A huge advantage that homeschoolers have over their public school peers is the relative lack of vacation time. We don’t stop learning during summer, spring break or most other holidays. The result is that we don’t slip backwards in our learning and we don’t spend time catching up to where we left off. I [...]
I‘ve written several times already about Hooked on Phonics (Anobydy Can Do It With Hooked on Phonics!, Hooked on Phonics Products, Reading Progress: 5 Year Old Alan). It happens that both my boys have officially graduated beyond the Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade levesl of Hooked on Phonics. Alan, my 5 year old, has just started [...]
Several months ago I wanted to start teaching my kids to spell. They know how to write, and they know how to read, but their spelling was pretty awful. I decided to start picking out random categories of words to teach them to read. For example, one day they would spell the days of the [...]
When I sing the alphabet to the kids it never comes out sounding right. Oh, sure I can sing it and it doesn’t sound terrible. It just doesn’t compare to some of these performances. James Earl Jones doesn’t even sing it and he sounds awesome. Most of these videos are from Sesame Street which [...]
For the past year and a half I have been using Hooked on Math to teach my boys basic math skills. It’s a fairly good program in terms of providing plenty of example problems in addition and subtraction and explaining how 1′s 10′s and 100′s work. But, it’s somewhat deficient in other areas. While it [...]
This is me telling my story on how I learned English. In our family we decided to homeschool our kids. We have many reasons for doing so, one of them is freedom to be able to choose what we teach to them and when. How to teach them Spanish was a subject that for [...]
I hear it all the time. The first thing people ask me when I tell them I homeschool my kids is, “Well, what about social interaction?” There is clearly a perception that homeschooled kids are ill adjusted compared to their publicly schooled counterparts. Frankly, anybody who suggests that my kids are socially awkward, [...]
I spent 75 bucks buying school supplies for my two kids this year. I knew my total expenses were lower than what most parents of public schooled kids spend. My method for figuring out that I pay less is not exactly scientific. What I did was post what I spent on my facebook page with [...]
We went on a lengthy vacation this summer. We criss-crossed the eastern and central United States and drove 5,800 miles in two and a half eeks. On our way back to Colorado we saw a really cool van with “Space Shirts” written all over it. The van was basically, from top to bottom, a big advertisement [...]
My dad and I had a conversation last week about the things that we were never taught in school. Some things in life we have to learn for ourselves. Schooling gives us the raw material to make something of ourselves. We learn all the core subjects like math and reading, and that’s good. It’s [...]
One of the reasons I home school, and possibly the biggest reason, is the freedom it offers us to travel and learn wherever we might be. We are on a three week family vacation now and have been traveling from Colorado to North Carolina to Florida. We’ll be heading to Virginia in a week [...]
