My oldest son is about to enter the 9th grade and we have decided to homeschool him all the way through high school. Homeschooling the elementary years were not intimidating but when I thought about homeschooling high school, I will admit, I did have my freak out moments. I wanted to share some resources that I have found to be helpful in calming those freak out moments. Lee Binz is an amazing resource for homeschooling high school. She has a website called “The Home Scholar” and her passion is to help homeschool parents successfully homeschool their student in high school. She has everything from books to webinars to coaching you personally through your journey.
Category: Advice for the new homeschooler
What do I do with my toddlers when I am teaching the olders?
What can I do with my toddlers or preschoolers that will keep them busy while I am teaching the older children? This seems to be a popular question that I hear or read about among my fellow homeschoolers.
I am part of an amazing group of ladies that are homeschoolers who have awesome ideas all the time. Last night we had our monthly parent meeting and one of the ladies talked about what she does to keep the little ones busy. One of the ideas she had was a program at your local library called “Books to Grow On”. You basically go online to your library website, put “books to grow on” in the search engine and pick a theme. The theme you pick will in the form of a box of all kinds of books and activities that go along with that theme for your little toddlers or preschoolers. What I love about this idea is that it is free and you get to keep the box for a month. Great idea for my little 4 year old. 🙂
Another idea that I came across was activitybags.com. You can purchase their e-book that is full of ideas for making different activity bags for preschoolers to use. They had wonderful, inexpensive ideas for making these bags. They also let you download a sample of their book that will give you a chance to try out some of their ideas and make a few of their activity bags. Loved the creativity and variety of what they offered. 😉 Then, there is the simple “bag of tricks”. There are many ways that I have seen mom’s do this. One of the ways that I would implement it would be to have 5 shoeboxes or medium size plastic bins for each day of the week. Then I would put a special puzzle, activity or other manipulative in each box. Each day my little 4 year old would get the box that corresponded to that day. The boxes would be special “school” boxes that only came out when I needed to teach the other older children. If you make it “special” just for that time, the boredom factor won’t sneak up on you as quickly.
I am sure there are many more wonderful ideas out there for me to discover and use. These have just been a few of my favorites in the past year. 🙂
Living the Adventure 