Follow Your Passion

Follow your passion.  One reason families home school is to allow more time to pursue your passion, whether it’s music, horses, or volleyball.  We try to finish school in three hours so we can get down to work.  Try all kinds of activities to find your child’s spark.  We bake, cook, do art, and experiment.  Paul, ten, likes coding, programming, and dessert.  Enlist friends from your church to teach new skills, such as knitting.  Make premie or chemo hats.  Learn to play an instrument.  Join the choir at church.  Train dogs.  Make bird boxes.  Learn to life guard.  Train for a 5K race.  Follow your passion!

Make Recordings for Digital Portfolios

 We keep track of everything, including guitar, a Fine Arts Elective.  Below is a sample from the guitar lesson.  My husband, Rob, does Zoom calls with Paul and a friend.  I load samples to YouTube and save them in a slideshow.

Prescriptive Instruction

What is prescriptive instruction?  Whenever an opportunity for a lesson arises, use it to teach.  Here are two examples.  Paul, ten, was writing an essay answer and misused ‘there’.  BTW this isn’t the first time.  Yes, we have had ‘there, their, and they’re’ grammar lessons.  Several times.  Each time Paul mistakes the correct ‘there’, we retract.  I’ve exhausted my own source of ‘there’ lessons and print another from the internet.  Every single time he mistakes ‘there’, we do a quick lesson.  It only takes five minutes.

We take the same approach for misunderstandings.  Paul didn’t know how to read a protractor properly.  Immediately, we located a lesson on angles and retaught the use of a protractor.  In fact, we substituted the protractor lesson for his daily math work.  Whenever, you see your child making a similar mistake or having a misunderstanding, stop and correct it.  Hey we may do a quick lesson on homophones!

Light Bulbs

 Here is a worksheet to compare the costs between LED, CFL, or incandescent light bulbs.  Add a little economics to your math lesson.  Another similar math lesson is this  Home Energy Audit from Teach Engineering.  Pull out your electric bill for the kids.  I like practical math lessons.

Guess the Test

  How do you prepare for tests?  Paul, ten, is learning how to study for tests.  We instruct him to read and complete study guides and answer questions.  We added note-taking.  Once, Paul has completed labs, matching, vocabulary, and exercises, we have him go back through the material and take notes.  As he works through the chapter, Paul tries to identify key points which will be on the test.  You can do the same thing for math lessons before a test.  Which types of problems will be on the test?  Which problems present the most difficulty?  Be sure to do extra word problems; they always present difficulties.  Try having your child determine likely test questions, rather than give him a study guide.  Explain to her she will be creating a study guide.

Christmas Presents

 Our little household is making several art projects for Christmas Presents.  Additionally, I’m giving close family friends who home-school a giant bin with art supplies: sketch books, markers, colored pencils, and water color sets.  These friends have a large family.  New sets of supplies make school seem fresh again.  I bought the bin and sketch books at Five Below.  You could raid Dollar Tree for more fun art supplies, too. I took advantage of back to school sales last fall.  Yes, this is one of those presents parents appreciate more than kids.  

Art and Science

  Pink Stripey Socks has 40 ideas to combine STEM and art, beginning with DIY art materials, such as home-made water colors and sidewalk chalk paint.  Start with Pink Stripey’s links and compare recipes with other sites, such as Martha Stewart’s Watercolor Paint.  Experiment with the proportions of corn syrup and corn starch. Use the home-made paint with crayons to make these notebooks for little presents.  Sit down with your kids and plan which art supplies they want to make. Chalk?   Finger paint?  Scratch art?  Here are more DIY art material recipes.  How do they plan to assess the quality of the art supply?  What do they want to make?  Could the art product be a Christmas gift or wrapping paper?  Hey!  Anything worth doing is worth over-doing!  Don’t forget to document the entire project for your home-school portfolio.  I know we will!