A Net in Time

Curriculum and book reviews, faith, homeschooling and more!

Homeschooling

Reasons to Homeschool

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I have to admit, I liked these. 🙂

Top Reasons To Home School Your Children

  1. Studies show that home-schooled children average between the 80th and 90th percentile, regardless of the socio-economic background, or educational level of the parents.
  2. Great student teacher ratio.
  3. Very good communication between the student, teacher and parents.
  4. The student can’t lie about their homework.
  5. With a class size of one, they can’t copy anybody else’s work.
  6. The curriculum is in perfect agreement with the values of the parents.
  7. The children will not bring bad habits home from school.
  8. The pace of learning will be geared to the ability of each child, not the lowest common denominator.
  9. You don’t have to fix lunch in the morning.
  10. Children will be better adjusted socially if they don’t learn social skills from the street gangs.
  11. Without peer pressure, they learn to think for themselves, not just parrot what the “group wants to hear”.
  12. Every educator agrees that parental involvement is the key to success in a child’s education. How could one be more involved?
  13. Your child will never be “just a number” in the classroom.

AND THESE ONES TOO!

20. Your kids never tell you that you’re a lot dumber than their teacher.

19. If you can’t find matching socks for your child first thing in the morning, who cares?

18. Cleaning out the refrigerator can double as chemistry lab.

17. Your kids never have a reason to think they’ll get beat up by a gang at school.

16. If the principal gives the teacher a bad evaluation, she can stick her icy feet against his legs at night.

15. You can post the Ten Commandments on your school room wall, and you won’t get sued.

14. You never have to drive your child’s forgotten lunch to school.

13. Your child will never go to their 20th high school reunion, meet an old flame, and recklessly abandon their marriage.

12. You get to change more than diapers, you get to change their minds.

11. If you get caught talking to yourself, you can claim you’re having a PTA meeting.

10. It’s better to be slightly concerned about socialisation than very concerned about socialism.

9. Your child will never suffer the embarrassment of group showers after PE.

8. The only debate about the school lunch program is whose turn it is to cook.

7. You never have to face the dilemma of whether to take your child’s side or the teacher’s side in a dispute at school.

6. If your child gets drugs at school it’s probably Tylenol.

5. The teacher gets to kiss the principal in the faculty lounge and no one gossips.

4. Your kids recognize that this list is numerically in reverse order.

3. Your honour student can actually read the bumper sticker that you have put on your car.

2. If your child claims that the dog ate his homework you can ask the dog.

1. Some day your children will consider you to be a miracle working expert and will turn to you for advice.

Some blogs entries to consider a bit further

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I liked this one from School of thought as it gave good answers to why people are concerned about homeschooling vs public schooling.

Heart of Harmony helps us consider steps to take when making a child’s garden.

I can’t say that poetry is my thing, and I think I will find teaching it a tad bit difficult, but teach poetry I shall at least attempt. This post from Higher up and Further talks about poetic narration (whatever that is)

Free math worksheets (PDF format) at Twaddle-free math handouts.

High Desert hi-jinks brings a post on resources for doing a fox study.

My Domestic Church has a recommendation for using material from Bravewriter. Sounds like it might be a good program to use.

Friday Freebies from This Old Schoolhouse

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I’m catching up so here’s a hodgepodge of freebies on-line to help with homeschooling.

You Need a Story. you need to go to his site to sign up for his free weekly newsletter. Each newsletter will have a story. This is part of what he has to say:

At our house, reading aloud to the children is one of the pillars of their early education. And when I read to my own, I’d love to have your young’ns gather ’round with them. There’s always room for a couple more. In fact, if you’ll let me know where to send it, I’ll be glad to email you a FREE audio story each and every week in our FREE Weekly Newsletter. Sometimes I’ll do the reading, sometimes it may be someone else. But each installment brings you an exhilarating audio adventure —unabridged, of course—to enrich your children’s minds (not to mention keep them occupied with something beneficial while you get other things done). The selection may be one of the great classics. Or, it may be one of those hidden gems from the vast wealth of children’s literature. Or, it may be an enthralling story that has never yet been published. But it will always be clean, wholesome, and enjoyable for the whole family.

Home with Kids has a number of links that go to free homeschooling resources. this is what they have to say:

Most of the links listed below will take you to free resources. There are so many wonderful free educational sites now available online, that I can’t possibly list them all. Use the links below as a starting point, but don’t be afraid to explore what the world wide web has to offer.

The International Bible Society has a couple of videos that can be viewed on “who is Jesus” and “he has done it” Check them out.

Want to make a smoothie with your children? Check out Elkan’s Paradise Smoothie.

I haven’t had the time to really listen to this site called Just One More Book. It is a podcast on books.

Lessons at Home with Kids. This is a site with different monthly activities. A link that is from the same folks also does activities topically.

Family Education has a St Patricks day activity, a craft, and st paddy’s cookie recipe.

Handwriting Helps

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This Old Schoolhouse sends out emails to me every week. They often have a great deal of good information in them. Today’s email contained places to find help with teaching children good handwriting skills.

These are the links

ready for kindergarten. This page lists a bunch of different activities to help children learn skills they need in order to perform other skills later. Good resource I think.

ABC teach. This site allows a person to download pages to help with learning how to print and write. Saves a person time in having to create these pages on their own. In the long run, this is a paid for service site, but they do have some pages listed for free.

Handwriting Worksheets. The URL in this page seems to indicate that is also comes from the ABC teach page, but the page is set up differently. Whether it is or not, free pages saves me time and energy in making them myself.

ESL Writing Wizard brings us this site on writing in Paragraphs.

Handwriting for Kids. Basic copying pages for children to learn good style in printing.

I managed to continue this theme by doing a search on my own.

Young Minds Handwriting Practice Sheets. Some of their items have been discontinued on-line and need to be purchased, but they contain more than the practice your letters pages. They have some “pre-writing” pages as well.

Tracer pages is a rather neat site. They allow you to make differently themed pages using different styles of printing. I never knew that there were different styles before. Apparently there is Zaner-Bloser, d’nealian, and cursive. Cursive I knew but the other two I did not.

Handwriting Pages is a site the is a compilation of handwriting pages on the web. I have not looked through all the sites, the ones I saw looked either useless or okay.

Alphabet Printable Materials this site looks promising.

Handwriting worksheets has this to say about itself

Print the Handwriting Worksheets to make a handwriting book for each letter of the alphabet. For each letter, there are 5 different printable handwriting worksheets for 2 styles of writing. The first five are Zaner Bloser style, the next five are D’Nealian style. Print the handwritng worksheets and bind together to make a book.

There were lots more pages that I could examine, but I figured this gave me a place to start.
We are as of yet, a couple years away from printing, and at least four from writing. 🙂

Socialization….

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Just the other day I was talking with my sister and she mentioned how busy she thought I would be with our boyo when he grew up a bit. She knows that we are planning to homeschool him, and she said “you’ll be busy driving him around, cause he’ll need his socialization”.

My first thought was
1. Don’t all parents drive their children around to activities of one sort or the other?
2. I’m not worried about socialization.

I look back at my school days. I loved learning. I hated the playground. The socialization aspects of things… ick! I did like when they let the “big kids” play with the “little kids” I had a blast organizing the little kids and playing games with them. Gave me something to do and people to help. Fun that was. Didn’t last long because “big kids can’t play with little kids don’tcha know?”

Why would I want to send my child to school to have to deal with socialization?

What if he ends up having to deal with bullying and name-calling and not having good friends at school? Why should he have to deal with all that “ick” in order to have “socialization”? I’ve been there, done that, don’t need my boyo to go through that.

Besides…I think he’ll learn a whole lot more, more quickly, at home.

He won’t have to deal with schoolmates liking or not liking him.
He won’t have to deal with bullying.
He won’t have to deal with having to decide…do I stick up for this child being bullied or do I run away so I don’t have to deal with it or get hit for sticking up for him?
He won’t have to deal with teachers pushing their own agendas (just his parents doing that!)

So, how do I answer the questions of socialization?
Should I just say…it’s not a concern for me?
I’d rather he learn how to function as a Christian in society, than that he spend his days with same age students learning how to social with them?
That yes, I will enter him in sports…but not because I want him to socialize, but because I want him to learn to use his body and to work co-operatively and to learn from someone other than me in something. If he makes new friends in the process… cool, if not, that’s okay too. 🙂

I’m not too worried I guess about the whole socialization. I figure he’ll make friends in time. 🙂

But what do you think?

Government takes child

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I read this article and I was horrified. I found it courtesy of Semicolon.

It bothers me that children are forgotten and families are torn apart because of state-decisions that their way is the only way and who cares who gets hurt in the process.

Makes me glad I live in a country and province where home-schooling is considered just fine, and where acceptance is given.

God has shown his blessing to us in yet another way!