New School Year

The new school year has begun. I assume that all you homeschoolers have begun your year. One of the things that I did with my kids with emotional issues, was to start the school year slow. They were still young. So we did the calendar and one subject. I found that they adjusted to our routine better if I added 1-2 subjects per week. Once we got going, things went fairly well in staying on task.

I really miss homeschooling. The kids haven't done well with choices they have made and live in institutional settings now. But, I long to teach kids.

Meanwhile, we have some wonderful grandkids. The oldest is 6 and she stayed with me for a weekend. We had a lot of fun. I did a few things with her. We used stencils to draw a picture. We colored them and then each told our own story about our picture. I wrote her story for her. Then, we read the story. She did very well and was excited about that.

The other grandkids are 4, 2, 2 and 4 months old. Nope, the two year olds aren't twins. Our daughter had a baby girl and three weeks later our daughter-in-law had a baby boy. I went to camp with our daughter and her family in August. I made a brief stop to see the other three on the way. Now, I'm making plans to see those three next week. Life is good.

More On Planning For The Year

This is typically what I do to think through how the school year will go. I like to plan science to fit with the seasons. It is fun to do outdoor type activities in the spring. Most of the time I do all of these subjects all year long. I don't do each subject everyday of the week though. This method has been helpful for me when I need to plan the schedule for the week & day. A few weeks after I started teaching, I'd usually end up adapting it a bit as I saw how we were making it through each day.

When I was teaching my kiddos who had numerous problems, I'd usually start the school year out with one to three subjects (depending on what those were). I commonly started with a subject that would definitely take all year to finish. Sometimes I added in a few things that were just struggle areas for my kids. One thing we did for awhile was to go over idioms. We were able to have fun with what seemed silly but had a hidden value. I found that adding 1-2 subjects a week quite often made our year start to go more smoothly.

I did continue to teach my kids with difficulties throughout the summer. The focus changed from getting information in to enjoying what we had learned. We were able to put into active practice what we had been learning. Such things as continuing to measure/graph our findings, to measuring/graphing the vegetable growth in our garden. The kids discovered many things as we were out in the garden. We had talked about pollination and when we were out in the garden my five year old son saw bees polinating and got all excited. This was pure joy for me to watch.

Preparing For A New Year

When I homeschooled, I sat down with all the curriculum I planned to use. The first step I did was to look at how many lessons were in each subject. I personally chose to do all subjects all year long. I know that some school teachers will rotate some subjects. For example, Social Studies/History and Science don't usually have enough lessons for the whole school year.

Because I did all subjects throughout the year, I did those types of subjects 1-3 days a week. It was pretty easy to figure out how to divide them out when I looked at how many days were in the school year. Our state required a certain number of  homeschooling days. The amount of time each day varied on the child.

One of the benefits that I loved was that I could count time doing chores (Home Ec), taking them to gymnastics/swimming lessons (PE), piano lessons (music) etc. You get the point. Some of my kids were in public school part time and I tried to coordinate what subjects they were being taught there and what I needed to cover at home. I really did find this to be more difficult than total homcschool.

Anyway, I got a bit off topic. Once I knew how many days a week each subject would be, I started setting up a schedule. It took a bit of time to learn how long we needed in each subject. Some of the lesson plans told me how long to plan for the subject to be taught. About a month into the year, I took  time to think about how our schedule was working.

I also started talking about our school year with the kids a bit. I wanted them to have something to look forward to. I learned with some of my children that I needed to adapt some of the subjects I taught. I tried to do more hands on and I enjoyed taking them on field trips. As I looked through the various subjects, I tried to think of field trips or things that would make learning more fun.

Another thing that I attemped to do was to be part of a homeschool group. This gave me a chance to learn from other mothers and my children a place to be around other children. Our kids also attended a mid-week church activity.

Things I Loved In Homeschooling: Input Please

Things I Loved In Homeschooling: Input Please: Hello Folks, I'm starting a new blog that involves things related to homeschooling. I have a few ideas, but would love input on what t...

Input Please

Hello Folks,

I'm starting a new blog that involves things related to homeschooling. I have a few ideas, but would love input on what types of subjects you would like to read about. I've homeschooled biological kids and (mostly) adoptive kids who had many difficulties.

One idea I have is to do Bible videos. I can discuss how I adapted curriculum or added to it. I can share some craft things we did. I can talk about curriculum I used. Or you can just toss out things you would be interested in & I will decide if I know enough to blog about it.

I'm considering going into a site that would allow me to have "contact" with your child as "teacher." This website would allow your child to post, view my blog without having their posts go out on the web. The main thing I'm considering this site for is to post Bible videos.

I really enjoyed lesson planning, teaching, adapting and coming up with fun things to do.

Along with anything you can give input on above, if you could tell me if my site seems to be easy to view/read. I'm going to tag a few of you on Facebook. If you know others who might be interested, please tag/send this to them.

Thanks for taking a look at this,

Denise Nash