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Guilt-Free Homeschooling details
Listing ID: 561
Title: Guilt-Free Homeschooling
Description: GFHS is run by Carolyn Morrison, an 11 year veteran of homeschooling her two children, from leaving public school in the elementary grades through high school graduation and into college.
Category: Education & Training : Home Schooling
Owner:
listed on: May 13, 2008 08:23:27 AM
Number Hits: 3 times
Recent Posts:
| The Holidays Are Unit Studies -- Learning During the Busy Season - 2008-12-02 15:13:00 |
| [This article was written by Jennifer (Morrison) Leonhard: Guilt-Free daughter and homeschool graduate.]The holidays are a hectic time: relatives are coming over, the house needs to be cleaned, presents must be bought and wrapped, and food must be prepared. The schoolwork either gets lost along the way or becomes an added frustration as we try to get everything done at once. Mom planned our school schedule with the knowledge that Dad would be home from work around this time and regular schoolwork wouldn't get done, but the learning was just beginning. Mom usually gave us a break from lessons during the entire week of Thanksgiving, and we often stopped ourofficialschoolwork well before Christmas, since extra time before each holiday was more beneficial for Mom's preparations than time off afterward. However, we found many opportunities for learning, even when the schoolbooks had been put back on the shelf. Shop Class Dad usually did some project around the house during his time off from work (after all, you can't get Dad to just sit around the house doing nothing). We learned to fix cracks in walls, paint, and generally drive Mom crazy with home repairs, all while she was preparing to have people over. Creating homemade presents, like building blocks, picture frames, and ornaments, teach handcrafts while theoretically cutting down on the expenses for gifts. Math Mom has always used cooking as math. Make a recipe smaller or larger, and you are automatically learning fractions: ¾ cup of flour times 2 equals 1 ½ cups. (Sure you could just use the ¾ cup twice, but then what are you learning?) The economics of having a budget for Christmas will never fail to provide an opportunity for learning. How about learning some geometry and spatial relationships when wrapping presents?A lesson in possibility vs. impossibility lurks in the concept of a jolly and fat Santa squeezing down a chimney (which also brings up the lesson of "don't try this at home") or reindeer in flight (although one can argue that bees are also supposed to be a flight impossibility, and yet they consistently defy logical aerodynamics). Music Obviously, Christmas includes music -- but that can take on many different forms. You can find many genres of Christmas music, from a symphony orchestra to the sounds of animals barking and mewingAway in a Manger. The latter is rather amusing the first time, but it gets harder to appreciate with frequency. The library and your friends will likely have a variety of holiday music that you can sample. I found a simple song book and learned how to tap out a few tunes on the piano. I knew what Christmas songs were supposed to sound like, so they were easier to learn, and I got a small taste of playing the piano. Explore the lyrics of Christmas songs to learn a little about Christmas history -- have you ever wondered why the lyrics toI'll Be Home for Christmastalk about presentsonthe tree? History Beyond the lyrics of songs giving us a glimpse into Christmas Past, there are many other subjects you can study for history. Thanksgiving is a history lesson in itself, from the voyage of the Pilgrims to learning why we celebrate it in November. American history becomes an interesting pastime instead of boring history when reading a Pilgrim's personal account of coming to this country. Do you know why we celebrate Christmas around a tree? Or who started the tradition of sending Christmas cards? Do you know how the first Christmas trees were decorated -- or the stories behind your family's favorite decorations? Literature From studying Christmases past to reading about the Ghost of Christmas Past, ample literature can be found about others celebrating Christmas. In the spirit of the season, reading holiday stories aloud by a fire while drinking hot cocoa certainly doesn't feel much like schoolwork! Spelling The holidays can provide much inspiration for spelling, from Language, Geography& Social Studies Research the different names for Santa Claus around the world. (And for math, estimate the number of stops he must make in a single night.) Various traditions surround Santa's visit, from cookies and milk to leaving shoes instead of stockings to be filled. And don't overlook the traditions of Hanukkah: many interesting studies reside in the holiday celebrations from other cultures. Cooking Besides being recruited to help Mom with preparations for large family dinners (and vying for turns at grinding the fruits for our traditional cranberry relish), we often made a variety of cookies and candies to have available during the season. Occasionally, we also made an assortment of mini-casseroles and other freezer meals as gifts for elderly grandparents. Perhaps you could experience popular foods from holiday celebrations in the past -- and who doesn't enjoy a chance to try yummy new foods? You may end up adding a new favorite to the season, or (if you don't like the new dish) you can at least learn to be more thankful for the old standards your family regularly prepares for holidays. Many more lessons can be found in the holiday seasons -- just make sure to keep your eyes open for learning opportunities and your heart open to the most important lesson of all: being thankful for the Son. |
| Uber Amazing blog Award - 2008-11-11 16:48:00 |
Michelle atMy Blessed Homesurprised me with the Uber Amazing Blog Award! Too many disruptions to daily life (for one, my Mom recently passed away) have kept me from keeping up with whatever awards are bouncing around the blogosphere, so this was especially touching. Thank you so much, Michelle!
About the award: Uber(synonym to Super)Amazing Blog Awardis a blog award given to sites who: The rules of this award are: * Put the logo on your blog or post. I pass this award on to: The Cate Family ofWhy Homeschool?for their creation of and tireless dedication to theCarnival of Homeschooling.Andrea and heratypicalife, including the non-stop, side-splitting adventures of Emma, the wunderkind. Plus, Andrea is my favorite go-to computer geek/homeschooling mom. Dy atClassical Adventuresfor her continuing saga of a growing family refurbishing their Forever Home. I have to remember to go to the bathroombeforeI read Dy's posts, because... well, read her blog and you'll KNOW why! Use extreme caution in drinking your favorite beverage while reading also, because your computer just won't like the results. Kim'sLarge Family Logisticsprovides down-to-earth how-to's from a family that knows what they're talking about! Comics, Coffee and Catcheshas to be my favorite online comic strip, mostly because it's TOO TRUE in its representation of homeschool life. These drawings can say so much in just a few panels, and they never fail to make me smile, laugh, or GASP! with the recollection of "Ohmigosh, my kids did that, TOO!" (and I've always wanted to learn to juggle, so I freely admit to having juggling envy) |
| How Can I Teach Out-of-the-Box Thinking? - 2008-10-30 13:43:00 |
| [This article was written by Jennifer (Morrison) Leonhard: Guilt-Free daughter and homeschool graduate.] Society spends years conforming our minds, teaching us to follow certain conventions and rules, and then once we reach college and business, we are asked to be "out of the box thinkers." I turned to my brother for inspiration at this point. My brother has never been accused of being "in the box" unless it was a large cardboard box, wrapped as a Christmas present during a white elephant gift exchange. (Yes, he really did that.) In math class, when presented with a hexagon and asked to "Name this figure," he simply wrote "Bob." When Mom asked what direction he would be facing if he went out the front door, walked 3 steps and turned right, took 3 steps, then turned right again, took 3 steps and turned right again, he said, "Forward!" By nature I am more of a conformist, striving to give the answer that was expected of me, and when faced with an "out of the box" question, I was often lost. Given no absolute and no example upon which to base my answers, I didn't know where to look and often called my brother from college to see what his answer would be. After an hour or so of brainstorming, I could find a direction that suited me for forming my own thoughts. Surprisingly though, I have often been considered by my peers as a bit out of the box. For the past few years, I have dressed in costume for work during the holiday season. It started when I worked in a commission environment (selling fine jewelry) and had to find a way to gain attention and get customers to talk to me. Dressing in a Santa hat and curly toed shoes with bells on the ends made customers want to greet me, instead of shying away when I greeted them. Getting the initial greeting with the customer was the hard part -- after that I could gain the information I needed to learn who they were shopping for and what that person might like in a gift. My costumes prompted the customers to speak to me first. Last year we had too much Halloween inventory at our retail store, and it wasn't moving out the door fast enough. I started dressing in costumes, and children would beg their parents for a costume: after all, that girl over there (me) is dressed up, and it isn't Halloween yet! It worked. I started coming up with as many costumes as I could, digging through our olddress-up boxto come up with ideas. Many costumes were based on a single hat and accessorized to fit the theme. A witch's hat turned an ordinary black dress, green tights, and green eye shadow into a complete character. The same idea worked with an inexpensive pirate's hat and a striped shirt, dark eyeliner, one hoop earring, and a gold blazer. Everyone at work asked where I got these elaborate costumes, but most of them were things I normally wore to work any other day, but they were just combined differently to go with a specific hat. It seems simple enough when explained, but my coworkers simply can't get over each costume I wear. They laugh at my courage to wear a costume to work, since many are not planning to wear a costume on Halloween, but I've been wearing costumes every day for weeks. I don't know exactly what factors made my brother and me the way we are, but I do know that we were encouraged to have an imagination much bigger than ourselves. We drew Dr. Seuss characters with chalk on the sidewalk and tried to create Seuss-like characters of our own. Mom had wanted to be an astronaut when she grew up, and that same desire to shoot for the moon was passed on to my brother and me. When my brother and I were growing up, Mom would ask us questions that would get us to think situations through. Along with asking us simpler questions, like what sounds certain animals made, she would ask us more intriguing questions, such as how would we get our shoes tied if we had a broken arm. She asked questions that would get us to anticipate the future before it happened, and consider how different variables could alter the outcome. We were encouraged to look at questions from different angles, to experiment to see what happened, and to have the imagination to believe anything was possible. Mom created new games using parts from the other games we had -- usually to teach us something. I hated spelling, but using Scrabble tiles to form my spelling words made the subject a little easier to grasp. Math was more fun when it involved ascavenger huntfor us and a friend. In fact, Mom always called math a puzzle. She enjoyed algebra, and as annoying as that was sometimes, she taught us how to see it as a puzzle, too. Mom used her math skills to scale down the solar system to the size of our block -- the sun was as wide as our street, and we drew its outline with chalk right there in the middle of the street, and then we mapped out the planets to scale, too. Seeing how far the planets would be from each other if the sun would fit on our street helped us to imagine how far away from each other they must be in real life. I'm not especially talented, I am a horrible artist, the musical talent went to my brother, and I wouldn't make a good actress. I'm also not the homeschooler who is likely to be featured on the cover of a magazine. I enjoy math, but it doesn't come easily to me. However, I did learn to visualize things, whether possible or not, in order to come up with solutions and decide on the best one. Although a lot of my homeschooling came from books due to my love of reading, some of the most memorable parts were when our family got out of the textbooks, out of the classroom, and out of the box. |
