For centuries people have built their homes with nothing more than their own two hands and locally available natural resources. Necessity caused people to combine artistic beauty and practical form to construct adobe pueblos, Pennsylvanian barns, Mongolian yurts and Indonesian stilt houses, long ...
Homeschoolers enjoy nothing more than going out to explore the world. The word "home" may be in the word homeschooling, but often there is more time spent outside of home on experiential endeavors, than sitting at home doing book work. Visits to museums, factories and special events, are great wa...
John Constable, the English landscape painter, called the sky the “chief organ of sentiment.” Leonardo Da Vinci called clouds “bodies without surface.” But you don’t have to be a famous painter to appreciate the beauty of clouds. All of us have enjoyed looking up into the sky and “seeing” differe...
This year, the country has been besieged by angry, Old Man Winter. His fierce temper has blanketed most of the nation in heavy, white snow. While school children have enjoyed the treat of snow days, many adults have long since ceased to view the snow as a novelty.
On one of these many snow days,...
Students' first impression of the Impressionist Movement when they visit their local art museum might be that they are simply looking at “pretty pictures” without a deeper meaning. But this is not true. Impressionist painters and sculptors were seen as renegades in their time because they chose s...
One of the most useful, yet undervalued, math concepts is estimating. It is a practical skill for use in finding solutions to real-world problems and contributing to higher level math reasoning. Estimation teaches children to use their existing knowledge to figure out a problem. It is more concer...
Music elevates the soul and inspires the mind. By encouraging musical training, you can help your children enhance their listening abilities, discover patterns, and foster creativity.
At my house, we have incorporated music into our curriculum every year since kindergarten. Initially, my kids we...
Have you ever seen your child so completely engrossed in an activity that he or she loses all sense of time and place? For my son, it happens when he’s engaged in certain math games on the computer. An hour can pass and, to use a sporting term, he’s still “in the zone.” His key strokes are automa...
Unschooling can be a controversial topic, even for homeschooling parents. People are usually passionate about the subject. They either love the idea, or hate it. However, unschooling can be regarded simply as another method used to teach children.
The idea behind unschooling is that the student ...
The world around us provides virtually limitless ways to teach number patterns to children. I found that our local place of worship, the mall, the park, and our public swimming pool were all wonderful places to investigate number patterns. We visited each place so my son could copy the pattern o...
It’s been my experience that students develop a greater appreciation of math if they can relate its significance to their own lives. Thus, when it came to teaching my own child about math trailblazers, men and women whose accomplishments made invaluable contributions to our world, I wanted to pre...
Bugs are not to be distained or feared. In fact, you can help your children discover the mysterious world of these bizarre and prolific creatures. Insects belong to the phylum Arthropoda, under the kingdom of Animalia. While some are pesky, and can be harmful, they are a crucial element in the fo...
I might be wrong, but I think that as a child, I spent more hours dreaming during the day, than I did at night. Often, a thought unrelated to what I was supposed to be thinking about, would distract me. And off my mind went, willingly, on the journey. Unfortunately, I would come out of the day dr...
My 8-year-old son is not yet at the point where he can calculate numerical extremes. He has no concept as to the mind-boggling vastness of the universe, or the inner workings of an atom. This kind of knowledge will come a bit further down the road. Lately, he has been learning about place value a...
Homeschooling is a tricky endeavor that requires the ability to adjust. There is always something new that enters into the equation. Just when I thought things were running smoothly, the middle school years arrived. Who knew that middle school would completely change our homeschooling experience?...
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