Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

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What is REAL Homeschooling? Homebound, Co-op or Public School at Home

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

To the world outside of homeschooling, it is hard to define the “normal homeschooler”.  Is it a family who raises chickens and who milks their own cows?

Is it a family who believes in the conveniences of city life or a family that loves fast food?

Is it a family that loves homesteading and eating only organic or is it a family who loves traveling?

We know as homeschoolers we embrace families from all backgrounds as the norm.

Satellite Schools, Cyber Schools, Independent Study Programs – Homeschooling?

More important, we understand the one common weave among so many different homeschooling families is that we all respect the right we have as parents to make the educational choices for our children.

However, as important as that choice is, it can cause quite a bit of stir in the homeschooling community to define what is real homeschooling.

Too, many new homeschoolers are joining our ranks by the hundreds and bringing with them their definition of what they may feel is homeschooling.
It is important to not only sharpen their definition of homeschooling but to remind us as veterans what is real homeschooling especially if we have seen times when homeschooling was not so freely allowed.

For example, when I was a high school freshman in public school, I got real sick and was homebound for a year.

Some people have never heard of being homebound.

What is REAL Homeschooling @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschooling Plus

My mom was not homeschooling at that time and we understood as a family that learning at home was an exception made for me because of my health. I would have to do my public school work at home.

I was simply changing the location of where I did my school.

My lessons were issued by the teacher and my parents had no say over the lessons I did and also, like a public school, the cost was free.

Did I consider myself homeschooled then? Absolutely not. Just being at home did not make me a homeschooler.

There are two very fundamental things that define what is real homeschooling.

The first significant factor is that all teaching is parent-led or parent directed.

You notice, I did not say all teaching is parent taught.

It does not have to be and that becomes important as you homeschool the upper grades where you may want to receive some outside help.

Classes offered online, private tutors, co-ops and homeschool events are all chosen by the parent.

Parent-led means that the education and instruction of the children falls squarely on the shoulders of the parent, free of government input, which is the key to understanding the very fine but clear-cut difference.

The way a parent uses a homeschool co-op too, for example, can be quite controversial today though it wasn’t that way before I started homeschooling.

I didn’t take my son out of public school to only enroll him in a 5 day “homeschool” co-op which was ran more like a private school.

I would be exchanging one task master for another had I put my son in a 5 day homeschooling co-op.

All I really would be doing would be enrolling my son in a private school and “helping” him with his homework.

I could see the difference in using a homeschooling co-op to supplement and add enrichment and relinquishing all teaching over to somebody else.

The second important point of what is real homeschooling I touched on briefly and that is you are free of public school or governmental control.

If you are newer to homeschooling, you may not fully appreciate the bristling of homeschooling parents who when they hear a family solely using a free, government backed, full online public school say that they are homeschoolers.

The second definition is not meant to put homeschoolers at odds but it is to remind all of us of our homeschooling roots and what we hold dear when it comes to homeschooling unencumbered.

Homeschooling options, like having cyber schools, have changed tremendously even since I started homeschooling.



This is a good thing because it allows more families to homeschool.  However, even with online schools, there is almost always an option to choose what is not free.

Why would a family make that choice? Because free for online public schools is not really free. You are giving up something.

Free of charge is different than freedom to educate in the way you feel is right for your family.

Homebound, Co-op or Public School at Home – Homeschooling?

Free for a lot of online public school means you are required to test, “attend” online parent teacher conference, join in live classes and more than not have a workload that has taken some homeschoolers 6 or more hours to complete.

More importantly, you are not picking and choosing the lesson planning day to day.

I have helped numerous new homeschoolers get out of on line schools because they thought they would be stress free to only find out that again, they have exchanged one taskmaster in public school for another one online.

Though free may sound inviting in the beginning, you are given up something else valuable, which is the right for your children’s education to be parent-led or directed.

This does not mean that online schools are to be avoided but it means that you want to maintain control over what your children learn day to day.

Most online schools or boxed curriculum providers have options for you to pay for the program as well or to enroll in their “free” program.

If it does not have an option for you to pay for the program then it is just an online public school.

Did you know that some states only consider a family homeschooling by law if it’s parent funded and parent directed?  Even they recognize the two fundamental differences.

Using outside sources is for sure part of homeschooling, but turning over full control of your children’s education has not ever been a definition of what is real homeschooling.

In sharing today, I am encouraging you to value and to not give up so easily the time tested methods that have worked for years and years in graduating well-educated children.

Giving over control of your homeschool changes the dynamics of your homeschooling and it’s worth every effort to be sure our homeschooling stays parent-led.

What about you? Do you think the dynamics of homeschooling has changed over the last few years?

Hugs and love ya,

 

What is NOT Homeschooling?

What Do You Fear Most About Homeschooling?

Should You Really Give Homeschooling a Trial Run?

What Do You Fear Most About Homeschooling?

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

What do you fear most about homeschooling?  If we could see the list of others, whose list would be longer?

  • Fear that I won’t prepare my kids for the world outside of my home.
  • Fear that my extended family that is watching ever so close will inspect us at the end of the year to see if we failed.
  • Fear that I won’t guide my children to fulfill their God given talents to the best of their ability.
  • Fear of being a perfectionist on top of that being unorganized – is that possible?
  • Fear that I will miss some vital subject.
  • Fear that my children will get behind.
  • Fear that I am the only one that loses patience with my kids.
  • Fear that I am the only one where public school looks like the perfect solution on some days.

Does your list look similar?

What would make you more confident?

Knowing that you are not alone in your fears and knowing what worked and what did not work for others is encouraging.
However, there is one noteworthy step in my experience that stand outs among all others and that is goal setting.

What Do You Fear Most About Homeschooling @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Goals are not only essential but they are crucial.

Fears are normal in the beginning when homeschooling, but what is more important to remember is that you are now swimming upstream so to speak.  You are going against the norm and that requires hard work.

Goals energize us to stay focused on our family’s needs.

We will avoid just floating along, responding to the moment or jumping ship to adopt the newest trend in homeschooling when our goals are specific and measurable.

The second important thing to remember is that your journey will be unique.

This point is so important I want to say it again.

Though some of your experiences will mirror my experiences and other homeschoolers, they will not all be the same.

How to Make a Strong Start in Homeschooling

Bottom line is you have to be able to measure progress for your own unique journey and you need a way to do that.

Look at how setting goals reduces fears, gives you very specific ways to measure the progress of your unique family and fortifies you for each year.

  • We make progress based on our family’s need.
  • Instead of wasting time checking out all the latest trends in homeschooling, we are analyzing our own efforts and measuring progress within our own family.
  • We avoid boredom and a stagnant year because we are focused on whether we need to speed up our homeschooling journey or slow it down to meet our family’s need.
  • Homeschooling is more purposeful and inspirational because out time is focused on meeting goals instead of coasting along.

Though I have made some pretty pages for you to write your homeschool goals on, you can write them anywhere.

I tout it all the time and that is though goals may sound good in our mind, when we put them to paper they are concrete.

Don’t ever forget what brought you to homeschooling in the first place.

If our goals and reasons are not in plain sight each day we give in to fear.

As time passes, it happens to all us and that is we forget why we chose homeschooling as a superior education.  Those reasons quell any fears and keeps us plodding forward.

Like the subjects we teach our children, reminders are needed throughout the years when fears resurface.

Overcoming fears happens by not only arming yourself with homeschool knowledge but with goals.

When your goals are met each year, you don’t need the validation of others, either by testing or by family approval.

What are your fears about homeschooling? Where are your goals?

Hugs and love ya,

Tina 2015 Signature

Also, check out these other posts.

When You Feel Like a Homeschool Failure

When does homeschooling become “normal”?

 

Homeschooled Kids Who Read – Pastime Pleasure or Professional Prerequisite?

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

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

In the early years of homeschooling much of our time is focused on how to teach reading and rightly so.

Today, homeschooled kids who read for pastime pleasure or as a professional prerequisite is about giving you a bird’s eye view of reading.

Being in the homeschool reading trenches, it is important to glance up every now and again to hone our reading vision.

Look at some tips to remember on your reading adventure.

Make it your aim to associate reading with pleasure in the early years.

How do you do this? By not just teaching phonics and then stopping for the day.

I know your time is stretched thin when the kids are all little but one attention grabbing story can capture the attention of 3, 4 or more young children.

Too, another tip I did along this same lines was to start a chapter book or long book like Charlotte’s Web instead of reading just a short children’s book that could be read in one setting. 

Don’t worry about the higher vocabulary in chapter books.  Just explain the meaning and move on. 

I piqued their attention for the next chapter or the next time we sat down together. They didn’t want to miss what happened next in the story.

Environment matters too.

Try to move away from a stiff and formal atmosphere for reading.  Don’t do like I did with my son.  The minute he started rolling on the floor, I got onto him. 

Soon I realized there was a difference between moving and wrestling.  Too, when I asked him at 3 years old what we were reading about, he could still tell me in a few simple silly words.  He was listening.

I learned to relax by taking a lesson from my son who was relaxed while we read even though he was moving a bit.

Add in choral reading.

I never heard of choral reading before I homeschooled.

Shortly after reading about the benefits of it, I added it quickly to my reading schedule.

In teaching my boys to read, next to reading aloud, choral reading was by far the best teaching tip that spanned from beginner reader even to high school with my boys.

Homeschooled Kids Who Read Pastime Pleasure or Professional Prerequisite @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Choral reading is reading a short passage with your child at the same time.  The benefits are far from simple.

I had one son who equated reading with not breathing or at least it seemed that way. 

He read so fast without pauses because I had focused so much on getting up his reading speed that he wasn’t comprehending, much less enjoying anything we were reading.

When we started choral reading, he could see where I paused, where I put emphasis and how I took a longer pause at the period.

It wasn’t too long before his reading fluency changed and he could not only understand what we were reading, but his volume, diction and rate of reading improved quickly.

Since he is my Sociable Sam type of personality, it was always a fun time for us.  He liked the challenge of reading with me.

Homeschooled Kids Who Read  Lifelong

It was also a skill I practiced with my sons as they entered high school.

Though I had let my oldest two sons do choral reading together a few times, it ended up being competitive and one son would always feel like he was doing less. So that didn’t work in my circumstance.

You may have children that are spread apart enough in age that an older child could do it with a younger child and not make the younger one feel defeated.

Much later in the teen years and even into high school, it was a fail-safe practice because not only would my sons be reading for pleasure but understanding what they read in books would be the stepping stones to passing tests for any profession they chose as adults.

Create memory aids.

Visual person that I am, I knew that at least two of my sons were visual learners also.

In the beginning, I made story props so that each child could hold up the character or prop when he heard it in the story.

Using hands-on props helped me sons to remember certain parts to a story.

For older kids, letting them look at a timeline or visual fact card on the subject you are reading about is helpful.

Public reading aloud.

Public reading aloud infused my boys to take reading seriously and to see the value of it beyond pleasure. 

When reading for pleasure, it’s not really important to have to remember what you are reading.

When my sons took up public reading aloud, it is a form of reading that is done in the adult world or work place. 

Public speaking and public reading aloud helped my boys to prepare for the work force and equipped them with valuable study skills if they are pursuing college courses.

Homeschooled kids do not have to make a choice between a pastime pleasure or using their reading skills as prerequisite for a professional job.  They can have both.

Adding in a few of these tips to your reading schedule not only will make your child a better reader, but when he is an adult, he will be an avid learner.

Guess what? Things have become too serious around here.

To celebrate National Reading Month, we are going to PARTY!!!!

I LOVE giveaways and I am so excited for you about this giveaway.

I have joined a few of my fellow bloggers from iHN to give away a Kindle Fire HD 6 16 GB !  Oh yeah baby, it’s nice!

Would you like one FREE?

Just a few guidelines.

1. Open to U.S. residents only.

2. The giveaway is from 6:00 am EST Monday, March 16 until 6:00 am EST Friday, March 20.

 The winner will be announced on Saturday, March 21.

3. Follow the instructions closely on the Rafflecopter. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Scoot by and visit the other hosts and check out their tips about reading.

Starts at Eight: Children’s Books about the Library

The Heart of Michelle: 5 Ways to Encourage Reading in a Reluctant Reader

Our Journey Westward: 11 Tips for Raising Readers

Life’s Hidden Treasures: Family Favorites and a Kindle Fire Giveaway for National Reading Month

Hugs and love ya

Tina 2015 Signature

Look at some more helpful tips!

Teaching Homeschooled Boys How to Read – When to Panic!

Letting Go of the Homeschool Language Arts Stranglehold

What You’ve Got To Know About Teaching Reading Comprehension

 

Homeschooling A Trial Run?

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

No matter what our knowledge of the homeschool world is when we begin, the thought of giving homeschooling a trial run crosses our mind during our journey.

I had a younger sister who was homeschooled and I knew quite a bit about the homeschooling world then, but I still thought I should be prepared to send my first son back to public school.


Homeschool Trials – A Sign of Weakness?

What if my son missed out on opportunities that only the public school could offer?

What if the public school teacher was more prepared than myself on a particular subject?

What would I do if we got to high school and I didn’t have a science lab?

What field trips would he miss out on?

What I have learned is that we can’t lead our lives, teach our children or fully enjoy the benefits of homeschooling based on “what ifs”.
We will either be insane, live in a state of constant panic and fear or we can choose now to intentionally homeschool.

Now, when I think about homeschooling being a trial run it’s like saying: “I’ll give my newborn a year. Because if I don’t have a great year, we’ll we just can’t keep him.”

That may sound like a way out there analogy but homeschooling half-heartedly was paralyzing and insane.

I think about all the preparation I made for nine months when I had my first born.


I thought everything would go perfect, along with our perfect crib, perfect schedule and perfect baby because well — I planned, right?

If I had judged my whole parenthood by the first year with my oldest son, I wouldn’t have had any more kids because very few of my expectations were met.

It was not rock-a-bye-baby with my first son.

The sleepless nights, constant calls to the doctor and worrying, the nights up pacing, rocking, digging for information to understand him was met by lots of hard work and on the job training.  It was much more time than I even imagined.

Homeschooling is very similar.

I homeschool to enjoy the freedom, to have better standards, to give more time, to tailor the curriculum, to give my children a better future, to give my sons a better foot hold in life, to build Godly character, to foster sibling relationships, to build a relationship with God, to capture my child’s heart, to make learning a delight for the child and on and on.

Homeschooling A Trial Run @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

I was not giving that up.

Along the way, I figured out this would not happen if I kept looking back instead of looking forward.

After my momentary lapse of fear when I put my son back in school for less than a year and took him back out, I realized that ruling out public school as an option from the beginning was the only way I could whole heartedly homeschool.

Too, though in the beginning my fears were more about not being able to meet my sons’ academic needs, the turns and twists of life have proven more challenging than meeting the academic ones.

Extended sicknesses by family members, deaths in our extended family, change of employment, financial ups and downs, pregnancy, and moving have been challenges that have you second guessing your journey.

Breaking all ties with public school was the best thing I did for our family. Why?

Because meeting the challenges of life was done best without interference with the public school schedule.

Public school may seem like a blessed relief in the beginning, but relief can quickly turn to restraint after the initial phase has passed.

Year-end testing, homework in the evenings and giving up control of what your children will be learning and when, were not things that I wanted to add to an already stressful time.

I weathered all the personal challenges I mentioned above and my homeschool conviction was stronger because of it.

At the time when I was making trips back and forth to the ICU in the hospital to care for my husband, laying on the couch because I was so nauseated each day of my pregnancy that I couldn’t hardly move to take care of my other children and driving hours and hours back and forth from my house to my mother’s house to care for my very sick mother, I felt my sons were going to be so behind in their academics that public school would be a relief.

Academics – Perk of Homeschooling?

Tears followed and the feeling of defeat loomed.
What I have come to treasure, value and hold on to is that out of every one of life’s challenges, we raced ahead, caught up and even moved ahead at certain times.
Along through the years, I taught my sons about compassion, nurturing older ones and the value of precious life. What a blessing!

Here are my answers now to the above questions:

If I sent my children back to public school, it would be giving them less as I can offer more even when the road blocks of life happen.

Yes, I have gaps in my education and will make mistakes. Through the years, I have seen plenty of mistakes in textbooks though.

Many professionals will know more on subjects than me, but I am the parent I don’t have to know the subjects, my children do.

I can hire private tutors, use DVDs, have my sons take on line classes and use co-ops and not to mention learn right along with my kids and I did.

We still don’t have a science lab.

We have something better, a fully stocked kitchen that is the perfect science lab.

Field trips are not taken once a year or a few times in the early years and then almost non-existent in the older grades, which is the norm in public school.

I did better. We have taken monthly field trips for every year and the field trips are some of my boys best learning moments. The tales we have to tell you now.

I don’t view myself as a particularly courageous or brave person, but through each hurdle, I was fortified, fueled and empowered for the next challenge and unswerving in my determination to stick to homeschooling.

Keep looking forward to your end goals and don’t measure your whole homeschooling career in front of you by one or two years. It is worth every effort and sacrifice.

What about you? Have you chosen to intentionally homeschool NOW?

Don’t give in thinking the other path is easier, check out these posts:

Hugs and love ya,

5 Tips on Teaching Homeschool Subjects I Loathe

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

I have been on a homeschool confession sort of roll and in that spirit I might as well confess my dislike for math.

All you math lovers don’t leave because I need you here on my blog.

5 Tips on Teaching Homeschool Subjects I Loathe @ Tina's Dynamic Homeschool Plus

Teaching homeschool subjects I loathe I guess really boils down to just one and it’s math but I am so thankful that none of my boys feel the same way.

However, these tips I am sharing today will work for any homeschool subject.

The tips are really kind of like a formula I have followed when we have covered tough subjects or ones that we had less interest in.

5 Tips on Teaching Homeschool Subjects I Loathe

Believe me, it’s not because I am a brain-iac in math that my boys actually love math, though I do feel differently about it now than I did when I first started teaching my boys math.

Looking back now and if you have a math bent, I think you would agree with me that sometimes math can be plain easy to teach because of the predictable formulas and operations that you follow.

That part of math saved me in a sense once I figured out it was like learning a foreign language in a way.

It is sort of like defining terms.  Once you understand the operations, terms and formulas, a lot of it is practical sense.

However, before getting to that point, I struggled with picking math curriculum for my boys because I didn’t want them to not like it.

I knew my dislike of math was traced back to my school days.

It is actually kind of ironic or a twist because I did not have good math teachers or start to enjoy it until high school.

Up until that time I struggled with math.  I had dedicated public high school teachers who allowed me to stay after school and they would tutor me.

Oh, I soon caught up and did four years of math and took advanced classes in the end, but I still remember my struggle and dislike.

What I am trying to say is that the beginning mattered more than the ending because it set the tone for how I still feel today.

I just wanted you to know all that background because our weakness affects the way we set out to teach a homeschool subject we loathe.

Look at the these tips that I learned that made math a favorite subject for my boys and that really can be applied to any homeschool subject you loathe teaching.

One/ Understand the approach.

What I didn’t realize about myself was that I needed less drill when I was younger and longer time in between concepts to think about them.

I needed something to add a mystery of suspense to math and to allow me to think about it, which is how I still am today.

You know for the most part I don’t make knee jerk decisions and it’s the way I approach learning too.

Remembering this, I took a long time looking over math curriculum to give my boys a good head start and settled on Singapore Math as a good beginning math curriculum.

I was such a good choice because it was not boring and it is a mastery approach, meaning it had less drill and kill.

It focuses on conceptual understanding, which was lacking in my own elementary years.

Also, I liked how it focused on concrete things before moving the boys too quick onto abstract.

Knowing that I wanted my sons to understand the concepts before rote memorization, I feel, made all the difference for them.

Math just made sense to them from the beginning, unlike my own experience.

For any subject, think about the approach they use whether it’s a spiral approach with lots of repetition or has some repetition, but moves on at a steady pace.

Two/ Use as many hands-on manipulatives as you like and don’t get rid of them too fast.

My first son was the only one I rushed when using math manipulatives because when the math curriculum stopped giving me instruction like: “Show your child this operation with blocks, shapes or a number line”, I stopped doing them.

I realized soon after that my sons benefited from using the hands-on activities longer.

So I soon ignored the advice to use them only in the younger grades, again, because I recalled my limited use in the younger grades with hands-on manipulatives.

Why do we have to leave off those vital things in the first or second grade?  There simply is no rush.

Each of my boys on their own gradually moved away from using them as they understood the concepts.

If they couldn’t show me with a picture or manipulative, I knew they didn’t fully understand.

Three/ Games are NOT just for young learners.

Then another thing I did was to be sure I kept the subject fun by adding in games.

A simple deck of cards used to drill multiplication facts took priority anytime over a boring worksheet.

Tell a boy we are going to play War with the cards and he is in and brushes up too on his math facts so that he can win.

Dominoes, Uno and Monopoly were called “school” and took the place of our math time on many occasions because again I was determined for my boys to feel differently about math.

Four/ Read a math story.

When they were little, I used math time to read aloud.

I loved it when I was unpredictable when assigning them their math for the day.

Reading a living math book for the day was always a winner.

Living Math Books for Homeschool Middle School Too

I never minded that the boys felt like they were getting away with not doing school because we only read.

It hasn’t hurt one bit to let them feel that that way because it always added an air of fun to math.

Too, though there are many living math books for the younger grades there are also many books to use even for middle school.

One book, Lawn Boy, I read to one of my sons who struggled a bit more to show him the value of learning math.

He needed a valid reason to learn math and making money is certainly an inspiration for learning.

Too, I didn’t want them to sigh when they heard the word “math” and I did want to invoke warm feelings toward learning math.

Five/ Join a Chess Club.

Even though at the time we lived far out in the country and it was about a 40 minute drive one way to meet with other homeschoolers, my boys played chess with other homeschoolers.

It helped to burn off some of that mental energy they had for numbers as they grew.

It wasn’t anything formal, the other moms had boys and girls too who enjoyed being challenged and had math lovers.

These five time tested tips have been the starting point when teaching homeschool subjects I loathed.

Not wanting to model for my sons my dislike for any subject, I can say today that though math may never be my favorite subject to teach, it certainly has way more appeal to me as we homeschool.

What is your least favorite subject to teach? What tips work for your kids?

Hugs and love ya,

Signature T

Also, look at tips at my post 25 Creative and Tasty Edible Math Activities that Keeps Learning Fun.