More results…

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
Search in posts
Search in pages

Category: Homeschool For Success

  • Four Year Plan +1 for High School @ Home

    In the Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling Teens, Chapter 12,  I write about the necessity of laying out a tentative schedule of coursework and tasks for high school at the beginning of  8th grade.  That’s for those of you with foresight.  ( I didn’t gain that until my third child.)

    The benefit of the plan is to make sure everything important gets done and that you distribute the tasks in a way that minimizes overloading the teen’s schedule.  ( The senior year, for instance, needs to have time for filling out college applications and making the college decision.)

    I’ve uploaded the Four Year Planning Grid and an example with pre-labeled tiles you can move around in your quest for the best workable schedule: Four+Year+Plan+Movable_Tiles.  These are Word documents.

    I include the extra year ( +1) because when you work backwards from the most competitive next step your teen will possibly take following high school graduation, you’ll find some things need to be done by the end of 8th grade, too.

    I’ve also created a High School Checklist that includes desirable coursework and activities you might want to consider.

  • Ultimate Planner Review

    This review made my day! And there is an Ultimate Planner giveaway attached.

  • Two-Fold Purpose of the Ultimate Homeschool Planning System (UHPS)

    I love homeschool moms.  I love their passion, their resourcefulness and love for their families. But now with the luxury of viewing homeschooling through the rear view mirror, I can see a couple of sore spots that contribute to our exhaustion and occasional loss of vision.

    • We are more aware of our own shortcomings in our homeschool life than we are of God’s activity.
    • We feel guilty when our kids work independently of us because our image of a good teacher is one who micro-manages her students.

    If there ever was a ploy of the devil in our midst, this is it.  Our enemy doesn’t want you to notice God at work.  He wants you to keep believing it all depends on you! Secondly, he’d never want your kids to learn independently.  That would give them too much motivation and investment in this venture, and he isn’t looking for a successful outcome.

    The Ultimate Homeschool Planning System (UHPS) is a small attempt to keep your eyes of faith focused on God and not yourself.  Even though you are writing down the nuts and bolts of your academic plan each week, we ask you to first spend time recounting God’s faithfulness and surprising blessings from the week before.  We give you a place to list small beginnings, signs of progress, notable achievements and unexpected acts of kindness all under a heading we call “Evidences of Grace,” just so you can remember what the source of these memorable moments s — God’s unmerited favor in your family’s life.  We also know from our own homeschooling days your kids are going to look inside your planner to see what you think is worth noting.  We want them to find a record of God’s activity as the focal point, not a manmade effort.

    Secondary to that ultimate goal, we want to help you raise an independent learner. If you don’t, you aren’t going to finish the course. Dependent students are a key contributor to homeschool burnout.  We want you to know the truth about learning: You can’t teach anyone anything.  Is that a shocker? Especially from a teacher with thirty-some years of experience under her belt? You can only motivate a student to engage in learning. And learning only results when effort on the student’s part is expended.  If your child is staring at you dull-eyed and slack-jawed, go find something better to do with your time.  Kids only learn when they are cognitively engaged. The outward signs of that are effort, interest, motivation, and initiative.

    Here’s some really good news about that reality: God has hard-wired your kid to learn.  That’s right, we are built for learning. We will live longer, and lead happier, healthier lives as long as we keep using our brain to learn. An ugly truth about this is schools aren’t built to encourage independent, healthy learning. Rather they are built for crowd control.  And because most of us were schooled under that system, the powerful model in our mind is a teacher at the front of the room controlling our time, our work, our interests, our learning.  The Ultimate Homeschool Planning System ( UHPS) which includes a planner for mom, a planner for students ( 4th-8th) and a planner for teens (7th-12th) is designed to foster and reward independence and initiative while you provide accountability and strategic guidance.

    We pray putting our planners in front of you each day will be a gentle reminder of the central and secondary goals of homeschooling:  Seeing God’s handiwork in the details of your family life and raising up the next generation trained to seize responsibility and lead their own families according to His plans.

    How has God been faithful in your family’s life this past week? Let’s get that down in writing.

  • Sneak Peek: Ultimate Weekly Planner for Teens

    I want to give you a quick look inside the forthcoming Ultimate Weekly Planner for Teens. ( While part of the Apologia team is on vacation, I grabbed a few pages to show you. I didn’t ask, hope that’s okay.) I think it is so hip and cool… and by association I am therefore (possibly) still hip and cool. (Are you buying this.) Anyway, here it is:

    Sneak Peek Teen Planner

    Thoughts?

    So far, the teen focus groups have loved the design, and moms have loved the organizational system. I am particularly excited about all the study aids we’ve put in the back. My goal is to make our planners for students and teens the Swiss army knife of the planner world (which I did not realize is quite vast.)

    Besides plenty of space for monthly planning and weekly assignments, we’ve created lots of forms for the record-keeping collegebound teens need to do (and not you). We’ve also given them checklists for high school graduation and a timeline for college admissions so they don’t miss something important. And there is a big study aid section with the kinds of information teens repeatedly use in each subject area.  Notice how I managed to sneak in some SAT vocabulary practice, too.

    Finally, we’ve made it small enough to fit into a big purse or backpack — no excuse then to leave it behind.  Feedback before we go to press? Should we print a gazillion? (This should be out before the end of summer.)

    Related: Sneak Peek Inside Mom’s Planner.

  • FREE Starter Kit for Student and Teen Planners

    The Ultimate Homeschool Planner for moms will be widely available next week. But the student and teen planners are still (at the outside) a month from being released. We are working diligently to get them to you sooner. In the meantime, I secured permission to create a starter kit. The attached file includes planning pages from both the student and teen planner so you can use these to get your homeschool under way. I had to watermark them to prevent viral copying, but I tried to make that as light as possible.

    You are free to reproduce these pages for your personal use — and you are free to distribute the starter kit on your own blog or Facebook pages. Actually — thanks so much in advance for doing so.

    Student and Teen Planner Starter Kit

    In case you missed our most popular post: https://wp.me/p15e7J-bo That’s a sneak peek inside the Mom’s Planner, now available for purchase from Apologia and CBD.

  • Help! My Child’s A Late Reader

    The magic of reading is part brain development and part environment. You can’t do much about the first — that’s a timeline God controls — but you certainly can about the latter.

    Kids will learn to read if they invest time in reading. The more they read, the better they will read. Your role is to help them want to do that. Our mistake is in thinking the reading program we choose is the secret ingredient. Not so. Curiosity is. Kids have to want to know what is hidden in those pages to persist in decoding the secret system.

    Here are four things you can do to stir up desire:

    1.Keep the context of reading pleasurable. We learn more when we are happy and relaxed.  As soon as we experience stress, our cognitive powers decrease.  We lose our ability to take in the full context, and instead, just focus on the threat. Further, emotions triggered in a stressful situation create a powerful memory that will be triggered again when the same context arises. If your child repeatedly finds reading stressful and demoralizing, those negative emotions will come rushing back at the beginning of the reading time and further complicate the process. Summertime, when school is officially out or at a more relaxed pace, is a good time to create a different reading memory for your late reader. Create a reading nook or an outdoor hiding place where books are a part of the setting. Share reading with your child, cozy up together and make reading an expression of your love and affection.

    2.Talk about books you love. Readers are raised by readers. My own childhood memories are soaked with not just my mother reading a book, but my grandmother as well. At 80, my mom is still a voracious reader who always has a book to recommend to me and her four granddaughters.  Reading is a central part of our family life, from generation to generation.  Start talking up your own reading habit. Make trips to the library or bookstore part of your family night. When traveling, track down the best used bookstore in town and give everyone a couple of dollars to splurge on books.  Share your finds with each other. If your kids see reading as an adult activity, they will be motivated to want to mimic that.

    3.Listen to a recorded book together. Nothing like a professional narrator to bring the characters inside a classic novel to life. It is a mistake to think listening to a book on tape will undermine your child’s desire to learn to read. No, it will exponentially boost that curiosity and desire to know what’s inside other books. You are creating an appetite for books when you pull the world of words into your child’s daily life any which way you can.

    4.Become a wordsmith. There are a number of skills that expert readers possess. A rich vocabulary is one of them. But don’t turn this into another dreaded subject. Rather, cultivate familiarity with words — big and small  –through wordplay, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, and dictionary games. Keep big dictionaries and thesauri within reach. Talk about words. Notice when the same word appears in different contexts. Use online resources, such as Word-Origins.com, to track down the fascinating history of words.

    Your turn.  What’s working at your house?