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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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Review: Real-Life Devotional Bible for Women: Insights for Everyday Life by Lisa Terkeurst
NIV Real-Life Devotional Bible for Women: Insights for Everyday Life by Lisa Terkeurst Reviewed by: Lori Twichell Genre: Non-Fiction Publisher: Zondervan Publication Date: Mar 19th, 2013 My life is really busy. It’s chaotic, full of crazy and very often, it’s hard to find peace. I’ve also had many, many Bibles throughout my lifetime. I’ve had study Bibles and women’s Bibles and small ones and big ones and…you get the picture. The Real Life Devotional Bible for Women stepped out of the mold for me. Short, creative devotionals are peppered throughout this Bible – enough for someone to have a new devotional daily (as the title says) and they are wonderful.…
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Do you know who I am?
Recently Reese Witherspoon made national headlines when, during a drunk driving arrest, she asked the police officer that question. She threatened that he would be all over the news if he arrested her and guess what? She was right. Just not in the way she had imagined. Instead of everyone rolling their eyes at the police officer and his actions, the entire country was rolling their eyes at Reese. Suddenly you’re in damage control mode. I admit that I rolled my eyes when I read Reese’s story. In the course of my career I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of ‘celebrities’ and I’ve been on the receiving…
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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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Review: Mom’s Ultimate Guide to the Tween Girl World by Nancy Rue
Mom’s Ultimate Guide to the Tween Girl World by Nancy Rue Reviewed by: Lori Twichell Genre: Non-Fiction Publisher: Zondervan Publication Date: July 2010 Do you have a teenage girl? Or a tween girl? If you do, then you probably understand the frustration of entering this completely new phase of life with your daughter. I mean for me, I just felt like I could finally figure out what might come next and then hormones hit. (And honestly I believed for YEARS that the rapture was going to happen before I became the parent of a teenager. That pretty much defined my entire ‘parenting teens’ philosophy.) So I was pretty happy to…
