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  • 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?

  • How Do Kids Learn Best From Others?

    Yesterday I started a discussion about raising an independent learner. Today I’d liked to explore the ways in which we learn from others and get your thoughts on this, too.

    Have you ever considered God’s intention in human development? Why the cycle of life? Why not create us fully-formed, like Adam and Eve? Why do children need almost twenty years to reach full maturity and be equipped for life independent of their parents? What’s the Creator’s intention in this plan?

    For one thing, it insures parents have opportunity to train their children and pass on their heritage. On a grand scale, it means each generation has opportunity to glean the cumulative wisdom and knowledge from all the generations that have come before.

    Not only did God author human development, He designed us to live in groups. There are few hermits among us. We organize ourselves across cultures and time as families, tribes, and nations. Why? Not all of God’s creatures do this. What’s the purpose behind our social nature?

    Again, one benefit is this allows us to pass on prior learning and build upon it. This is the secret of human progress—we are social.

    So how do we cooperate with this grand design in our homeschooling?

    How do children truly learn from others, and practically how do we facilitate what is beneficial about social learning? ( Clearly, we do not want children to learn everything they observe!)

    David had one key idea in the comment threads under “How Do You Raise an Independent Learner?” He pointed out the power of modeling. We do learn more from what we observe than from what we are told.

    However, we learn even more when watching someone model a behavior and they talk about what they are doing.

    To leverage this even further, what they talk about is important. If we explain the mental processes we are going through while modeling that behavior; e.g. solving a math problem, swinging a golf club, those who are learning can copy that behavior more quickly.

    In educationalese, we call this process of modeling and narrating our inner thoughts “think aloud.”

    So what ideas do you have? Are you using co-ops, grouping siblings together for certain subjects, including grandparents in your schooling? What seems to work best? Or not at all?

  • 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?

  • Sneak Peek Inside The Ultimate Homeschool Planner

    Many of you have asked when the Ultimate Homeschool Planner designed by me and featured in Apologia’s latest catalog will be available. Hang on. It’s almost here. The planner for moms went to the printer last week, and the planners for students (4th-8th) and teens (7th-12th) are headed there shortly.  Launching a brand new product line is an arduous project — especially if you want to have the nerve to use the term ultimate in the title.

    These three planners have gone through dozens of iterations already, based upon feedback from focus groups and reviewers.  At this point, Apologia has generously brought so many highly-skilled people on to the project, I’m a bit embarrassed to claim authorship.  It really has been a team effort and many experienced homeschool moms have made invaluable contributions toward our goal of creating an elegant, easy-to-use, and above all, God-centered planning system that will lighten your load — not create another burdensome chore.

    But I’ll let you decide if we have reached that goal or not.  Here is a preview of the 48-week daily planner for up to six children:  Ultimate Planner Sample

    What do you think? Does this look promising?