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Back to School! Um…wait. I Homeschool.
Summer’s over! Time to get back to school! For those in public or private school, uniforms are being purchased and supplies are sitting in nice orderly stacks just waiting to be used. Right now they’re neat and tidy – not a mark out of place. No torn covers or bent pages. Those crayons and pens and notebooks have worlds of untapped possibilities. It’s exciting! But I homeschool, so things are different now. Instead of rainbows of crayons and colors, my get back to school involves plotting schedules and choosing curriculum. The organized and savvy homeschooling parents have already chosen their curriculum and many of them are already into their school…
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Bullying Part Two: The School’s Responsibility
Recently, I posted an article about bullying. I asked if it had changed or if we, as a society, had changed. I think that this is a really complex answer and I don’t believe that it can be addressed with any measure of value in a series of blog entries. Still, this is my platform and bullying hurts my heart in a personal way, so this is my attempt. My family has dealt with severe and powerful bullying on more than one occasion. A few years ago, a little girl at my daughter’s school decided that she didn’t like my daughter. It happens all the time and unfortunately, it’s something…
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Bullying: Has it changed or have we?
Recently bullying has been in the news a lot. After having a daughter who was literally bullied out of school and a friend whose son made national headlines for his cry for help from bullying, I’m sure you can imagine this is a topic that touches my heart with intensity. When a young, unmarried friend of mine who has no children asked on social media what all the uproar was about, it created a firestorm. Obviously there are some very strong opinions on bullying. This may surprise you, but the opinions vary pretty drastically. I see both sides of the issue. I believe that our society has ‘politically corrected’ so…
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Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 3: Homeschooling Lessons – Curriculum!
If you’ve been following my recent posts, you’ll know that I’m sharing some lessons that I’ve learned while I’ve been homeschooling. (Iron Man is Swimming Part 1 and Iron Man is Swimming Part 2) Today’s topic has been one of the biggest learning curves for me and our whole family as we’ve gone through this process. Curriculum. We’ve used several different styles of curriculum during the course of our homeschooling years and with each one, we’ve learned something that we take with us to the next one. The first year we did an ‘online’ curriculum that promised us virtual classrooms with very little need for parental involvement. For this newbie…
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Iron Man Is Swimming in My Lemonade Part 2: More Homeschooling Lessons
Yesterday I started a short series about homeschooling with “Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade.” Today I’m talking about a few more lessons learned in my homeschool journey. Calendar: Public schools are required to complete all of their curriculum standards within a 180 day window. That’s about six months give or take holidays and snow days and such. This seems like a lot of time, but really – it’s not. In our lessons, we chose to take some extra time on some subjects and topics. We found that a lot of things were glossed over or missed in fundamentals, so we spent more time there. But the biggest thing we…
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Iron Man is Swimming in My Lemonade or: What Homeschooling Has Taught Me
Recently, while talking to a good friend about homeschooling, she told me that I should write a book about it. I admit that I laughed out loud. I’m definitely not qualified to tell anyone how they should homeschool! The first few days of working with all three kids at home were absolutely insane for me. At one point I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake when, between school lessons and conference calls for my business, my son brought me a huge decorative margarita glass. It was full of lemonade and an Iron Man action figure appeared to be doing the backstroke in it. I thought for sure at that point…
