More results…

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

Blog

  • 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.

  • Creative Writing Class with Lili Serbicki

    I am thrilled to announce that we’ve just added a creative writing course for high school students to our line up of online classes .   Lili (Meldrum) Serbicki is a former student of mine (and Vicki Dincher’s, our registrar) who was a joy to work with throughout high school.  She is immensely talented and prolific.  Now a college graduate and professional writer, I contacted Lili as soon as I heard she might be interested in offering a creative writing course online.

    I’ve had many students over the years in my online AP English courses who wanted to develop their creative writing talents.  AP English certainly requires a lot of writing of students, but it does not primarily focus on creative writing per se.  So, she is a perfect fit for our focus here:  She has developed a creative writing class aspiring writers will love; and at the same time, Lili will help them lay a foundation for a future AP English course.

    You can read her course description here: Creative Writing

    And you can register for her class here.

  • 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.

  • The Dependent Learner: What Can I Do?

    All kids will be reluctant or resistent about academics at some point — some more than others.  What can we do to inspire a love for learning and promote independence?

    Here are a three strategies that have worked for me with many different kinds of students:

    1. Success: Start at the child’s level of success in that area.  Forget about grade levels and where you think your child should be — that’s not helpful if your child is not ready or interested in working at that level yet. We give time to things we feel successful at; we avoid areas where we feel doomed to fail.  Think about where you invest time and effort. Do you expect to be successful?  Would you invest the time and effort, if you expected to fail? That’s my point.   Until recently, I avoided cooking — I didn’t find it very rewarding because I have had too many disasters in the kitchen. All those cooking shows  mydaughter enjoys watching finally got me interested enough to put some time into meal preparation once again. With a lot of helpful sources online and reruns on Hulu, I learned enough of the basics to start turning out new dishes my family loves.  Now that I’m getting positive feedback, I keep putting more time into cooking. And I’m starting to think of cooking as something I enjoy — my intrinsic motivation is on the rise. 

    Your kids are wired to learn just like you are. So figure out where you can start in math or science or reading that will prove successful.  Then make a big deal out of that success. I love that the word encouragement has the word courage in it.  That’s what it does — encouragement puts courage into your child. It fills them up with the boldness they need to persist.  And that’s what they need to combat their fear of failure.

    2. Challenge: Once you have some success, then challenge your child to tackle a slightly more difficult book or task.  You challenge with encouragement and expressed confidence in your child’s ability to learn. Instead of thinking of yourself as a teacher, think of yourself as a personal coach or trainer. You are there to help your kid grow a brain and you aren’t going to let him or her fail or quit. But the trick is, the challenge has to be just right – not an over-challenging situation, but one in which they can use the new skills they are learning to achieve the very next level of success. Success will breed confidence and interest. And interest is especially keen when we think we have a knack for something that is difficult.  We get our greatest sense of accomplishment from tasks that require effort from us in order to be attained. Kids lose interest not just because they are over-challenged; but also, because they are under-challenged.

    3. Novelty: Try a unique approach. We human beings get bored easily. We like novelty. There are endless ways to pique a child’s interest in math, science or reading — find an enthusiastic person who works in the field where your child is struggling. Figure out how your reluctant learner can spend some time around this person. Take a field trip or read a captivating book aloud that shows the benefits of working hard in this area. Just because your child thinks a subject is boring today, doesn’t mean interest can never be created. It certainly can — and novelty is one certain way to get that started.

    What other ideas have you tried?