to feel defeated, though!  Adding a little spice to the schedule is sure to perk up the homeschool spirit!

Rather than “talk” a lot, I’m going to be short, sweet and practical.  This is an emergency and I know you need nothing less than wordiness!  Try one, two or all of the ideas below and find attitudes refreshed fast.

Warning: Adding spice to your homeschool may mean shaking up the regular schedule.  That means (gasp) you might have to replace a grammar lesson or two with something different… or even fun.  It might even mean that your children will demand that these new and exciting things become part of the “new regular”.  You have been forewarned that creative schooling is addictive!

• Take field trips.  Get out of the house to visit museums, community businesses, plays, musicals, indoor historical sites, or to participate in special classes.

• Plan homeschool group events.  Get together once every week or two with homeschooling friends to go bowling, play basketball at a church’s gym, swim at the YMCA, bake cookies together, or learn a new skill together (like sewing or woodworking.)

• Take nature walks.  Getting outside for exercise, sunshine and fresh air invigorate the mind, body and soul.

• Do a unit study.  Take a break from the textbooks to complete a family unit study.  Be sure to include lots of family reading time, art, crafts, cooking, science experiments and other motivating learning activities.

• Let your kids watch TV.  That one got your attention, didn’t it?  I have all sorts of documentaries and other educational shows on DVD and on my DVR.  We never get around to watching them other times of the year.  When it’s too cold to get outside, I allow a little more TV time in order to catch up on these educational programs.

• Celebrate theme nights.  Spend the day (or week) learning about a particular holiday, culture, or historical event.  Everyone in the family can help prepare food, decorations, music and maybe even costumes appropriate for a family theme night.

• Learn a handicraft or two.  Winter is a great time for your child to learn a new handicraft like sewing, knitting, painting, decoupage, scrapbooking, woodworking, wood burning, or photography.  Library books make great teachers if you don’t know how to teach something yourself.

• Splurge on a new educational toy or kit.  A fun kit full of science experiments or other projects can often take the place of textbook lessons.

• Replace some regular assignments with projects.  Instead of assigning a test at the end of a chapter, allow your child to create a project to show what he knows.  He might create a diorama, a mobile, a poster report, a play, a 3-D model, a poem, or a song to prove he understands the material.  From experience, projects “stick” way longer than test questions any time of the year.

With a little effort, you can enjoy your children and your homeschool – even in the winter.  And just in case you still need to hear it, spring isn’t too far away!

Cindy West is an eclectically Charlotte Mason mom of three who loves learning alongside her children. You can find her blogging at Our Journey Westward
and find her nature study curriculum at Shining Dawn Books.

Not long ago, we completed a study of Charles Dickens. As a teen, I was not a fan of Dickens; I found his work far too long and even more boring than it was lengthy. Consequently, I wanted to introduce him to the kids differently than I met him while in high school. We took the time to learn Dickens’ writing style courtesy of Invitation to the Classics. After reading Tale of Two Cities, (which the kids said had nothing to do with all those Disney-like spinoffs they have seen), we actually looked forward to delving into more of his work. Besides, I have not yet seen the day when the kids turned down the chance to watch television for school (smile). First, we watched “Great Expectations,” then “David Copperfield.” What I loved most was hearing all of their conversation, first with one another, then with me, regarding their thoughts on the stories, and on Dickens. It was the rare Socratic dialogue that is a homeschool parent’s dream.

Often as homeschooling parents, we play hit-and-miss with our older children and having transformational discussions about what they are learning. Schools focus on exams as a test of comprehension, and for many of us, we transfer this same approach into our homeschools. As a college instructor, I spend numerous hours helping adult learners move past the memorization required for most exams, and instead engage in Socratic dialogue. Over the years, I have helped my high schoolers get a jump on this same dialogue using exercises that deepen their understanding and help them think more critically about their history and literature studies. Most of these ideas require little planning to implement, and the educational bang for the buck, so to speak, is well worth the effort.

Probing for Prior Knowledge
Believe it or not, what sometimes stymies a child from learning about a subject might be what he thinks he already knows. As an example, following the classical cycle of study, a student will see the same periods of history on three different occasions. By the rhetoric stage, a brief moment spent learning what the child knows can help in at least two ways:

1) Any misconceptions can be clarified.
2) As an educator, you use your time wisely.

Discuss with your child that you are going to study _______, and that before you jump off into an extended lesson plan, you want to see what he already knows. His response does not have to be a paragraph or a report; a simple listing of facts will suffice. As an example, if you ask “What were the major accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci?” and your child can list most major achievements of his life, your time might be better spent elsewhere. You might even be delighted to find that your child loved a particular area of history enough to dig out new information without your lesson plans. There is a caveat here: be sure that you understand what answer you are looking for before evaluating whether your student is competent. Note that there is a distinction between what your child knows and what you taught; the child will repeat the former, not the latter.

Learning Matrix
A learning matrix is a simple grid that can be modified to gather a number of facts regarding any study. It takes light preparation to think about how a layout for the grid, in a fairly objective snapshot, what a student understands.

To help your student with higher order thinking skills, this table can be modified such that a student lists pros and cons or a categorization of facts. Also, remember when you shopped for that appliance and used a comparative list to help you make a decision? Do not discount this same type of listing to allow your child to fill in the blanks. This is not geared toward a Socratic dialogue, but as a methodology to seal in facts from which your child can build deeper insights.

Major Civil War Battles

One-Minute Paper
The one-minute paper can be a dream for a reluctant writer, but it also gets a student to think about what he/she has read, and to summarize it in a matter of a few words what was the primary idea. From the parent’s perspective, only one question sparks the written discussion: what was the most important thing you learned about ____________? A related, or possibly an alternative question, might be what important question remains unanswered? An expansion on the one-minute paper, if you are considering it for more regular use, might be the commonplace book, in which the student collects these same types of insights on a more regular basis. We use commonplace books extensively in our home as an extension of our notebooking, and I can see very quickly where the kids are in their command of a given topic.

Word Journal
The Word Journal has two products that can be used for further analysis:

1) a single word, from the student’s perspective, that summarizes the text
2) a paragraph or two explaining the choice of that particular word

The student is, in essence, giving an abstract of the text. This is obviously best used on shorter excerpts or texts. Also, if the book generates an apathetic response, you can always help your student along by offering a choice of words rather than letting the student belittle the assignment. One of our children, as an example, loves the adjective ‘interesting.’ In reading through an analysis, why a book is “interesting” is well-defined, but I am also looking for expanded vocabulary, so I constantly steer our child away from this description. Also, consider a picture—worth one thousand words—to replace the one word approach. Then, an artistic child can explain the choice of the picture.

Bear in mind that, even after incorporating one or more of these exercises into your lesson plans, a student’s response to the question, “What’d you think of that book?” might be, “Eh, it was alright.” [Groan]. However, seeds are planted, and whether it is immediately obvious or not, you are facilitating thinking skills, which will serve your child in the long run much more than passing a test of memorization.

Belinda Bullard is a wife and homeschooling mother of three, Belinda is an author and the owner of A Blessed Heritage Educational Resources, a literature-based historycurriculum featuring African-American presence in history, as well as the contributions of other races to American history. A chemical engineer by formal education, she also serves as adjunct faculty for college distance learning programs. Belinda blogs at Simply Belinda and Chronicles of a Blessed Heritage.

Like many, we homeschool at the dining table. Every day I’m amazed at the speed with which it is covered—books, papers, folders, colored pencils, and sometimes a bowl or a cup is squeezed in there, too. Worse, I’ve seen a kid fill one spot up with books and papers and then sit at a fresh spot for lunch, leaving one of my preschoolers to set a bowl on top of the older kid’s pile of books.

We’ve had nights that we just ate in the floor picnic style rather than try to excavate the dining table. We’ve had disastrous coffee spills and cheerio-encrusted Latin pages. I only confess this because I know you know what I’m talking about.

The table gets that bad with only two students, but this year, my three-year-old and four-year-old have started wanting to “do school,” too. They lug their workbooks and bags of pencils over to my desk, and with round, sweet eyes, they ask if I’ll help. They obliviously pile their things on top of the bigs’ papers some days; other days they just cry out, “There’s nowhere for me to sit!” And then they get stuck, repeating this cry until a spot is cleared.

Last weekend, I had an idea. I marked off the amount of space each child could have for their work and gave them a piece of paper the same size to decorate and label. John drew inventions on his placemat; Grace illustrated the events of The Iliad on hers. Abby and Caedmon colored their names with dots and stripes.

We put the four pieces of decorated paper on the table and covered the whole table with a thick piece of clear plastic I’d bought at the fabric store for that purpose years before. Now they could see at a glance if they were taking up too much space.

So far…honestly, it hasn’t helped at all. But I think that the training will go more smoothly with the visual reminder. I think drawing boundaries will help them to see—in the long run—the importance of keeping their stuff picked up and the finite limits of the square footage available at one dining table.

Aubrey Lively is a homeschooling mama with a loud one-room classroom filled with four children, aged ten to two. She likes a Saturday morning with her husband and his guitar, a good cup of coffee, and a fresh sheet of paper. She has a BA in Literature and a MEd in Teaching, but more importantly, she thinks outside the box. (She believes the box is a conspiracy.) Visit Aubrey online at http://aubreylively.blogspot.com.

It has been said that play is child’s work. Do you agree? I do.

Vygotsky’s famous statement emphasizes this: “Play creates a zone of proximal development of the child. In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.” (Vygotsky, 1978:102)

Maria Montessori also gave her word about play: “The most important role that play can have is to help children to be active, make choices and practice actions to mastery. They should have experience with a wide variety of content (art, music, language, science, math, social relations) because each is important for the development of a complex and integrated brain. Play that links sensory-motor, cognitive, and social-emotional experiences provides an ideal setting from brain development.”

As we can see play is understood as the most effective vehicle for young children’s learning.

But ‘play’ in a bilingual context can be an exciting experience it leads to language and cultural learning. I have heard comments such as, “How can children learn when they are having fun?” or “Children should sit in their seats and pay attention when learning.” Although I have found that playful activities stimulate children and promote learning.

What happens in a child’s mind when they listen to a song in another language, move to the rhythm of a foreign rhyme, or engage in a game that requires them to speak a foreign language?

Games, songs, chants, movement, fun activities do compliment language acquisition. As adults, what are our roles?

We have to provide opportunities for meaningful play, to engage children in purposeful experiences in a rich environment so they continue to learn. Playing with your children contributes to their physical, emotional and intellectual development.

Play situations tend to create meaningful and interesting contexts for children, in which children can become motivated to communicate in the new language both non-verbally and verbally, and to practice and rehearse familiar words and short phrases, and to begin the process of combining new words together. A teacher (or mother, or leader ) who joins in and talks through everyone’s actions and ideas – i.e. models the use of language – when children are not yet able or ready to talk for themselves, provides language teaching in a meaningful context.

For example in this picture, my niece (or should I say the princess?) is preparing tea for her 5 best dolly friends. She invited them to have tea and they accepted. So at that time she was laying the table.

I took advantage of that situation to review colors in Spanish, numbers one to five, the words tea, cookies, cups, plates, spoons, teapot and tray. And we review how to greet people. Oh! When everything was ready for tea, she changed her dress and waited for the dolly guests.

To resume we can say that play helps your children to

• Have a sense of well being and good self-esteem
• Deal with tragedies and setbacks
• Have a sense of control
• Make good relationships with you and his peers
• Understand and care about others
• Be creative and imaginative, think and have ideas, develop concentration
• Be physically co-ordinated.

Language is a vehicle for communication. A new language will be easier for younger foreign language children, yet laughing and excitement are still an integral part of the lesson. Play almost always promotes excitement, enjoyment, and a relaxing atmosphere.

So,what we are waiting for? Let’s play!

Analia Capurro is the designer and owner of Ingles360.net® and the author of all the educational resources sold in her website. After 20 years of teaching children she found that the only way children love learning is if teachers love learning and teaching, too. Promoting a learning environment where laugh, fun and friendship and companionship are as important as any language structure, are the things she had in mind while designed her bilingual resources.

Daughter #2 is a highly tactile learner just like her father. She learns best when there are things to touch and feel, when she can move her body (she is also a musical learner but that is for another post). We first became aware of this while trying to teach her math. She just couldn’t grasp math concepts when taught the same way as her older sister (mainly through reading from a textbook). She was frustrated, I was frustrated! I feel badly about the first year or two of schooling her. I kept trying and trying to teach her the same way that my oldest (and myself) learn the best. Of course, it didn’t work very well. She learned things but it took a lot longer. School was not enjoyable for her.

It was during this hard time that I really started studying about different learning styles/multiple intelligences. I came to realize that in order for my daughter to come to love learning again I needed to adjust my teaching. For instance, I searched until I found a math program that was geared towards tactile learners (Math U See). The manipulatives, though simple, were extremely successful in helping her to ‘see’ the concepts. It was amazing the difference just a few weeks with the program made for her!

Here are some things I’ve learned about tactile learners.

• They usually excel in one or more sports or have very good coordination.
• They like to MOVE: fidgeting or tapping are not uncommon, especially when they have to sit for a long period of time.
• They just “have” to touch something they have just seen.
• They enjoy getting their hands messy – finger painting, working with clay, glue, etc.
• They love to take things apart and put them back together again.
• They have a dramatic way of expressing themselves.

Ways kinesthetic/tactile learners learn best:

• competitive and cooperative games
• physical awareness and relaxation exercises
• all hands-on activities
• creative movement, mime
• hands-on thinking
• communicating with body language/ hand signals
• tactile materials and experiences
• field trips
• crafts
• cooking, gardening, and other “messy” activities
• manipulatives
• virtual reality software
• physical education activities
• body answers

Now that my daughter is older and taking independent study classes through a High School correspondence program she has learned various other ways to help her study so she can be prepared for college where most courses are taught through lecture, not ideal for tactile learners.

To memorize facts, she paces or walks around while reciting to herself or using flashcards or notes. She’ll also close her eyes and write the information in the air or on a surface with her finger. She’ll try to picture and hear the words in her head. Later when she needs to recall the information for a test she is able to close her eyes and ‘see’ what she wrote.

When she begins reading a a new chapter in a textbook, she takes a whole-to-part approach. This means she first scans the pictures, then reads headings, then reads the first and last paragraphs and tries to get a feel for the content before reading the entire thing through.

She likes to study lying on her stomach or back, sitting in a comfortable lounge chair or on cushions or a bean bag but certainly not at a desk!

She takes frequent breaks. She will study for about 20-25 minutes than take a 3-5 minute break.

She takes a plethora of notes! Writing helps her to not fidget so much and to concentrate on what is being said. She will rewrite her notes several times to help her study and retain information.

There are also other ways she studies but those fall under the musical learner which will be discussed in another post.

Other posts in this series: 

Learning Styles: The Basics
Learning Styes: The Basics Part II, Multiple Intelligences
Linguistic, Read, Write, Learners

Montserrat Wadsworth is completely devoted to her wonderful husband, Joseph, and their eight children (seven girls and one boy!). They live on a 4,000 acre alfalfa farm nestled in a small Northern Nevada valley. They’ve been homeschooling for 11+ years. Montserrat enjoys, photography, cooking, crafting, chocolate, and sloppy goodnight kisses. She strives to live each day as God would have her do following Mary’s biblical supplication, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” (Luke 1:38) You can find her at her blog Chocolate On My Cranium.

This year I took the plunged and “officially” started homeschooling my preschooler and my kindergartener. I planned to start in August but then we ended up having to move at the beginning of the month so that didn’t work out too well. Then I planned to start right after Labor Day. We did but soon after that my house was full of cooties which left at least one of us out of commission for about 3 weeks. Then right when we recovered from that my school work load was a bit overwhelming and we had to take a break so I could catch up and regain some of my sanity.

I am a planner. I have plans for everything, color coded calendars, weekly menu plans, etc. My plan for this year never seemed to work out. Half way through those first few months of homeschooling I fell out of love with my planner. It just wasn’t working for me anymore. And it was so sad because I had taken two weeks over the summer to plan out the entire year for both boys. It took a month but I found another planner that is working quite well for all of us (I may have to keep it around for a while).

Both of my boys are a little bit further ahead in skills than I originally thought they were. Actually my kindergartener is way ahead of me in the skills I wanted to work on. I’m constantly playing catch-up with him it seems. All my planning had been of little use during those first few months. So during our holiday break I decided to do something about it. I needed a new plan.

I realized that even though I had a plan I really hadn’t taken the time to figure out where I wanted to be by the end of the year. So I did. I looked at the work my boys had done so far. I looked the things they really enjoyed and the things that they didn’t like. I asked them what they wanted to learn about and do during school. I made a list of what I want them to learn and then I took it all to the Master Planner. After much prayer my plan was in place. And it’s a good one this time because I made sure to “do it right” this time around.

My new planner is filled with assignments, activities and field trips. My kindergartener has extra activities and lapbooks to go along with his assignments and he’s over the moon about it! My little guy isn’t doing any literature units this year because he doesn’t like them. He wants to learn his letter sounds and I’m okay with that. And mommy has thrown in some fun character lessons and activities and Bible verses for memorization.

As a newbie homeschooler it can be overwhelming to figure it all out. To know what’s going to work and what will not. It’s equally difficult to predict where your child(ren) will be at skill-wise. And as much as I love to plan I know that there will be many times when my plan falls completely apart. And that’s why this time I wrote in pencil!

LaToya Edwards is a homeschooling, single mom of two beautifully busy boys, one that has been diagnosed with SPD. She has a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Development, will soon have her law degree and aspires to run her own adoption agency in the future. She is a very busy woman, but wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s loves music, poetry and reading fiction stories. But mostly she just loves spending time with her boys. LaToya get real over at Christian Momma, where she blogs about the struggle and journey of being a single christian woman and mom.

I always think of January as the school year’s second “back to school.” Having two or three weeks off for Christmas break creates time for me to reflect on what’s working in our schoolroom and routine — and what’s not. It allows me to reorder supplies on which we’re running low, and come up with resources to help fill gaps within the curriculum that I discover during the first “semester.”

Those last few weeks in December and the first week or two in January is also a time I renew a lot of my commitments, make extended plans, and determine to get more organized….in homeschooling as well as in other areas. I begin to pull from resources I love as a homeschooling parents — things I wonder how I’d do without — realizing how blessed I am to have them at my disposal.

So here are my homeschooling essentials, in no certain order. Maybe there’s something in this list you have never considered or have never heard about — or maybe many of you can read this list and just nod in absolute agreement. Either way, here you go: Ten homeschooling helps I couldn’t go without:

My scanner
Our scanner isn’t fancy or state-of-the-art. It simply scans photos and documents — and doubles, for me, as a copy machine. (I scan documents and reproducible worksheets, transform them to PDFs, and email them to myself for printing.)

My personal laminating machine
I found this little gem on Amazon last year as one of their daily deals. For just a handful of dollars I can now custom make my own flash cards, write on/wipe off charts and worksheets, and preserve important papers or artwork for safekeeping.

Online support
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run to my favorite online homeschooling forum, The Homeschool Lounge, with a question or dilemma. Whether it’s about read-aloud book suggestions, curriculum confusion, or something pertaining to motivating and inspiring my kids, the helpful homeschooling parents on this site always have words of encouragement and sound advice to share. They have also given me a ton of helpful links and online resources to check out that I probably would not have found on my own. Field trip ideas, creative writing prompts, and even how to handle criticism — it’s all here. It helps me not feel so alone in my endeavors!

Rainbow Resource
It’s a nifty, all-inclusive website offering the best prices I’ve found on lots of curriculums, art supplies, books, educational aids, even toys. Their customer service is stellar — they’ve let me call and add on items to my order that I’d forgotten a day earlier — and their catalog is exhaustive. (You can shop online or request a free catalog by mail.)

Streaming ETV
Our state has its own streaming website for ETV (educational television) programs for all grade levels. Through our homeschool organization, I have a membership that allows us to watch as many videos and listen to as many audiobooks as we choose at no extra cost. We can watch full episodes of Reading Rainbow, Time Warp Trio, NOVA, and much more. Check with your local state’s ETV programming headquarters to see if something similar is available for your home classroom!

Pinterest
Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s a visual way to collect and organize ideas from the web. And it’s awesome. You can “pin” things yourself to remember later, as well as browse pins on other folks’ boards. You can follow other people’s boards, too, so if you find someone who really knows their homeschooling/crafting/teaching links, grab on and keep up with them. Here’s my homeschooling classroom inspiration board and my educational activities and experiments board to give you an idea of what’s out there. I cannot remember life without Pinterest! *wink*

Audiobooks and e-books
We’ve used free audiobooks for downtime and e-books on the iPad and other devices to help build vocabulary, increase reading comprehension, and just entertain. The possibilities are endless! I love bringing multimedia into the classroom in such a rich way. The best part? It’s portable — we can learn anywhere, anytime!

Our local homeschool co-op
We joined one this past year and we’re slowly getting involved. As the kids get older I am seeing visions of how incredibly valuable this will be to us. Other parents are experts at other things — and they volunteer to teach other families’ kids once a week. There are also fun field trips planned, targeted group outings and adventures, charity volunteer opportunities, and seminars — not to mention accountability — all for a low yearly fee.

YouTube
Yes, this site can be scary. But use it the right way, with proper adult supervision and accurate search terms, and it can be a wealth of helpful multimedia for the classroom! We use it to learn songs to teach us the books of the Bible. We use it to look up videos about cultural festivals in other countries. We use it to bring life science alive. Our son uses it to find videos made by other kids who build and demonstrate new projects with his favorite educational toy, Snap Circuits. We use it to supplement nearly all subjects.

Full-backing and support from family and friends
No one can go it alone. I’m so grateful for a supportive husband who applauds my efforts and even helps me teach the topics I’m weak in on his day off. I have parents and in-laws who see the results of our homeschooling and are convinced we’re doing the right thing for our family. I have friends who are jumping in alongside us every single year — and it’s inspiring and edifying. I know many don’t have the luxury of having such strong support — and I know that what I am experiencing isn’t the norm…but I’m grateful that it’s my reality…and pray it can be for everyone else who feels called down this educational path.

What are your homeschooling essentials?

Meg Wilson is a devoted wife to her husband, Ken, of 10 years, and mom and homeschooling teacher to her 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. When she’s not writing or creating something, Meg loves to cook for, host and entertain friends and family. She also enjoys reading, the outdoors, eclectic music, yoga, and studying history. You can read all about her adventures (and misadventures) at her blog, Muses of Megret and read her product reviews at Electric City Academy.

When my husband and I lived abroad, we made the decision to homeschool our daughter. Local schools were out of the question because of their competitive and atheistic underpinnings. The price of international schools was exorbitant compared to the quality of education. Since I had an education background, homeschooling was an easy choice to make.

Fast forward nine years. We returned to our native country and were faced again with the choice of schooling options. For the sake of a smooth transition into American life, we decided to continue homeschooling our middle schooler. But over the months, I’ve been asked several times why I don’t send Sprite to public school now that it is an option again. Little do these people know that Sprite has been ruined forever for public school. After all of our years of homeschooling, I don’t think she could survive in “normal” school. Or if she did, it would be at the expense of precious character traits.

Creativity
My creative daughter is forever imagining skits and craft projects. The “fill in the bubble, walk in a straight line, write it this way” formula for learning would rub against the grain of her right brained thinking. With homeschooling, we can harness her creativity for projects that promote learning. There are no right or wrong answers to be ferreted out, just experiences to be had. In order to succeed in school, my daughter would have to stop being so creative and learn to conform. The emphasis on outward structures would mystify her since we have always valued meaning over form.

Fine Arts
Along with her creative bent is a love of fine arts. There is no way that a public or even private school could offer her the wealth of art instruction we have had. Field trips would be few to none; drawing instruction would be rare if at all. Fostering her passion for fine arts would require a lot of work on my part, work that I’m already doing. But with the schedule of public school and the demands of homework, we would not have nearly as much time to devote to the arts.

Competition
Instead of using grades with my daughter, I focus on improvement, learning, and diligence in our homeschool. Because she has no classmates to compare with, Sprite is free to grow at her own pace without feeling like a loser when she is “behind” or a geek when she is “advanced.” In public school, the constant feedback of numeric grades would be a huge paradigm shift for her. Would she feel inadequate when her grades were not all As? Or would she become prideful and scorn those with lower grades? Would she start working for the sake of the grade instead of for the joy of learning?

Popular Culture
If my daughter were in public school all day long, I can only imagine the influence that popular culture would have on her as she absorbed from the children who are saturated in television, movies, and video games. Just being in American church has opened up new worlds of television stars, pop singers, and online games that we never knew about before. How would public school affect my media-sheltered child? Or would she be constantly traumatized? Or would she become calloused to the violence and occult that are so common in popular books and videos?

Flexibility
Years of setting our own schedule has given us the freedom to travel, take extracurricular classes, and pursue personal passions. The rigidity of a traditional school schedule would lock us out of the freedom we’ve grown accustomed to. No longer could we rearrange the academic timetable to suit our preferences or tangents. Sprite would constantly feel the chafe of being a cog in the wheel of an institution. She would resent the artificial constraints of school schedules and scope and sequence charts.

Yes, I admit it. My child doesn’t fit into public schools. She probably could have if she had started off in Kindergarten seven years ago. But we’ve ruined her through years of homeschooling. I’m sure that if life demanded public school, she would learn to cope. She would comply and give up some of her creative thinking. She would grow less involved in fine arts and would grow more desensitized to the worldliness of our society. She would evaluate herself through the lens of a numeric grade and conform to the pattern of school life.

Looking at the big picture, though, I’m quite happy with her ruin. In fact, I plan on ruining her right on through high school.

Are your children “ruined?” I’d love to hear how you’ve ruined them by homeschooling. Just leave a comment below.

Jimmie is a former public school teacher turned homeschooling stay-at-home-mom. Her only child, Sprite, is a creative middle school student who loves the arts and living books. Jimmie uses a loosely Charlotte Mason approach with lots of notebooking and field trips. Visit her blogs Jimmie’s Collage and The Notebooking Fairy.

• Amazon, and especially Amazon Mom.

• Books. Lots of them.

• Cuddling by the fire on a school day.

• Dirty–science experiments with earthworms and plants and owl pellets, or Dishes piled up in the kitchen sink.

• Explaining–why we homeschool, how to add, who speaks Latin, where the International Dateline is, when the Thirty Years War actually ended.

• “Fort School” under the table and Filing.

• Games of Monopoly for “math class”every night over dinner with Daddy.

• Helping little sisters and brothers learn their ABCs.

• Ink refills.

• Junk drawers for crafts and experiments.

• Killing direct objects, to see if they’re really direct objects.

• Lying under the stars together during a meteor shower. And Libraries.

• Museum Memberships that make you pinch yourself to see if you’re dreaming or if school is really THIS much fun. And the Magic School Bus, too!

• Nature journals with fairies.

• Off-season vacations and Oxford commas.

• Parent-Teacher conferences!

• Quiet Time, no matter how old you are.

• READING. ALL. THE. BOOKS.

• Sneak School–playing games and reading books outside of school time that are actually educational.

• Toddlers, who find ways to get stuck in the toilet, the trash can, and the toy kitchen sink.

• UPS Man, a great-nephew of Santa Claus, who makes year-round deliveries.

• Via, or any other form of fast caffeine, especially when it’s from Starbucks.

• Well-Trained Mind Forums, where any problem can be solved.

• Xylem, the star of the science play written last year.

• Year-in-Review, when you realize it’s all really worth it.

• Zoo Memberships that let you get to know the animals on a first-name basis.

Aubrey Lively is a homeschooling mama with a loud one-room classroom filled with four children, aged ten to two. She likes a Saturday morning with her husband and his guitar, a good cup of coffee, and a fresh sheet of paper. She has a BA in Literature and a MEd in Teaching, but more importantly, she thinks outside the box. (She believes the box is a conspiracy.) Visit Aubrey online at http://aubreylively.blogspot.com.

Homeschooling high school is full of focused, directed study; however, I do try to provide experiences for our kids that are really, truly fun. Each family is different and your idea of fun is going to be totally different than ours, but I’ll share ours with the hopes that you are inspired. Leave a comment or link back to your blog so that we can see the fun things that you do!

We’ve been very fortunate to have yearly drama camps in our area. These have consisted of a yearly high school One Act Play Competition, a week long drama camp, and a weekly Shakespeare Camp. Each of these experiences are quite different, and kids of all types are drawn to them because of the camaraderie and good, clean fun that is to be had. The initial drama camp (which morphed into the yearly competition) started with a group of homeschooling parents hosting a drama camp in their back-yard several years ago. Now it encompasses around 100 kids a summer, 2 nights of performances, and happy kids!

• Politics! We’ve been involved in campaigning since moving to our current state. We’ve had the opportunity to participate in local, state, and national elections and our kids get the fact that they have political clout even before they can legally vote! TeenPact has been a huge part of our political endeavors and opened the doors to a myriad of possibilities, including free Leadership Institute Training. Our kids have been flown across country to participate in political campaigns because of the contacts they’ve made through TeenPact. The “alumni events” for TeenPact students are terrific as well. Two of our older kids have both gone to Washington, D.C., for a week long walking tour of the city and to rub shoulders with notables such as Newt Gingrich.

• The Challenge Program, run by the Timothy group, is a male only camp run by IRL great friends of ours, former Air Force Major, Bruce Stansbury. If your son wants a physical and spiritual challenge, he should check it out.

• This might be an odd thing to add to the list of fun, but my older kids currently love their work situation. They are feeding baby calves one full day a weekend. My oldest son also hays with a friend of ours a couple of times each summer. It’s not regular work, but it’s outside, very physical, and pays well. Check out the opportunities where you live and talk to other parents. We have found out about all of our kids’ work sites through word-of-mouth.

• Create classes that you know your kids are interested in and invite others to join. This year I am teaching Creative Writing for high schoolers. My son is intensely interested in writing and has some serious goals surrounding it. The class gives him structure, gives me an opportunity to direct and encourage his work, and supplies the added benefit of getting lots of other kids involved in something we love.

• Do something physical. Anyone who’s been to any TeenPact event knows that Ultimate Frisbee is the official sport. Several kids in our areas organized a regular Ultimate Game after their first state class and 5 years later it’s still going strong. Homeschool high schoolers meet once a week, spring through fall, at a local park to play till its dark outside.

• Those same kids also go ball room dancing twice a month. Contact a local dance studio and see if they’ll provide a discount to homeschoolers with lessons to boot. Our kids continue the fun of the dance at the local Dairy Queen.

• Find cool field trips. This year our teens will go rock climbing, take a field trip through EROS, and a local radio station, visit a museum, have the opportunity to do the sculpture walk with an area artist and more. I’m sure your city has great opportunities for teens.

There are obviously lots of other ways for high schoolers to have fun, even while they are working hard academically. What do your teens do?

Lisa Nehring has been homeschooling her 5 kids (2 of whom have graduated) for the past 20 years. She holds Master’s degrees in Human Development and in Marriage and Family Therapy. Lisa has been involved in creating co-ops, class days, and camp experiences for homeschoolers, and was instrumental in bringing TeenPact to South Dakota. She writes regularly for the Homeschool Village as well as other magazines, websites and newsletters. Lisa and her husband of 25 years, David, a Christian Psychologist and Biblical Counselor, speak on marriage and parenting, education and homeschooling. Lisa blogs regularly about “crafting the extraordinary from the ordinary” at Golden Grasses.