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Tina Robertson

The Dos and Don’ts of Homeschool Objectives

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Knowing the dos and don’ts of homeschool objectives boosts your teaching ability. Also, look at my page The Dynamics of How to Homeschool Easily and Smarter for more tips.

Homeschooling objectives for me have never really been about meeting the legalities of homeschooling but it has been about plotting a course.

Today, in the dos and don’ts of homeschooling objectives, I am using my homeschool objectives for fourth grade writing to show you what I did one year.

The Dos and Don'ts of Homeschool Objectives @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Before I do that though, I want you to understand that unlike the pressure the educational world puts on public school teachers, we do not have to use complicated language or try to mimic some fancy formula.

You need breathing room to plan for your own unique family and not some institution.

Too, arming you with details are important in helping you to move forward.

Key to understanding objectives is knowing how they relate to goals.

Goals and objectives are two different things though similar in purpose. They both chart a course.

Goals are general plans.  However, objectives are clear steps to reaching a goal and are more specific when you need them.

Look at my copy of my objectives for Mr. Senior 2013 when he was in fourth grade.

4th Grade Writing Objectives in Homeschool @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

First, I didn’t have my 7 step homeschool planner that I do now with useful forms so I kept a black hardbound book and wrote my specific objectives in it.

Too, I wrote a few personal notes on it about my oldest son’s writing and because I am not looking to embarrass my son when showing you my work, I whited out a few spots.

Look at my dos of homeschool objectives:

  • Do list your overall goal.  My goal was to have him write 3 paragraphs by the end of the year.
  • Do be specific to list the time allowed.  I would allow 40 minutes for writing each day.
  • Do list the specific outline or steps to accomplish the objective. I noted what I knew then as the 4 stage process of writing.
  • Do list things to remind you of what not to do. I wanted to strengthen his writing skills and hone in on changing his sentence variety that year by encouraging him to not always use “I” to start a sentence.  Varying topic sentences was another point to focus on for the year.
  • Do list what will be new that year.  I was going to try out a planner or graphic organizer that year.
  • Do list your resources or curriculum help. I was using several resources at the time, but there were some writing examples in Rod and Staff that were more significant to me to follow that year. This was part of my action plan to getting my objective accomplished.
  • Do list other helps you will create or find to accomplish the objective. I created a checklist for him to check his writing.
  • Do individualize the objectives for your kids and for the year.

MORE FOURTH GRADE HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM ACTIVITIES

Look at my don’ts of homeschool objectives:

  • Don’t try to follow public school by using educationalese.
  • Don’t worry about it being right or wrong from a public school point of view, grade or age. It is right because it is the road map for your child.
  • Don’t try to be too specific if you don’t need to be.  I only used my 4th grade writing objectives because I was very specific and wanted to show you a detailed list.

Goals and objectives can quickly become intertwined in homeschooling and that is okay.

Sometimes, you just don’t need such a specific plan.

Just remember the main difference between general goals and homeschool objectives is that objectives have 2 parts to them to make them more specific.

The first part is explaining what will be accomplished for that term, which could be a semester or year and the second part is explaining how it will be done.

If you were writing objectives, for example, about history and wanted to keep them general, look at this one.

  • To introduce and become familiar with the world of Ancient Civilization. This will be done through hands-on activities, role playing, timelines, making time period recipes, lapbooking and living books.

Again, noting what I was going to do and how I will accomplish it was all that I needed that one year.

Even simple objectives are meaningful and significant.

The dos and don’ts of homeschooling objectives are making them fit your use for whatever school term you need.

Do you find drafting homeschool objectives an easy part of homeschool planning?

Also, look at how homeschool objectives can easily be made for unit studies too.

Year Round Homeschool – Chaos Or Calm

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Year round homeschool can be chaos or calm depending on how you implement it into your schedule. Also, look on my page The Dynamics of How to Homeschool Easily and Smarter.

When I first started homeschooling, I didn’t even think about following any other homeschool schedule like homeschooling year round.

Now, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Though I would love to follow my own schedule, the reality is my husband’s work schedule dictated our school schedule for many years.

Year Round Homeschool – Chaos Or Calm

Like my family, a lot of homeschoolers are self-employed and so that means we make our own schedules, but it also means that it usually doesn’t jive with a public school schedule.

For the most part, can you dictate your own schedule?

First, look at some of these homeschool books

5 BEST How to Homeschool Books

I've rounded up some of the best books to help you get started homeschooling.

When deciding if homeschooling year round is for you, look at these 3 questions to help you figure out if it will work for your family or not.

3 Questions to Ask If You Should Year Round Homeschool Or Not

Assuming you can, the next thing to ask is:

Is it by completely taking off months or just having a few weeks spread throughout the year?

1. How Much Control Do You Have Over Your Schedule

You can’t really decide this if this is your first year of homeschooling because you and your kids are getting off the public school treadmill.

If you have been in public school for years, there may be a pull for your children to play with kids from public school and that means you think you may want the summer off.

2. How Do Your Children Learn Best

But the longer you homeschool the more that desire to form an attachment with friends from public school wanes because you have made so many friends otherwise in field trips, co-ops and classes with other like-minded parents and children.

A lot of homeschoolers school lightly during summer because it allows them to catch up on things they have been wanting to do but didn’t get time to do during the regular school year.

3. Does The Weather Affect You Getting Outdoors

If you live in a place like Texas, where the summer is a scorcher, then choosing to school during hotter months and having off during cooler weather is a huge benefit to enjoying being outdoors more.

These 3 easy questions helped me to see that my homeschool schedule did not have to follow the public school schedule.

I did better as a teacher when I could take mini-breaks throughout the year.

My children stayed in a relaxed routine too when we kept the same schedule year round.

More Homeschooling Year Around Tips

This doesn’t mean you have to keep the same pace each month and you really wouldn’t want to.

Staying productive year round has been a good fit for us.

Do you like schooling year round?

What homeschool schedule do you follow?

Homeschooling Year Round @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

5 Ingredients Every Well-Organized Homeschool Space Needs

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

I’ll admit it. My knees go weak and my heart goes pitter patter when planning and organizing a home school space.

It is one subject that I get plain excited about anytime of the year.

5 Ingredients Every Well-Organized Homeschool Space Needs @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus
Whether you have a homeschool room or not there are just some things that I have found through the years that make my overall day run smooth when I have things that I need.

Look at my list of 5 ingredients every well-organized homeschool space needs.

Writing Surface that is Age Appropriate.

I tried it and I tried it again but the kitchen table just did not work for me in my early years of homeschooling.

Even when I lived in the 800 square foot cabin for the 5 of us and we had no school room, I still fought for a space for the height appropriate table for writing.

The kitchen table and bar area was fine for projects, art and hands-on but it is hard to have good posture and put both feet flat on the floor when my son couldn’t reach the floor.

It is one reason that I believe that my

Bookshelves.

Need I say more. Okay, maybe a bit more because there was one thing I would have done differently.

Instead of getting caught up in those cutesy little bookshelves, I wished I would have just bought regular size bookshelves because you get more use out of them.

Cutesy Bookshelves for early homeschool room @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool PlusPreschool and Kindergarten are only a very few short years of schooling compared to elementary, middle and high school.

I could have easily used the bottom shelves where my sons could reach when they were Preschool and Kindergarten ages.

I did waste a couple of years with cute shelves but it would have been more practical with regular sized bookshelves.

Out of the Box Storage Supplies.

Buying zipper pouches to use for flashcards, buckets found in the kids gardening section of Target to hold pencils and small plant pots without the plant in the outside gardening section all made for inexpensive and beautiful storage that looks good in any part of the house.

I preferred clear storage containers that could be moved to any part of the house that held atlases, maps or references.

Pencils That Never Require Sharpening

Another must-have in my organized home school space is a mechanical pencil.

Your kids will not waste time sharpening pencils and the best thing about it is that your not so neat writers become neat because the pencil always has a nice point.

We use only the .9mm lead because it didn’t break so easily and it is sturdy. These are the ones I use by Pentel.

 


Organized Homeschool Teachers Rock.

Too, don’t focus so much on the needs of your children that you forget to organize material in a way that is good for you.
Don’t be afraid to rip the binding off any book and coil bind if needed. Coil bound books lay flat and I am able to highlight and write in my teacher books.

It doesn’t hurt to add a few pretty but well need supplies like paper clips, high lighters and pens.

Too, I love notebooks not only for my boys but to organize my material.

More and more resources are going digital and I love the fact that I can print exactly what I want to put in my teaching binders.

There are more things that I love to add to my homeschool space but these things are the basic ingredients to start with.

How about you? What is on your basic list of must-haves for your homeschool space?

Hugs and love ya,

2015 Tina Signature co

Check out these other posts:
How To Turn a House Into a Homeschool Space Part 1
How to Turn a House Into a Homeschool Space Part 2

3 Wrong Ways to Begin a Homeschool Unit Study

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

It is easy to get caught up in the hype of designing your own homeschool unit study before you have had a chance to explore potential mistakes that can be made when doing one.

Look at these 3 wrong ways to begin a homeschool unit study.

In creating a unit study, I had to decide which topics and subjects my children needed to cover.

Skinny It Up

My very first mistake was thinking I had to cover all the subjects in a balanced way. I did not.

Learning is about exploring subjects that your children are interested in or that you want them exposed to.

My beginning system wasn’t fancy, but it worked.

I simply took time to sketch out what subjects I needed to cover for that unit study.

3 Wrong Ways to Begin a Homeschool Unit Study @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus
Too, in my example above, I made the material have personal application to our family.

Meaningful Learning

That is the second common mistake to jumping into a unit study, which is not making the material personal to your family.

If you decide to use a prepared unit study, tweak it to fit your family’s needs.

Though children are interested in happenings on the other side of the world, learning comes alive when it is full of personal meaning.

For example, the first time I did the American Civil War, we lived in Texas and my boys needed more of an emphasis on learning about our home state.

I made the unit study to fit our needs because we took a trail off of the unit study to learn about Texas.

Curriculum Paradise or Pain?

Trying to cover two curriculum equally is the third mistake.

Why do we try to do that? It won’t work.

Well it might but then it might lead to homeschool burnout if you become too unbalanced.

There is nothing wrong with having more than one curriculum but the difference is that one curriculum is your main spine or focus.

The other curriculum simply supports or enhances your primary spine.

I have found that comprehensive unit studies are unlike short term enrichment projects.

In other words commit to a unit study all the way.

This means I don’t stress out my kids by going over other lessons in whatever laid our curriculum we are using at the time.

I simply move forward without feeling like we are behind.

Don’t stress you or your children either one by doing unit studies on top of what you are already using.

If you see something that is important to you to cover in your laid out curriculum, then fold that information into your upcoming unit study.

Grammar and spelling can always be applied to writing, atlases always fit geography and science and history can be hands-on activities.

Covering too many subjects, not making learning come alive by making it apply to your children and trying to do two curriculum simultaneously are sure ways to kill a unit study before you get started.

How about you? Have you made any of these mistakes?

Hugs and love ya,
2015 Tina Signature co

Check out my 1o Days of Diving Into Unit Studies by Creating a Unit Study Together

Why It Is Hard to Teach Homeschooled Kids Writing But Not Impossible

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Today, in sharing why it is hard to teach homeschooled kids writing but not impossible I will share some background information on how to teach writing. Also, look at my page The Dynamics of How to Homeschool Easily and Smarter for more tips!

First, let me tell you my story.

In public school, I had a middle school teacher that I adored.

She understood my preference of communicating orally where I could look into the eyes of the person I was talking to, give them a gentle pat or flail my arms out long when talking fast.

But she also encouraged me to give my written words the same gravity.

It wasn’t until I started teaching my boys how to write that I truly appreciated what a difficult task it is to teach my boys how to write.

Understanding the process of any skill that I am teaching has always helped me to find a solution to any problem we are experiencing.

More importantly, I have a direction to follow.

For example, it’s easy enough to understand that when teaching reading we need to start with a set of letters that express sounds.

After that, we build words, sentences and we are off to teaching our kids how to read.

Finding a starting point for writing, however, can be more elusive.

Why It is Hard to Teach Homeschooled Kids Writing But Not Impossible @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Word Writing Scramble

One reason I found writing hard to teach was that I didn’t appreciate that it is a learned art to fashion words on a page that are appealing.

It’s almost like playing word scramble or in this case sentence scramble when teaching our kids to write.

Immature readers can create awkward sounding sentences because of their lack of experience in life.

For that matter, awkward sentence that don’t flow smoothly can happen to even the most experienced writer too.

That is why it is important in the early stages of writing that children have plenty of time to mull over words, thoughts and arrangement of ideas.

Ideas like creating and writing in daily journals, playing word games and vocabulary games are important to arming children with the creativity they need to write.

When I started teaching writing, my oldest son felt almost paralyzed when I would ask him what topic he wanted to write about.

That was my first ugly encounter with writing after teaching him how to write his ABCs.

Mature Writers Born?

I taught him how to write his ABCs, how could this not be just as easy or so I thought.

My next mess up came because I was expecting maturity and experience with writing topics from a 5 year old.

Experiences and maturity come just from that, age and life experiences.

How could I equip my 5 year old with opportunities for writing experiences?

It is the same answer that equipped him at 15 years old, which is reading to the rescue.

I had heard many times that a reader is a writer and we read every day.

But other than pleasure and reading to find out what we wanted to know about, I under estimated the value of it in gaining experiences outside of what we were learning each day.

There was a connection between the books we were reading and writing topics that swirled around in my son’s mind.

I didn’t have to rush childhood, nor would I want to so that he could learn the art of self-expression.

Drawing out of him experiences that he read about either in his books and daily living were the keys to overflowing topic ideas.

Are You Making this Mistake?

There is just no rushing content, facts, ideas and details, which is the foundation of writing.

Content is the next biggie that kids are afraid of.

As if struggling with the structure of creating delightful sounding words is not enough, they have to think about content, topic sentences, details and a strong conclusion.

There is no getting around it, our kids needs our expertise when it comes to helping them with their writing.

In the early stages of writing especially, our kids need us to supply content and it is okay to do this.

We don’t want to ever put our kids in a sink or swim situation when writing.

It does absolutely no good and it can create a kid who hates writing and carries that feeling to high school.

It is important to continue these building skills through to middle school.

That is the time to continue to reinforce what was learned at the foundational level and to hone outlining and note taking skills.

Though I didn’t know as much then when I started teaching my kids to write as I know now, I did know that certain valuable skills could not be overlooked.

Look at these basic things to include in teaching everyday writing.

  • Copywork
  • Dictation
  • Outlining
  • Constantly reading back what they wrote
  • Journal writing to not be corrected but to use as practice for self-expression.

More Homeschool Handwriting Curriculum Tips!

Keep reading for a list of 8 handwriting curriculum and the benefits of each.