Almost Unschooling Grama

  Once a month, Shanda and I try to plan a special educational-themed party. This month we planned a one-hour party in the Nauvoo State Park, but since it was a little chilly and we only had 2 families involved, we decided to have it at my house and make a whole day of it.  We started out by making meat pies. corn pudding and butter for lunch.  Instead of making a big pie, we opted for making individual pastries so everyone could be involved in rolling out the dough. We used whole wheat to make it more authentic and talked about how the grain would be processed, the meat would be cooked, and colonial ovens. We also made butter by shaking 1/2 pint of cream in a jar. We all took turns and it took forever! After each round of shaking, we would check the butter and the kids would taste it. This picture is the final product: butter and a cup of buttermilk! After lunch, we made quill pens and blueberry ink. We thought the ink would be blue, but it was actually a brown color! We...

We went to the St. Louis Science Center on Friday.    They didn't have as many exhibits as usual due to Covid, but we had fun! It took a bit, but Lil Red worked up the courage to touch a dinosaur! We explored electronics Mechanics The Mars rover. And our solar system. But the video games were the big hit! Especially the fitness games! We learned about the bell curve. And liquid nitrogen! Then we tried out the wind machine. I tried to get a picture with all 3 kids in there, but Lil Red was the only one brave enough to stick it out. It looks like he's screaming and trying to get out, but he was having a ball!

  We don't follow a strict schedule at my house, but we do have a basic routine because routines help kids feel secure. Every family will have a different routine because every family is different. Here's a typical day at my house: In the morning, the kids get up and watch tv quietly while I work on my Bible name translation project, schedule posts on my FB page, or work on learning the foreign languages I want to learn.  When the kids get hungry, we have breakfast, brush teeth and hair, and get dressed. Then we do our morning chores and head outside to play for a bit.  Once we have the wiggles out, I read the kids their pick of library books and do a project or play a game, followed by snack time. Next, I work with each of the kids individually while the other plays educational games on the computer. After lunch, we head outside again for at least 1/2 hour, and then it's rest time. Each of the kids picks out a Bible cartoon and everyone sits quietly until they are over. ...

  There are 3 things I want you to know about homeschooling.   #1 It doesn’t have to be a full-time job. #2 It doesn’t have to take a ton of money. #3 It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains or any special training.   Most of us have grown up in the traditional school system and as a result, we think that education takes 6-9 hours a day, costs huge amounts, and requires a master’s degree. I mean, after all, that’s what we’ve always experienced so it has to be so. Right? Well, the truth is that every story sounds true until you hear the other side and most of us have never heard the other side.   Here’s the other side: I homeschooled all 3 of my kids with a budget of around $50/ year while I worked full-time outside the home and the highest degree I hold is an AA. On top of all that, for the first several years I homeschooled I was very sick with an underdiagnosed illness. Many people in my community thought I was crazy and pitied my kids because of ...

Homeschooling is hard, but then, so is parenting. If you are even close to being a decent parent, you are already doing most of the things a homeschooler does. If you are brave enough to take the plunge, it’s likely you will find that homeschooling fine-tunes your parenting skills, helps you understand how your children think and strengthens your relationship with them. Most homeschoolers who stick it out for a year or two find themselves on the other side of the fence: Sending their children to a traditional school seems like the harder education option.   If you have a child in a traditional school, the likelihood is that you are already spending as much time or more than the typical homeschool parent spends on educating a child. How can that be? A child in a typical school has to be readied for school every morning, then there’s transport, homework after-school, extra-curricular activities, etc., not to mention all the stress caused by doing these things when the child is tire...

This is my grandson's word problem box.  One of my biggest math book pet peeves is that kids are given a set of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems, but the problems on the page or on the worksheet are all the same type. They almost never need to figure out what kind of computation they need to make.  So, I cut up the books or worksheets and place them inside the box and have my kids pick out 2 random problems to solve a day. I have them circle all the numbers and underline the question. I also encourage them to draw a picture of the problem if they aren't sure of what operation they should use.  If they still need help deciding I have them highlight  any clue words from a chart like the one found here  https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/clue-words-chart-11156394    At first, most kids need you to walk through the entire process, but if you are consistent with the 2 problems a day rule, they will pick it up quickly.

Gotta get this out there! Schools as we have known them are germ factories. Why are we even discussing returning children to some sanitized horror factory of what they used to be? Let's not talk about trying to do schools as close to what they used to be to contain the virus. Let's talk about containment. The reason our current school systems are such germ factories is that there are simply too many children in one place. One kid gets sick and the whole community gets sick because that child spreads it to every family in the school. Let's limit the exposure. Why not restructure our schools, or at least our classes. One-room schoolhouses were once the norm in our nation for the elementary grades. Let's return to that. Imagine classes of 15 to 20 students with one teacher and one aide composed of 2 to 7 families of children. In this way, if one child gets sick, he/she only infects a small number of people in the community. Then, those families can take precautions to cont...