It's getting near the end of the year, and likely your kids are getting tired of working. I know mine are! And now is the time that we start to question ourselves. Did we really do a good job this year? Did our children learn as much as they would have in "real" school? Am I burning out?

Guilt Free Homeschooling has a great post on the likely causes of burnout in homeschooling, and I encourage you to read it! Some of her reasons: trying to match the curriculum at school; getting overly involved in outside activities; thinking you have to replicate school. I think she's totally right! I visited one homeschooling family once that sang the national anthem, did the Pledge of Allegiance, and made announcements at 9:00 just like in regular school. And then they did their subjects for twenty minutes each. It was so regimented they lost all the benefits of homeschooling!

So if you're feeling tired, read this post, and then browse her site!

And another tip: if your kids just aren't learning anymore, switch curriculum and end with a bang! We got rid of our geology and geography and history recently, and we're finishing the year with a novel study, using my new "Any Novel" Novel Study Guide! You can use it for all grades, 6-12, and study any novel you want! No more need for individual study guides! And you can download it immediately. You don't have to wait for shipping. Find out more here.

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Rosetta Stone is the fastest way to learn a language and has been the #1 foreign language curriculum among homeschoolers for a while — and you can WIN the *all new* version 3 Rosetta Stone Homeschool LATIN program… FOR FREE! This is the first year you can get Latin in the brand new Version III update.

This is a $259 program (and believe me it’s worth every penny!)
This is a computer based curriculum and Rosetta Stone will also include a headset with microphone, and a supplementary “Audio Companion” CD so you can practice lessons in the car, on the go, or where-ever! Students participate in life-like conversations and actually produce language to advance through the program. Rosetta Stone incorporates listening, reading, grammar, vocabulary and writing along with speaking and pronunciation lessons. For parents, the new Parent Administrative Tools are integrated into the program to allow parents to easily enroll up to ten students in any of 12 predetermined lesson plans, monitor student progress, grade completed work (the program grades the work automatically as the students progress- I love that!), and you can view and print reports for transcripts. Homeschooling a lot of kids at your house? This program is designed to enroll and track up to ten students (five users on two computers) and will work for nearly all ages — from beginning readers up to college students.

To win this most excellent Latin program copy these paragraphs and post them in (or as) your next blog post, and/OR link to the contest from your facebook page and/OR email the information to your homeschool support group – Then go to the original page http://Jeneralities.com and leave a comment saying that you’ve posted about, or have linked to, the contest. Please make sure the link works to get back to the original contest page when you post. And good luck!

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Thanks to all of you who entered my contest last week for some free audio downloads!

We have two winners: Mickeigh and Bonnie! Congratulations!

In the meantime, you can still listen to these inexpensive downloads that are SURE to help you homeschool more effectively and creatively. I have downloads on:

Teaching Childrent to Write Well

Drilling for the Basics (using games and other fun things to ensure your kids know the basics)

Setting Goals for Your Homeschool (figuring out what you want to do, how you're going to get there, and whether or not you've arrived!)

See all of them here.

Thanks for dropping by! More on homeschooling soon, including why my 25 minute lunch breaks always grow to an hour and a half!

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On a forum, someone recently asked me how to help a wiggly three-year-old learn their letters. Here's what I said:

1. Buy foam letters that stick to the bathtub. They're not that expensive, and you can usually find them at toy stores or educational supply stores. This is how my kids learned to read! I'd ask them to find me the P,or the D. Eventually they were spelling DAD and POP and things like that.

2. Take them to the library and get out books every week. Make it into a routine, so they know that books are a regular part of their lives. Let them choose some, and you choose some. Read to them before bedtime each and every night. No exceptions. When you have to go out, bring books with you: to the doctor's office, to the dentist, even to the grocery store while they're sitting in the cart. Help them to entertain themselves with books. If they're wiggly when you read to them, let them act out the story and jump around.

3. The I Spy letter books can be really useful in teaching letters. And children often like them because they're puzzles.

4. Speaking of puzzles, buy any puzzles you can find with letters. Ask them what the letters are.

Now, here's a little pointer. Instead of teaching the kids the name of the letters, teach them the sounds. This helps them read. Think about the name for this letter: W. It sounds nothing like its sound. But if you teach the kids the sound of it, it's a lot easier! So when they're three, teach the sounds. It won't be long before they're figuring things out!

And don't forget about my giveaways this week! Go here to learn more.

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Are you busy with New Year's Resolutions? I know I am.

Sometimes we vow things that there's no way we're ever going to live out. This year, I will not yell at my children (Probable time until breakage: 2.3 days). I will not get behind on the laundry (4.2 days). I will exercise (1 day). I will organize creative crafts for my children everyday (2 days). I will not eat my children’s candy (1.5 days if said candy is chocolate, 17.8 days if not).

You know what I mean!

But sometimes planning and goal setting are really useful. Without vision a people perish, after all.

We need to know where we're going, and I don't think it's right to let the curriculum decide that for us, because curriculum writers don't know our individual children. Only we do, and we can see both God's unique calling on them and areas where they need to improve.

I make goals in three areas: academic, spiritual, and life skills. My husband and I sit down and pray and think about what we want to teach the kids, and then we break it down into manageable chunks.

One of the most important things, though, is to identify your children's gifts and help them grow in these areas.

I have a new download called "Setting Goals for Your Homeschool" and for the month of January it's only $3! That's 70% off what it normally costs.

And you also get a FREE publication, How to Bless Your Children, talking about how the biblical principle of blessing can transform our families!

You can listen to the download while you surf the web, do housework, or just think about the homeschooling year ahead.

Learn more here! I really believe it will help all of us ensure that we raise independent, well-rounded and godly children!

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I felt like a slug of a mother this morning because I made all the kids rewrite their book reports.

They tend to restate the plot rather than reporting on the book, no matter how much I explain.

So  sat down and created a detailed book report outline that will help them get it! Now it's more of a paint by numbers approach, and it's like the light went on in the kids' heads!

Do you want it? You can download it free right here! And I hope it helps you, too!

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As a writing exercise today, I had the kids actually do something.

They had to build models and then explain, step by step, how to build them. So we handed out the same Cuisenaire rods to two kids, put them in two different but adjacent rooms, and the first kid had to build the model and then dictate directions to the second.

They did pretty well. Only one flub up!

You can see all the pictures at my Facebook album here.

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My kids are really into Bible quizzing. We do it through our denomination (Alliance) and is it ever fun!

It's one of those things that sounds really geeky, and is, but it's still wonderful!

This year we're learning Luke, and they learn it inside and out. Typical question would sound like this: Question 3 is a Multiple Answer question: Take nothing for your journey, what? Answer: No staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic. Like I said, it's obscure.

Kids can start in grade 6 and go to grade 12, and we have four regional meets each year. Our region has about 160 kids in it this year from seven different churches. The top 10 quizzers from each district go to the Internationals in Pennsylvania in July.

Anyway, Rebecca started last year at age 12/13. She won second highest rookie for the year, and won a big award for Best Overall New Quizzer. Yesterday we had our first meet for this year. My daughter Katie just did amazingly well (she's 11) and she won Top Rookie. My nephew Alex, whom we homeschool, won 2nd best rookie. And he hasn't even really gone to church until we started homeschooling him last April! But he's having a great time. And Rebecca placed within reach of making the international team.

To get a feel for it, here's a little video from last year (I didn't tape yesterday; I was too busy coaching). Last year was the epistles. Rebecca's the one in the forefront in the tiara. (Just for information, in the background people are saying, "Come on, Quinte!". That's not her name. It's the name of our church (Quinte Alliance).

Watch a one minute video to get a feel for it here.

What I love about it is that they'll never lose it. When they spend this much time getting to know a Bible book inside and out when they're young, when they're older they'll always remember things about that book, and remember a lot of their Bible verses. So it's great!

If you ever have a chance to do quizzing, consider it! We're having a great time with it.

Come read some of my posts about marriage and motherhood! I've even got a new podcast up! Just click over to To Love, Honor and Vacuum!

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We started off the year with the best of intentions. We were going to give school our 150%, my husband and I! We didn't need fancy curriculum with everything done for you. We knew what we wanted the kids to learn, so we bought the basic books, tons of resources, and we were going to custom-make a curriculum for science, history and geography.

Now I love history. That's working out wonderfully! But after my mini-nervous breakdown because I had so much other work to do and I wasn't able to homeschool effectively, we decided we needed something else.

I've been "on strike" for the last two weeks, taking a hiatus from teaching just so I can caught up on everything else. Sometimes you really need that break, and I've been extremely productive! Just look at some of the YouTube videos of myself speaking I've managed to upload! And I've got tons more in the queue ready to upload soon.

But when it comes to school, I know I have to do things differently when we get back to it. And I think this time of year is a good one to admit when you bit off more than you can chew.

So I just picked up the phone and ordered Alpha Omega's LifePac science. I'll keep teaching history, but we have to do Science well. And with Alpha Omega, the kids can work basically on their own. That works for me!

I'll let you know how it works out. I hope I find the stuff rigorous enough (we're kind of picky that way). But in the meantime, I'm glad I'm throwing in the towel before we lose even more precious time!

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We’ve been having a bit of a crisis in our homeschool lately. I just have so much work to get caught up in with my speaking ministry–work that I’ve been putting off for years. But I can’t seem to do it at the same time as I’m homeschooling. Even if my husband takes the kids one day a week, I just can’t get everything done.

So then when I am homeschooling, I’m not really paying attention to the kids. My mind is elsewhere, focusing on what I should be doing on the computer.

We’ve decided, then, after an especially rough week last week, to take three weeks off to get me caught up, and then to work six weeks of homeschooling, one week off, so that I can get my work done periodically and won’t get behind. And we’re going to be schooling half days through part of the summer, too! I find they get bored and bicker in the summer anyway, so it’s just as well.

This plan means, though, that three kids, ages 11, 13 and 13, need to work on their own without me for three weeks. And that is not an easy thing, because two of them gang up against the oldest girl and tell her she’s being bossy, and they try to just play chess all day. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do want them to get other things done, too.

So today, on our tour, I am going to leave you with some sites kids can go on to actually DO SOME STUFF while you need them to get out of your hair. Because, if we homeschoolers are honest, we do have those moments, don’t we?

Here’s a neat one: Freely Educate. It has a mish mash of curriculum that’s available free on the internet. Some of it your kids can do themselves, like this amazing computer curriculum site. Kids can learn how to program in a graphics environment. Today, my 13-year-old nephew is starting on that one!

Another one with links to “Gutenberg texts”, or books which have been published on the internet, in the project that hopes to have all books eventually online, is Old Fashioned Education. It organizes all the resources by subject matter, but if you’re going to use them to homeschool you’ll have to do a lot of work yourself organizing it!

A site where they can work on their own again, which I really favour, is Interactives. All sorts of neat math and science quizzes are up online, but they’re all multimedia, and really fun.

For younger kids, the Kids’ part of the National Geographic site is animated, and has a number of activities you can do. You can assign them to explore the site for twenty minutes, or something, and you’re guaranteed they’ll learn something! They also have premade activities, like this one for The Underground Railroad, which your children can take.

As a Canadian teaching Canadian geography this year, I love this online activity at the Canada Atlas site that the government has.

But if you want your child to just fill in an outline map in an interactive activity of several different countries, you can find those here at Your Child Learns. And the United States is included in that one! I also like their World Monuments Map Puzzle. The same site also has free online software where you can build your own medieval village, your own castle, and more! That can keep your child busy for at least twenty minutes. And that can be a godsend!

Education World has an online tour of the human body, with links to great websites. I especially like The Virtual Body, and you could easily assign a child, say aged 9 and up, to look at it for 15 minutes at a time. Lots of activities there, too.

The American History site also has a “Price of Freedom” learning activity, where you learn more about different historical figures. Again, the child can do this on his or her own.

If you’re into Canadian history, here are some online interactive quizzes kids can take. My kids are each doing three of these today!

And then, last suggestion of the tour today, the National Gallery of Art has different tours you can take, with audio, of different art time periods and mediums (media?). They look really interesting, and my kids are doing the French Impressionists from the 19th century today!

I hope that gives you some ideas to keep your kids occupied if you just need some time to yourself periodically or time to get something done. I know I’m making use of these today!

Have a good day!

I’m the author of four books, including To Love, Honor and Vacuum: When you feel more like a maid than a wife and a mother, with an appendix especially for homeschoolers! Read my daily thoughts at my To Love, Honor and Vacuum blog!

(Cross-posted at The HSBA Post)

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This year my husband and I fanatically planned our curriculum before the year even began. We had stuff planned out for every subject, and had it divided up by week as to how much we had to cover to be done in this school year.

And then we jumped in. And hit a curveball.

It's not a bad curve ball, but it seems that if the kids work steadily, they're done everything by 11:30 or 12:00. And that's not acceptable to me. I want them working harder than that! (I have a child in grade 9 now).

Perhaps that makes me a bad homeschooling parent, but I feel as if they're no writing enough this year. So we have come up with another idea. We're going to supplement our history course with novels.

We normally do that anyway, but that's one aspect of this curriculum we didn't plan, because we wrote the history curriculum ourselves. We're doing only Canadian history this year, because we've never done it before. Frankly, I just don't think it's that important in understanding world events. We did a ton on the American Revolution and Plymouth Plantation and the Civil War and the English Civil War and all of that last year, but that is more important. That's the history of democracy, and it matters. You can't understand anything in world events if you don't get the importance of the American Revolution, and why the French Revolution was so different (and so violent).

We used Veritas Press' Omnibus curriculum for all of that, and it was great.

We couldn't find something comparable for Canada, so used a hodge podge of books that we think are pretty good. But we're short on novels.

So I found this website that lists novels for each historical period, and we're going to start having them read a novel every two weeks and write a book report. It sounds like torture, but I love torture. Why else would I be doing this?

If any fellow Canadians are interested, here's the site:

http://www.freewebs.com/canadianhomeschool/nicolas%20%20list%20draft%20sept%2023%202006.htm

Hope you enjoy it!

Don't forget to visit my main blog at To Love, Honor and Vacuum!

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We've been studying logical fallacies in our little homeschool this year, and Obama gave us a great example to look at some of them up close.

In his speech on race, he had a paragraph that is now being called the "throw grandma under the bus" argument. Basically, he said he realized that what Pastor Wright said was wrong, but he could no more dismiss Wright than he could his grandmother, who, when Obama was a child, said that she was scared to walk outside near black men.

This is what is termed the "Red Herring" fallacy. It really makes no difference whether Grandma was a racist or not (and from what I knew of her, she definitely was not). What matters is whether or not Pastor Wright is racist and someone whom a presidential candidate should align himself with.

By introducing Grandma, he's trying to deflect attention. It's a fallacy of relevance. Grandma has no bearing on Pastor Wright.

But there's something else going on here.

In the Grandma analogy, Obama is implying that she is wrong. But was she? Jesse Jackson said the same thing at one point. And in his book Dreams of My Father, Obama tells the story a little bit differently. It turns out that Grandma was being aggressively panhandled by an Africa American. Her fear, then, seems justified. I'm certainly scared of walking in some urban areas at night. Aren't you?

But if Grandma's feelings were justified, and Obama is equating Grandma with Wright, then is he also saying that Wright's feelings are justified? That one really can say God **** America? That whites really are all evil? That's the subtext here.

Anyway, I had fun going through all this with the girls. They got it all on their own, too. I know Obama speaks well, but the benefit of homeschooling is that we get to see beyond the words and the style to the argument. Can you take apart his argument? What is he really saying? And is this justified? It's a good real-life example in logic.

Why don't you try it with your kids?

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I'm just finished reading the Railway Children to my 10-year-old, and it is such a great read!

I loved it as a child, and this is my second time reading it aloud. I can't recommend it enough.

It's just a nice story. Set at the turn of the century, three children are forced to leave their comfortable life in London and go live in a smaller house near a railway when their father is mysteriously taken away from them. They don't know why; we don't find out until the end of the book. In the meantime, their mother is very brave, earning money by writing, and they try not to bother her by getting to know the railway and getting involved in everybody's lives all around them.

The children are very sweet, and there's a thread of definite morality throughout the book.

At one point, Peter has acted beastly towards his sisters and the local doctor notices. He takes Peter aside and gives him quite a nice talk. He says;

"You know men have to do the work of the world and not be afraid of anything--so they have to be hardy and brave. But women have to take care of their babies and cuddle them and nurse them and be very patient and gentle."

He then goes into a wonderful description of chivalry which is still so true but sounds so anachronistic now.

Another paragraph I love:

"Don't you think it's rather nice to think that we're in a book that God's writing? If I were writing the book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right--in the way that's best for us."

Anyway, a wonderful book. Don't miss it with your kids!

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If you've never read Uncle Tom's Cabin, you should. It is simply one of the best novels I've ever read, and certainly the most Christian.

We're studying history and literature this year with my grade 8 daughter using Veritas Press' Omnibus III curriculum, which is wonderful. Basically, you read original sources from the time period and then do cultural and biblical analysis on them. We're doing the civil war right now, so Uncle Tom's Cabin was one source they used.

I always shied away from it because I thought it would be much more graphic and disturbing than it was. Instead, you invariably cry at the end, but it's a good cry, like you're climbing out of a nice, warm bath. (Actually, I was. I always read in the bath. But that's another story!).

You feel as if you have touched a piece of Jesus in the character of Tom, but also in the other characters.

And what I love about Harriet Beecher Stowe is that she tells it like it is. Not all blacks are good and not all whites are evil. Not all women are good, and not all women are evil. Some men are bad, some are good. She's equal opportunity, which is the way it is in life! We can respond to difficult circumstances (in this case, slavery) by becoming like Christ, or we can become bitter and persecute others. And I think because it was written in the 1850s children today can handle it. They just weren't as graphic about violence and sex as they would have been today writing the same novel, so it's wonderful.

The two questions Rebecca and I have both enjoyed are: how is Tom a Christ figure? It's the first time we've looked at Christ figures in literature, and it led to discussions of Lord of the Rings as well. And secondly, who is in slavery? And how? What she realized is that the white slave owners were in slavery as well, just of a different sort. They were enslaved spiritually, but also physically, because they could not extricate themselves from the evil system.

Anyway, a great book. Rebecca couldn't put it down and read it in one day. So read it, even if you're not studying the civil war! It will bring you closer to Christ.

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I know it's not fun. I know it's hard work. I know it stretches the brain.

But there really is no substitute.

My best friend pulled her daughter out of school this year because she was in second grade and she hadn't learned to read. She's going through Hooked on Phonics with her and the little girl is progressing well.

But I'm really disappointed in the math aspect of her education up to now as well. It seems that the schools just don't like forcing anyone to memorize anything anymore. They just want the kids to "understand the concepts". But as far as I'm concerned, if the only math a child does before grade 6 is getting the math facts down cold and understanding fractions, they'll be fine. The rest they can pick up really quickly later. The reason that math often goes so slowly is because they haven't memorized the facts. When kids know what 5 * 6 is or what 7 * 8 is without thinking, then doing 5678 * 85 becomes just routine. It's not scary. But when each time they're confronted with a simple multiplication problem like 8 * 5 they have to think about it, math is going to be hard.

She is still counting out all her plus 2's on her hand. She knows how to line up double digit addition and figure it out, but it takes her a long time to do it because she doesn't know these facts. She'll learn them all right, but I think it's tragic that we don't stress this enough in our schools.

Here's a great link to a Michelle Malkin column about the problem with "Fuzzy Math" and "New Math". It has a 15 minute video embedded in it that is fascinating. Even my 10-year-old was glued to watching it. So check it out!

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I'm looking at getting a new spelling curriculum for Katie, who is grade 5.

Does anybody use Spelling Workout? Specifically, I'd like to know what words are in Level E and which are in Level F, because I don't know which one to buy. And I'd love any reviews that people have of Spelling Workout!

We have a mish-mash program that isn't bad, but if this one is fun, and easier for her to do independently, I'm open to a change.

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We bought Rebecca, our 12-year-old, an Introduction to Logic curriculum that comes with a DVD teacher. The problem, though, is that she's finding it really boring.

One of the benefits of homeschooling, it seems to me, is that you can rush through things the kids already understand. Yesterday in math, for instance, my 9-year-old's lesson was on volume. She already understood it, so we skipped it and I just let her do the questions rather than doing a long teaching session for something she already got. That's how we manage to homeschool quickly. We spent a lot more in-depth time yesterday, though, on Spain in the 1500s and the effects of the reconquista and of its colonization of South America.

But with DVD curriculum, they have to watch the whole thing. And Rebecca's finding it really slow. The only good thing is that I've told her she can crochet while she watches it.

It makes me a little reticent to buy a bunch of DVD based things for high school. But I can't figure out how to "skip" something, or skim something, when it's a video! It's a bit of a pickle.

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I had great plans for this year, but we are definitely slowing down. I just don't have the gumption to get all the kids' work completed everyday.

But it's hard to feel badly, because we just sailed through first semester, even if it didn't feel like it at the time. In previous years we've always schooled four days, and then spent one day running errands. This year we schooled everyday. Rebecca had a more rigorous curriculum (she's in grade 7 working with Veritas Press' Omnibus program), and it didn't make sense to take a day off. So we didn't.

With math, that means that we're at lesson 105 out of 120 for both girls. With grammar, it means that Katie is finished Abeka Language A by the end of next week. They still have more to do on other things, but they're doing really well.

But my schedule is heating up like crazy. I'm speaking at a bunch of World Vision events this year, and I'm keynoting at two women's conferences in April. I'm thinking, sleeping, and dreaming talks. So it's good not to have to worry about them anymore.

If I had my dream, I'd just let them do nothing but piano for the rest of the year. But it's so difficult to get Katie to practice anyway, I wouldn't want that kind of fight all day, everyday. So I guess we stick with history and composition.

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I haven't seen the movie yet, but I've heard good things about it. I read the book when I was 10, and just loved it. So I think I will tell Rebecca, my older one, to read it this week.

On recommendation from Maureen at Trinity Prep School, I went to The Moral Premise and read their review.

I wish I could write reviews like that! The symbolism in it is amazing, and I never saw it before. It's funny, when we studied the book in school we weren't told anything about the Christian symbolism in the book. We just read it because it was a good book. But it's good because it has a real story with Christian roots, which is what makes everything ultimately redeemed.

Read the book! It's great.

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