Jennifer Kaufeld

Article / Updated 04-27-2023

What do you pull out when you want to play school rather than actually teach? Why, one of these games, of course! The games in this list offer you much more than Monopoly or Connect Four; in fact, you can substitute any one of these for a subject lesson once in a while with no regrets. From electrical circuits to business conglomerates and from food chains to famous battles, these games cover math, science, social studies, and language arts in the finest tradition of play. Although playing these games may take longer than it would to present a ten-to-twenty-minute lesson in whatever, there’s something to be said for variety in the home schoolroom. Some of them can even be played solo, an unusual boon for games. You should be able to find all (or most) of these games at your local specialty game retailer. If your city manages to exist without a game store, you can usually order directly from the manufacturer from the website listed with each game, or try the following websites: Boardlandia Funagain Games Anti-Monopoly This is not your family Monopoly game. Invented by Ralph Auspach, a retired economics professor, you start the game as a monopolist or small business. You get two parallel sets of rules and two ways to play the game; it’s designed to show the difference between how a large corporation works and how a small business functions. Will you be a monopolist or a free market competitor? This is a game we pull down for high-school economics class; it is an update to the Landlord’s Game invented by Elizabeth Magie on her dining room table. For two to eight players; ages 8 and up; from University Games—if you lose your instructions, you can download more here. You can purchase from AreYouGame. Evolution In Evolution you create, evolve, and sustain your species. Applying trait cards to a base species allows it to adapt to the ever-changing climate of the table. This game requires a unique strategy not found in many other games, and you can upgrade it with its expansion, Flight. If you love this, you might also like Evolution: Climate, a stand-alone game (not an expansion to the original game). Recommended for ages 12 and older; for two to six players; North Star Games. Forbidden Island/Desert Forbidden Island and its kin: Forbidden Desert and Forbidden Sky, are cooperative games that pit you against the board. You need to work together as a team or you will lose. Forbidden Island, the first of the series, traps you on an island that slowly sinks into the sea. You need to collect four treasures and escape before the water engulfs you. Each game in the series presents different challenges and contains slightly different rules. If you absolutely love this series, you may also want to look for Pandemic, a more complicated game by the same designer. For 2–4 players; ages 10 and up; Game Wright. The Garden Game What do you get when you cross seeds, pollinators, predators, and the weather? Well, if you do it outside, you may get a garden out of it. If you do it inside, you’ll probably find yourself in the middle of The Garden Game. Your goal is to plant and pollinate your seeds before the predators or nasty weather gets the better of you. At the same time, you move around the board through the seasons. This game includes a nice, multipage discussion on plant pollination and gardening, and it definitely fits within an upper elementary or middle-school science curriculum. (My garden lover, however, loved playing this from age 5.) For two to six players, ages 8 and up; Ampersand Press. How Do You See the World? Ths card game comes closer to traditionally educational than anything else in this chapter. Choose one of 100 cards, roll the die, and answer the open-ended question. Categories include reflections, relationships, aspirations, life’s purpose, and beliefs. Typical questions for the game: How much do you want to work in a week? What is one meaningless activity you engage in? How does your past influence your future? If you want your kids to reflect and communicate about all kinds of issues and thoughts, this may be a game for you. How Do You See The World? would also make a great downtime game, whether you use it after dinner, while you travel, or at a family gathering between activities. For one to however-many players; ages 12 and up; Authentic Agility Games. Into the Forest This card game explores the food chains of the forest. From the animal and plant cards in your hand, you pit one portion of the food chain against another, much like the game of war. So if you lay down a Grass card, and your opponent places Millipedes on the table, your opponent gets your Grass card because Millipedes eat decaying grass. Rather than win by point accumulation, players compete against a timer to simulate the never-ending cycle of life in the forest. List this game under science. (If your students really enjoy the game and its concepts, this company also produces the game Onto the Desert, which focuses on survival in the desert climate.) For two to six players, ages 7 and up; Ampersand Press. Krypto Krypto is one of those classic card games that people muse over. “Oh yes, I remember Krypto . . . ” and they lapse into silence, wondering if it’s still available. Although kind of difficult to locate, the game is still around. Each player gets five numerical cards, ranging anywhere from 1 to 25. Then a target card is turned face up; this is your goal card. Using all five cards, you need to somehow equal the target number through addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. Krypto also comes in a fractions supplement (fraction cards that you add to the regular Krypto game). Kryto accommodates one to ten players of any age. You can also find this game on Amazon.com. Periodic Genius Games is known for its real science games, by real scientists. Periodic is no exception. In this game you create compounds by visiting each of their elements on the periodic table. Once you gather all needed ingredients, the compound becomes yours and it marches you toward victory. This is a great game for learning about elements and compounds, not to mention memorizing the periodic table. In the box you’ll find the game instructions, but you’ll also see a booklet that discusses the science behind the game. Other games by Genius include: Ion, Covalence, Cytosis, and Tesla vs. Edison. For two to five players; ages 10 and up; Genius Games. Spell Smashers In Spell Smashers you play as a rugged adventurer, descending into dungeons and defeating monsters. You use gold that you gain through your exploits to purchase upgrades that make you a better adventurer. And oh yes, this is a game about making words. You draw letters as you go into battle and use them to construct words. Just for fun, each monster that you encounter marches onto the board with an adjective card. A nasty elemental, you say? A tiny minotaur? The adjective cards modify the monsters, and each monster carries a letter that you can use in words after you defeat it. This game makes spelling and word construction fun. Because of its fantasy wrapper, this is more appealing to kids than “Hey guys, wanna spell some words?” For one to five players; ages 12 and up; Renegade Game Studios. Wingspan This is visually a beautiful game. You are a bird enthusiast: a bird watcher, ornithologist, or researcher. Your goal is to discover and assemble birds according to their habitat, and to do this you need to feed your birds, gather eggs (which allow you to access upgrades that help you gather more birds), and build your habitat. This is an engine-building game. You have a certain set of cards, these cards all have certain abilities, and those abilities work together like a machine to help you win the game. Engine building is a particular genre of game; if you love this game, you may like Gizmos (less involved than Wingspan), or Terraforming Mars (more involved than Wingspan). For one to five players; ages 10 and up; Stonemaier Games.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-23-2022

Homeschooling is more than recreating school at home. It’s the opportunity to guide your children through their education in the best way possible for them. Turn here when you’re looking for useful homeschooling websites or inspiration and encouragement from friendly newsletters and magazines. When you feel that end-of-the-semester crunch and the method for calculating grade point averages slips your mind, you can find that here as well.

Article / Updated 08-30-2020

Homeschool media stories that tout homeschooling as expensive, elitist, and only for the wealthy are simply not true. The truth, which is that anyone can homeschool for nearly free if they need to, doesn’t make splashy headlines. Many people manage to homeschool their children for about $500 per child, per year, on the average or less. Some swing it on $500 per family. A few manage to teach for nearly free, but they’re the truly dedicated bargain shoppers. Five hundred dollars per child, per year, is a good round figure for estimation because you can get a good number of books, supplies, and even a few extra goodies like field trips for that amount. Now, opting for a $500 budget means that your child won’t be using the coolest, newest whizbang textbooks for every subject, but it also means that you can provide a more-than-adequate education. Set a budget for homeschooling supplies at the beginning of the year, but remember that you’re bound to pick up some fun stuff along the way. So, include that in your estimates. Setting up a reasonable budget can give you realistic boundaries while also letting you know that you can do this. Keep in mind that preschool and kindergarten are relatively cheap educational years. After you stockpile construction paper, glue, crayons, kiddy scissors, and some read-aloud books, you’re most of the way there. As you rise through the ranks, however, books get more and more expensive, until you reach the high school level where a new science book may cost you $90 or more. With more than one child, however, your costs go down every time the next child in line uses that $90 book. Planning a $90 purchase when three children can use the book in turn gives you a sturdy text for $30 per child in the long run. When you think about pulling your child out of a private- or public-school system, don’t forget to consider all the items that you currently pay for that will become irrelevant, such as Book rentals Club fees School lunches Tuition (for private school) You can apply that money to the extra costs that you now have, such as textbooks and lunches at home. Even clothing costs take a dive when you realize that you can homeschool in your sweats and no longer need school-appropriate clothes for each day of the week. If you opt for low-cost or almost-free homeschooling, you find yourself trading time and energy for the money you’d normally spend on curriculum. Trips to the library take time; you may spend hours writing math practice sheets for your first grader or searching for them on the web so you can print them out. Buying the books you need for the whole year saves you time and gas, but it means you need to fork over the money to pay for the books yourself and find a place to store them in your home. On the other hand, families can spend as much as they like on homeschooling. I know at least one family that considers homeschooling their major spending hobby, and they have plenty of money to spend. Such a family may drop $6,000 or more per child, per year, on homeschooling, but to do that you need to purchase the most expensive curricula that you can find. Look for curriculum ideas and resources in Homeschooling For Dummies, 2nd Edition. I could fill a 700-page book with nothing but recommendations for books and kits that you can use to teach with. If you purchase everything mentioned, you’ll easily top the $2,000-per-child marker. No homeschool family does all this. For one thing, people only have 24 hours per day, and trying to follow all these systems and add-ons would take many times that.

Article / Updated 08-30-2020

Every homeschooler has fears that nag and whisper in the night. Maybe going with the flow would be better. Whether you’re contemplating taking the leap into homeschooling, you’re a first-year homeschooler, or you’ve been doing this for ages, one or more of the fears that I discuss in this list is bound to hit you sooner or later. The good news is that they’re only fears and nothing more. When the sun shines again and you look into those bright eyes that live at your house, you reach for the math book and know you’re doing the right thing for your family. For the benefit of your middle-of-the-night uneasiness, this list contains the answers to classic homeschool fears. My child will never make friends if I homeschool. Actually, the truth is that it’s harder to stay at home and actually do the work than it is to pile everybody into the car and trek across town to another homeschooler’s house for the day. When I began teaching my children at home, I had it easy: Another homeschooler lived four houses down. However, keeping everybody inside until the day’s work was done was still hard. Play sets longed for company, bikes sat idle, and five pairs of inline skates (belonging to the other children as well as to mine) cried for attention. As long as you involve your child in activities with other homeschoolers or in the community and let him out of the house once in a while, your child will make friends. Due to the nonsegregated nature of homeschooling, your child’s friends may surprise you: Some will probably be a bit older, others younger, and she may even take a liking to the grandma down the street. (Who wouldn’t like a woman who cultivates gorgeous flowerbeds and serves great cookies?) One of the easiest ways to meet other homeschoolers is to hang out where they hang out. Join a homeschool co-op. Participate in the local library homeschool activities. Call your YMCA, YWCA, or other athletic club and ask about daytime classes for homeschoolers. Sooner or later, you’re bound to meet another family or two like yours. I don’t know enough to teach my child. If you took it, you can teach it. Did you make it through second grade? Then you can teach second-grade math and reading. Remember that I’m not talking about lecturing to a 30-member class. Picture yourself with your second-grader reading words and sentences while snuggled on your lap. Perhaps you sit next to your fourth-grader and talk about fractions while you cut an extra-large, chocolate-chip cookie into sixths for a tasty math lesson. After a while, when your child brings questions to you that you can’t answer off the top of your head, you learn together. Hand in hand with your child, you read through the textbook or research at the library or on the internet. You’ll want to stay a bit ahead of your student in some classes, and you can pursue other subjects together. If you have high-school-age students, they can do the legwork and bring you the answers. My child will miss out on socialization. That depends. What kind of socialization do you want your child to have? If you’re talking about being herded into a room with 20 or more other children and told not to talk all day, then your child’s probably going to miss that experience. If you mean the socialization that your child receives during ten-minute lunches in an impersonal school cafeteria where a monitor walks around the room constantly so that children remain silent while they eat, then your child probably won’t experience that at home, either. If you mean the kind of socialization that arises from the opportunity to interact with other humans in a natural environment, then homeschooling provides a sterling chance to gain the social skills that can prepare your child for a well-adjusted adulthood. Homeschooling gives your child the chance to experience life as it is lived, rather than institutionalization for six hours each day. Your child gets to socialize with people of all different ages and various walks of life throughout the day as he accompanies you to the post office, greets the FedEx-delivery person at the door, and participates in co-op classes across town. Homeschool children don’t feel threatened when they come into contact with younger or older children because, in their world, people come in all shapes, sizes, and ages. A 12-year-old homeschooler can interact just as easily with a 5-year-old as she can with a 16-year-old because, in her eyes, age doesn’t segregate people. Isn’t this the kind of socialization that you want your kids to experience? I will buy the wrong curriculum. Take a deep breath. Homeschoolers buy the wrong curriculum sooner or later. It happens. It happened to me, it happened to nearly every homeschooler I know, and it’s part of life. A problem occurs only if you keep buying the wrong curriculum even after you know it doesn’t fit your child. Because every child is different, some books, approaches, and projects work better with one child than they do another. Often you have the extremes right in your own household, like I do. I purchase the curriculums for a few subjects with both children in mind, but I need to buy other curriculums from separate publishers because my children learn differently. If you have more than one child, and you buy the “wrong” curriculum for the oldest one or two, you can always keep it around in the hopes that a younger child may use the curriculum. When I purchase something for one child and it doesn’t work, I try it with the other one awhile to see if it clicks. With children only one grade level apart, I can do that, and it minimizes my off purchases. Purchasing one year’s books at a time also helps to minimize the damage. If you buy a language-arts curriculum that does not click with your child this year, you can always struggle through (maybe with some homegrown modifications) and try another publisher next year. Deciding that a new curriculum is the best thing since sliced zucchini and purchasing all eight years’ worth without testing it out first may be a waste of money if your little darling doesn’t like it or if the new curriculum presents information in a way that your child doesn’t comprehend. If you find yourself with a stack of unusable books after the beginning of a school year, you can always pass them along to a homeschooler who needs them, donate them to your local homeschool lending library, or sell them used through your area vendor or an online swap shop, such as a Facebook homeschool book exchange. Although the curriculum doesn’t fit your child, someone will be delighted to get it because it matches that child’s needs. My child will learn less at home than he does at school. If you took your child out of school because he wasn’t learning, then you already know how little information your child amassed at school. You also know that with a little effort you can match or exceed that level at home. Good for you! Most parents who worry about a child’s learning levels are the ones who never sent their children to school in the first place. They somehow think that those hours spent poring over math books, learning parts of speech, and dissecting tulips this past spring count for less because they were done at home. Or maybe they believe that the schools teach something that they can’t duplicate at home. Relax. As long as you select a grade-level book for the year and follow it, your child can learn at least as much as her school-aged peers. Because you don’t have to keep pace with the slowest child in the class, you actually have the freedom to work at your child’s pace. In some courses, that may mean taking a year and a half to finish a textbook, but when you’re done, you know that your child understands the material. He didn’t simply read the words and move on. In other classes, you may stay right on target or even do a book and a half within a year’s time. If your child assimilates science quickly, and you find yourself moving through the science book faster than you thought, you can always take the extra time to incorporate experiments into the class instead of moving to the next book. One way to keep tabs on your child’s grade levels, even if your state doesn’t require it, is to give your child a standardized test each year. That gives you a general idea how your child regurgitates information and applies knowledge based on the current national norms. If your child scores above 50 percent on a standardized test, that means that he performed as well as or better than half the students who took the test. Not a very detailed way of measuring progress, but it may ease your mind. I’ll never have free time again. Oh, sure you will. And it may even happen before they graduate! Actually, one of the best things you can do for your kids — as well as for yourself — is to carve out a niche of time each week especially for you. Maybe that means watching a movie you want to see one evening after the kids go to bed. Perhaps you leave all the darlings in the care of your spouse and go shopping for a couple hours. When you take a couple hours to do whatever you want to do (within reason, of course), you return to the job-at-hand refreshed and ready to go. You don’t have to take a really long break. Sometimes soaking for an hour with your favorite novel does the trick. The very fact that you thought enough of you to schedule some alone time does your heart good. My child may not be learning at the right pace. As long as your child is learning, adding new skills to the ones already mastered, then you’re doing fine. After all, what is the “right” pace for learning? That depends on whom you talk to. If you want your child to actually learn the material, it may take a bit longer than breezing through the pages and marking them with checks to show you read them. The best learning involves active participation. Instead of reading through the sample math problem, your child needs to complete a couple problems on his own so he really knows how it’s done. The parent of a special-needs scholar takes learning at the child’s own pace. This student covers material one concept at a time until it’s all mastered. Sometimes it moves quickly; on other days, it goes pretty slow. As a tutor, you can do the same with your child. If she catches onto a concept quickly and gives you that bored I’ve-got-it-already look, you can safely move on. If she struggles to master another concept, then you can take as long as you need to master it before you continue. If you stick with it day after day, you’ll probably still get through the book before the end of the year or close to it. I won’t be able to do it all. Of course, you won’t be able to do it all. Nobody does it all and stays sane. It’s impossible to homeschool every day, cook a six-course meal each evening, mow the lawn twice a week, clean the house till it’s spotless on the weekend, wax the dog on Saturdays, and hand buff the car every other week while running a home business and decorating the house to look like a million bucks. Lives like this only happen with A-squared personalities or in the movies. A- squared personalities have way too much stress in their lives to be healthy, and the movies don’t happen in real life. In real life, you find yourself cleaning up the spilled cereal milk while engaging in a futile effort to catch the dog — futile because you waxed him yesterday. I can’t tell you the last time I went out to dinner with a Hollywood star (well, I could tell you but you wouldn’t believe me). However, I do recall the day that I homeschooled for four hours, mopped the kitchen floor, and made a dinner that was more than a casserole with a side salad. So rest in the knowledge that nobody real gets it all done every day. Pick your priorities and go with those. If a spotless house is high on your list, make that a priority and encourage everybody to pitch in to make it happen. On the other hand, if you’d rather wax the dog and run a home business while you homeschool, the house will probably look lived in most of the time. (Is that so bad, if you truly live there?) The dog, however, consistently shines. After I start, I have to do this forever. Nope. Not so. You don’t even have to finish the year out, although sticking with homeschooling one year at a time is probably the wisest thing you can do. Giving up on a three-month-old experiment doesn’t tell you much except that you quit before the end of the year. Sticking it out until spring tells you more — you have an idea where your strengths lie, what your weaknesses may be (in curriculum, planning, or even other areas), and the facets of your homeschool that you may change next year — if there is a next year. Most homeschoolers teach one year at a time. Very few start out in preschool declaring that they plan to do this through college. Your child may only need to be home for a year or two before you send her back to school. Or you may decide to teach for the first eight years at home and send him to high school. What is the best plan for your family? No matter what the plan looks like, that is the plan you should follow. If it means taking it one year at a time until you look up one day and your oldest is nearing the end of her senior year, then that’s great! But if you teach your child at home for the first three years and then decide he has enough of a head start to move into the school system, then that’s just as good. As long as your decision strengthens your family and meets your needs as a family unit, then it’s the right decision and you homeschooled just long enough. I’m not keeping the right (or enough) records on my child’s progress. If you’re tracking whatever your state asks you to track, then you’re probably doing all right. Your state may require attendance records and immunization records only — keep those up-to-date and nobody can argue with you. On the other hand, if you live in a state that wants you to keep track of each book that you use, to keep a file for a portion of your child’s worksheets and creative writing, and you do it, you’re fine. Most of us struggle with the paper concept: More is better — the more records, worksheets, poems, coloring pages, and construction-paper creations that are kept on file, the better. Actually, as long as you keep the right snippets of paper, you can happily throw the rest of the stuff away with a clear conscience. (You may want to do it while Junior isn’t looking.) If you have a high schooler, then you need to track individual courses, textbooks (with authors), course content, grades, and sometimes hours of instruction, depending on your state law. This is the information that you use to create the high-school transcript for colleges and other post-secondary schools, as well as a document that gives the admissions office a picture of your child’s high-school education experience.

Article / Updated 08-29-2020

Homeschooling can be stressful, and extreme stress pulls at a family’s seams. It tugs holes in the fabric you created when you gathered your little ones around you and taught them how to face the world together. You may find that you need to spend some time refashioning your family fashion fabric back into that sleek, gorgeous group that you used to be, before whatever stress happened that caused you to think about homeschooling in the first place. Setting your schedule Some families work best with a solid, unwavering schedule. Up at 7:30, breakfast, showers, math, language arts, lunch, reading, science, social studies, art, play time. Other families prefer a loose flow to their day: They get up whenever, have a late (or early) breakfast, and start school when everyone is gathered together. Or perhaps they start with the early bird and work more children into the day as they rise and begin to move. Your family’s schedule will be your own. It may look like one of these. It probably won’t. I know that our schedule falls somewhere between the two, and yours may too. The important thing isn’t that you follow someone’s schedule. The important thing is that you discover and follow your own schedule — the schedule that fits your family the best. Building your schedule works well with a little family input, especially if your children are old enough to hold opinons (and what children aren’t?). If you can put together a routine or daily task list that takes everyone’s preferences into account, your house will be filled with much happier campers. Working together One of the joys of homeschooling is the ability to work together on . . . well, almost everything. It’s fun to snuggle on the sofa and listen to someone read from this week’s book. If you like to cook, many hands together put dinner on the table in less time — even if it does create a mountain of mess that has to be cleaned later. Some subjects lend themselves to cooperative effort. Poetry reading, art, some science experiments, reading aloud, music, and learning about the world in social studies can be tackled as a family group. (You could also tie everything together in a unit study.) Outside of school hours, bringing everybody into family projects like bush trimming and weeding, painting the garage, or redecorating the living room (okay . . . which one of you wanted to paint all the walls purple and black?) help to bring the family together. It’s a huge sigh of relief and accomplishment when you all stand together and look at a job all finished and well done. Dad’s or Mom’s role in your homeschool Homeschooling is a whole-family adventure. It doesn’t fit neatly into a Monday-through-Friday-from-8 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. routine; instead, it becomes more of a lifestyle. Life itself becomes your classroom, and your children learn as they walk through it with you. Much of what you teach them fits nowhere into your planning book: values, priorities, likes and dislikes — yet it’s learning, all the same. If they weren’t learning it from you, they’d certainly learn it from someone else. Aren’t you glad they learn it from you? In much the same way, homeschooling involves more than the primary teaching parent. It incorporates everyone in the household, and sometimes the extended family as well — parents, siblings, and maybe even grandparents or cousins, depending on your family structure. Pulling everybody together and getting it all done takes a bit of ingenuity, but the result is a family that travels together in one direction. Generally, one parent takes the position as primary homeschool instructor or learning guide. Usually mom fills that role, but more and more dads are stepping up to the homeschool plate and teaching their children at home. If you foresee it working best for you if dad teaches the classes, then give it a try. Working with your children each day gives you a relationship that few men enjoy, and the homeschool dads I’ve talked to absolutely love what they do and wouldn’t want it any other way. Sometimes the parent who doesn’t keep up with the lesson book or explain the math problems feels left out of the educational experience. Often these parents think they’re unqualified to make schooling decisions because they don’t do it every year and letting their partners do it is easier. However, they miss much of the excitement and learning that goes on when they divorce themselves from the day-to-day homeschooling flow. Incorporating the non-teaching parent as often as possible can help. Although holding math class until dad gets home from work may not be the most inclusive (or stress free) move you could make, you may schedule a school field trip to the nearest museum on a Saturday or the working parent’s day off so that you can all go together. That way, you take advantage of both parents’ knowledge as you tour the exhibits. If you know science inside and out, but your partner’s specialty is history, you cover both subjects in depth during a trip, which increases the trip’s usefulness for all. Here are some other ideas to involve the parent who doesn’t carry the primary teaching load: Schedule vacation trips that involve some educational content. This allows both parents to help with the learning, explain what the children see, and generally enjoy the experience. Encourage the non-teaching parent to share what he knows about a subject dear to his heart. If kites truly jazz him, then spend some time looking at kites, why they fly, and how they fly. You may even make a kite or two together from plans you can find at the library and spend an off-work day flying. One or two evenings a week for an extended period of time covers much ground — especially when the parent teaches what he loves. Set aside an evening a week to pursue a topic you’ve always wanted to cover as a family, and make it part of your school time. If you want to dive into a subject, such as gourmet cooking or amateur radio, you’ll find it’s much more fun when it’s a whole-family adventure. And with a pastime, such as cooking, you automatically have more hands to help with cleanup when you schedule a family affair. Because parents like to learn too, this gives mom something to look forward to after a day at the office. Change your weekly school schedule once in a while to incorporate both parents. Although it may sound kind of strange, you can schedule a Saturday School and then take a day off the next week. Holding Saturday School once a month or so keeps the nonprimary teacher in the loop with everything you teach and gives the children the benefit of working with both parents every now and then. Incorporate a sharing time into your routine. Remember “Show and Tell,” when kindergarteners and first graders drag their favorite items to school — hopefully to bring them home again without losing them in the meantime — to share with their classmates? You can do the same thing at home by setting aside some time to share each child’s progress with the parent who doesn’t usually teach each day. What was the neatest picture your youngest made this week? Which new fact astounded your oldest? These topics make great dinner conversation as well as after-dinner presentation time. Children love to show their progress to the people they care for the most. Regardless which parent primarily homeschools, unless you’re willing to make some additional personal-time sacrifices and perhaps follow rather unique schooling hours, one parent needs to be available during the day hours for homeschooling to be effective. If you have the freedom to take your children to work with you, that’s great — but if not, and they’re too young to stay home and work on their own, then you need to be at home each day with them.

Article / Updated 08-29-2020

Homeschooling an elementary-age child can be challenging when you have to tackle a subject that they find difficult. For many children, math is a pretty ethereal subject. After all, you’re working with symbols that may (or may not) mean something to the child, and expecting him to take these symbols, read the code sign between them, and correctly come up with a new symbol. Is it any wonder so many children have problems with math? You understand the symbols because you’ve done math for years, but if the code doesn’t click with your child, he’s going to have problems discerning the answers to the numbers on the page. Your goal is to make those symbols mean something. After the symbols have meaning, then true math learning takes place. Just because your child can count to 100 by rote doesn’t mean that she understands what 100 may stand for. How many times did you hear the age-old ABC song before your child had any clue what those letters actually stood for? She sang the song, you applauded, and so she sang it again with even more gusto. The same can be true for counting by rote (1, 2, 3 . . . 98, 99, 100!). You usually figure out your child hasn’t put concept and symbol together when you try to show him how to add or subtract a few of those numbers that he’s been chanting for weeks. That’s when everything falls apart if it’s going to — he may look at those symbols like he never saw them before. For all he knows, you may as well be teaching him to add and subtract Roman numerals. There is a way out of this dilemma. The solution is math manipulatives, an educational term for math help that you can get your fingers around. Math manipulatives can truly be anything that you can count or measure with, although some items function better than others: Base-ten blocks: These are counting blocks. Beginning with the one-centimeter cube and the ten-centimeter rod, a base-ten set adds a 100 block that looks like ten of the ten-centimeter rods fused together, and a large cube that represents 1,000. You can add and subtract large numbers with this set; all the blocks come in the same color so they look the same and the learner concentrates on the size instead of the color. Cuisenaire rods: These ten little rods range from one-centimeter cubes to pieces of wood that are ten centimeters long. Each rod is one centimeter longer or shorter than the others, they come in predictable colors (for example, the five-centimeter rod is always yellow), and you can use them to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and do fractions, among other things. One set of rods contains several of each rod length. M&Ms: You know them, you eat them, and now you can count with them, too! With a few bowls and a pile of M&Ms, you can add, subtract, multiply, divide, and have snack time all at once! (Fractions are tough with M&Ms.) Do it quickly, though; if you hold them long enough, they do melt in your hand. Pattern blocks: Using these little plastic tiles, your child learns about patterns, fractions, geometric shapes, and tessellations (patterns that fit into one another and arguably go on forever). Shapes include square, triangle, hexagon, rhombus, and trapezoid. If you want to play with these online before you track them down at your local educational store, visit the Math Learning Center website. Pennies: Although half-dollar coins are easier to find on the table, pennies are much cheaper if you happen to be counting to 100. These function the same as M&Ms, but you don’t get the added thrill of eating the chocolate when you finish math class. To drive home the point, you can always make your own ten-count penny sticks by gluing ten pennies to a strip of light cardboard. This way, your child knows there are ten pennies per strip because she patiently sat and glued each one of them. (Use water-soluble glue so you can reclaim the pennies after fourth grade.) You can use manipulatives with any math program, but some programs are specifically designed for use with hands-on helpers. One of these is Miquon Math. Miquon primarily uses the Cuisenaire rods as manipulatives. Using Miquon, the child learns how to use the rods as he learns the math concepts. Miquon is a little weak in time (clock reading) and story problems, but it’s designed to lay a conceptual foundation in the first three years of elementary school. Children leave Miquon with the equivalent of a fifth- or sixth-grade math education, and they then move on to another program. Here are some other math programs that you may want to take a look at: Beast Academy: Who doesn’t love a few monsters with their math? This program is designed for kids who like to be challenged. Designed for ages 8–13, each level includes an engaging comic book (called a Guide Book) that teaches the concepts along with a student Practice Book filled with problems and math puzzles. Key To series: This is where you go after Miquon. The Key To books present a single concept per page, and each set of booklets covers a particular topic: decimals, fractions, percents, measurement, algebra, or geometry. These books say they’re for grades 4 through 12; however, the geometry curriculum is “proofless geometry;” therefore, it doesn’t qualify as regular high-school-level geometry. This curriculum is currently published by McGraw Hill; available from homeschool suppliers or Amazon. Math Mammoth: This curriculum covers grades 1 through 7, and it does it either topic by topic or in a customary progression, your choice. It’s inexpensive as math curriculums go, and it’s comprehensive. Available in either digital or paper format. RightStart Mathematics: This curriculum augments lessons with a ton of varied manipulatives — a math balance, measuring tools, fraction manipulatives, and their own abacus. This is a full and solid math program. Levels A through H cover grades K/1 through about grade 8. (You begin with Level A with a child who cannot add or subtract, regardless of the age.)

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

So you're thinking about leaping into homeschooling. The excitement of a new life decision always brings some jitters with it. Although the idea of homeschooling intrigues you, a few questions may still nag at the back of your mind. For one thing, what exactly does an adventure like this involve? When is the best time to begin? Reasons to choose homeschooling Why do you want to homeschool? What propels you in this decision to alter your lifestyle so drastically from that of your neighbors? People have as many reasons to homeschool their children as there are homeschoolers. Ensuring educational excellence Perhaps you aren't entirely sure that your child is getting what she needs at the local school. Maybe you watch her bring home page after page of review material that you know she mastered some time last year. She may tell tales of how boring school is, what little she learns, or the last time she corrected the teacher. Does this mean your school system is awful? Nope. It simply means that your child happens to be beyond whatever the classroom is currently covering — even if her class is at her "correct" grade level. Look at it this way: Even the best introduction to a biology course bores someone with a doctorate in biology. It may be a good course, but the successful doctoral candidate took that class long ago and now thinks far beyond its introductory limitations. Many parents decide to homeschool for educational excellence. They see a difference between the best private schools in their community and the public schools their children attend, and they bring their children home in an effort to bridge that gap. You can homeschool for much less than the $3,000 per year (a conservative figure) that a good private school costs, and the result can be much the same if you follow the classical curriculums most prep schools cover. Meeting your child's special needs Sometimes the school system simply fails to meet your child's needs. If your child slips through the cracks and misses too much information, he falls farther and farther behind. Before you know it, the school wants him to undertake remedial work in an effort to make up lost time. This situation is so frustrating for parents! You send them to school in the hope that the establishment will teach them what they need to know. By the time you find out there's a problem, though, it may be months after the issue reaches an almost critical stage. Bringing a child like this home rescues him from the condemnation he feels at school. This alone often relieves enough stress so that your child can concentrate and make up the work with a patient parent sitting alongside. It's not unusual for a parent and student to wing through one to two years' worth of lessons in a school year and catch the student up to his current grade level. If you rescue your child from an emotionally stressful or failure-ridden school year, he may need some time to unwind and get used to his new daily surroundings. Your best bet is to relax, take it slow, and give him some time. Think of it this way: If you bring him home in December and only get a couple months' of quality learning in before the end of the year, that's two more months than he was going to get in the classroom, right? Retaining religious convictions If your child's new language and altered values horrify you, and you see them in direct opposition to what you carefully teach at home, you certainly aren't alone. Parents of all faiths are pulling their children out of the public schools to teach them at home, precisely because they want those early foundations to stay solid. It's hard to compete when your child stays away from you for six hours a day. Bringing them home to school allows you to gently reintroduce and reinforce those values and traditions that guide your life. Homeschooling your child for religious reasons gives you several options. You can Locate tradition-specific curriculum. You may even be able to find a complete curriculum from science to history tailored to your particular belief system. Incorporate religious instruction into your day as part of your class structure. Use religious or secular materials for all subjects as you choose. If you select secular books, this means tacking an additional subject — religion — onto your day along with your state's requirements, but if you homeschool your children for religious reasons this won't be a big deal to you. Accommodating family lifestyle Sometimes lifestyle itself dictates a need to homeschool. If you work at odd times of the year and find yourself free and sitting at home alone while your children sit through classes wishing they were with you, you may find homeschool a great timesaver in the long run. It allows you to pursue family activities, such as vacations and hobbies, when work is light or concentrate your teaching time during off months and give the children a vacation while you're occupied. Parents who follow other than nine-to-five jobs that incorporate much travel, public appearances, or endless conferences may want to look at homeschooling as an option. It gives you the chance to spend time with your children no matter where you are. When you travel, the children can go with you whenever you set out and take their schoolwork along. Determining what's best for your family Okay, so you decide that homeschooling will be best for your family with child number one. What about child number two? Does it follow that you'll reach the same educational conclusions? Not really. Even within a family, each child is completely different. What's best for one may not be best for all or even most. When you look at your family as a unit, you may find that the answers for each child differ. But that's okay. You're looking for the optimal solution for your own family. Although it may seem strange, sometimes what's best actually means homeschooling one or two children and sending the rest to public or private school. That way, everybody's needs get met.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Even if you use textbook curriculum for most of your homeschool studies, breaking out of the print mold and jumping headlong into a unit study is nice every now and then. For one thing, it makes your students think a little more about how the different parts of life actually fit together. For another, it gives you a break from the middle-of-the-year doldrums. If you find that your children are deeply interested in one or two subjects but for the most part enjoy textbooks, then those subjects are the ones to pursue with unit studies when you decide to take a breather. Sometimes while you work through a year's studies, you see a hole in subject matter that you think should be filled. Find a unit study on that topic, and take a week or two to teach it. Do your kids find black holes fascinating, and does the science text cover them in a paragraph or two? Looks like a unit on astronomy may be in order. With a little time and creativity, you can create your own unit studies. Assembling your own curriculum around one topic sounds like a big deal — if it didn't sound so hard, an educational company such as Teacher Created Materials, probably wouldn't publish and sell as many great unit studies as they do. Designing your own unit studies presents two drawbacks: It takes time. For a busy parent who needs to get dinner on the table, teach several children, and still make the other wheels of life turn on a daily basis, this could be enough of a reason to take an extended trip to the nearest education store with your credit card in your pocket. It may require access to a couple of grade-level subject books. This includes science, language arts, or math, so you know which skills are typically covered at a particular grade level.If you have a good library — or better yet, a nearby college library with an educational books department — this could be a great excuse for the Unit Study Developer (that would be you) to spend a long Saturday and a pocketful of change at the college library with a stack of books. This leaves parental unit number two in charge of the kids for the day while you browse . . . ummm . . . work to your heart's content. The good part? You can teach anything you want. If you want to teach bug genetics as a unit study, then grab some books from the library and go for it. Creating your own unit study on economics almost takes less time than tracking down a study that someone else already created. Subject-ing yourself to this? When you make your own unit study from scratch, your unit study needs to cover all the subjects you'd normally teach, unless you plan to skip the math, for example, and work through a math text along with the unit study (also a fine decision in the unit study universe). To be complete, each unit study needs to include the first two subjects from the following list and as many of the others as you can fit in logically: Math: Create math problems at your child's level. If you're working on second-grade addition, for example, and your unit study is baseball, then you can add bats and balls, write a story problem that talks about number of pitches thrown until the team reached the final out, and so on. For the same unit, math for an older child may talk about speed of the bat, distance the ball travels, or the number of hot dogs that individual team fans eat. Language Arts: Reading, comprehension, grammar, writing skills — the whole kit and caboodle — can be included in language arts. Although you don't need to include all this in every unit study that you write, most units do ask students to write a little bit about the topic. Perhaps your child wants to create a story about the topic at hand. Or read a book or two about the topic and talk about it. Science: Sometimes a unit study shines in science. Other times you may need to work a little. If you just designed that unit on bug genetics, you're off the hook for science. The entire unit study qualifies as science. On the other hand, a unit on ancient Egypt may take some time to look at the creations of the Egyptian engineers, mummification, ancient medicine, or the tools that the Egyptians used to get the job done. Social Studies or Geography: Much like science, social studies may be your main topic, or you may need to work some information into the topic at hand. Some questions you may keep in mind as you work: Where was your topic first seen or invented? What culture surrounded the time or event? Where did this take place? What are the residents associated with your topic used to? Art: Draw. Build. Act. Design. Create. These all fall into the art category. Design a Roman mosaic. Sketch an insect's genetic makeup. Build a temple from clay or LEGOs. Create a tapestry to illustrate the unit that you're studying (felt shapes work for quick tapestries when needlepoint takes way too long). Paint the flowers that you're learning about. Music: Sometimes music fits into a unit study nicely. Listening to folk music while you explore the civil unrest of the 1960s may be a natural fit. On the other hand, you may need to work a little harder to fit music into that bug genetics unit study. History: Adding history to a unit study may be as simple as researching when an event began or an item was invented. On the other hand, history could be as complicated as talking about the events and times that affected an item's inventor. It's your unit study and your call. Physical Education: You may need to be a bit creative with this one, but if P.E. fits into your unit, then use it! Run footraces like the ancient Greeks, or gather a group of homeschool students to finish that baseball unit with a rousing game. Digging for topics If you need ideas for unit studies, follow your children around for a couple days and watch what they do. If one spends all his time engrossed in books, think about a literature-based unit study, such as How Books Are Made. If another child hits the door to unearth rocks from the back yard, you may have an archeology or rocks and minerals lover. Both topics would make great unit studies. Some topics are evergreen. You can present them more than once as your little group grows older. Perhaps your student is interested in Animals, horses, or mammals Baseball, basketball, fencing, or sports in general Cooking or catering (which may include business and economics information) Kites, flight, transportation, or weather Medieval history, ancient Egypt, or any historical culture Starting a business As your children mention an interest, write it down somewhere. If you keep a running list of interests as the younger set talks about them, soon you'll have more topics than you could use in a three-year time span! Even if your child only shows a deep interest in one or two topics, explore those. You may find that you create several unit studies based off the first one as new and secondary and tertiary fascinations develop.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Whether to collect and post grades in the homeschool is a reasonable question. And plenty of homeschool parents are asking it these days. Whether you decide to keep grades in your homeschool depends almost entirely on you unless you live in a state that asks to see grades at the end of your school year. As long as you have some system of tracking progress that others can understand if they need to, you're probably all right. If you live in a state that requires portfolios and you submit examples of your student's work with smiley faces on them, then you may not need a percentage grade for the school district official to see that your child is learning. Some states require that you keep your yearly grades on file. In this case, the law requires you to report some kind of final assessment. You may use the grading system or a detailed description of your child's progress. Your state homeschool association should know what's required and the best way to meet the requirements. If grades make you feel better, use them. Because the point is to understand the material enough that the child gets the right answers, some families have a standing do-it-over rule: If the problem or answer is incorrect, talk about it and then the child does it once more. Put the pros and cons on the scale. You never know. The concept of grading may seem unsavory in your mind, but grading may turn out a straight-A student. Pros: Grades give you a concrete measure. Grades tell you how much material the student actually mastered from the information you exposed him to. Cons: Grading every single scrap of paper becomes overwhelming. Grades assign a number to everything. How can you put a number on effort? Grading your children Grades give you good information if you correctly structure the test or quiz. If you create a quiz that covers subject material that even the dog could pass with flying colors, then all that your student's quiz paper tells you is that he knows as much, or perhaps more than, the dog. Quizzes like this pad a transcript and make the student look good on paper, but they tell you absolutely nothing. As the tutor who teaches this stuff to begin with, you should be able to glance over the quizzes and tests and get a good grasp of what your student does and doesn't know. How can you tell if you're creating a good, sturdy test? Some dos and don'ts: Only ask for information that has been actually discussed or read. Asking about the engineering behind the Roman Coliseum when you didn't cover that topic isn't fair. Ask reasonable questions. Demanding to know the obscure person's name found on page 294 of the state history text does nothing but infuriate your child. Include important points about each section or chapter. A good guideline, if you're the one creating the test, is to ask your student what you would want to remember after reading a chapter in the text. Then incorporate that information into a variety of question forms. Although simple quizzes can be all true/false or all multiple choices, a good test uses a smattering of both — plus a question or two that requires a written answer. Requiring older students to put their thoughts into words, rather than simply identifying the correct answer on a page, encourages them to actually think about the material covered. Elementary students may actually do better with oral tests that don't require writing the answers. Talking to the student about what she read or the project she completed and writing down her answers, gives you just as much information (and sometimes even more) without asking her to structure several paragraphs that outline her knowledge. Think of it as an essay in the air. Some commercial textbooks come with review questions and tests that are deplorable from a testing standpoint. If you read through a test that comes with your textbooks and it makes no sense to you, feel free to skip it or modify it. (If you get your books from a particular school or satellite program that scores all your child's tests and you happen to disagree with the test wording, give your umbrella school a call and talk to them about it.) Figuring the grade Grades aren't impossible to figure out with a good calculator or sharp pencil, but plopping percentages onto papers does take a moment or two of concentration. If your student is beyond the smiley-or-frowny-face grading method, you probably need to incorporate percentages and letter grades into his life. One way to figure grades is to keep a calculator handy. Divide the number of problems correct by the total number of problems, and you have a percentage. If your page has 14 problems and your student got 12 right, divide 12 by 14 to get a percentage correct of 86 percent. If your student always gets every problem correct, of course, then she consistently gets 100 percent at the top of her pages with no division necessary. Few of us, however, are fortunate enough to have this problem at our houses. An easy way to keep grades (unless you have a computerized planner that does all the work for you) is to assign quizzes and tests worth a multiple of ten points: 10, 20, 30, and so on through 100. Then you can use the following grading scale: 90 points up to 100 points = A 80 points up to 89 points = B 70 points up to 79 points = C 60 points up to 69 points = D 59 points and below = uh oh Using the ten-point plan and the percentage division together works something like this: 1. Your student takes a quiz worth 20 points. Either the quiz itself has twenty questions on it, each one worth a point apiece, or it has ten questions and each question carries a worth of two points. 2. She gets 18 of the 20 correct, which gives her 90 percent (a low A). To find the percentage, divide the total number of available points (in this case 20) into the number of points correct (18), which yields the percentage (90). 3. You enter that percentage as a 90 in your plan book next to Quiz Chapter Three or whatever you decide to call it. (This is your school.) 4. Through the semester, you continue to enter quiz and test results into your planner. You score and tabulate each quiz or test in exactly the same way. 5. At the end of the semester, you add up all the percentage scores (90, 70, 100, 85) and divide them by the number of quizzes and tests you offered. In this case, you'd divide the total by four. The result is your final grade for the semester. You take that percentage, which, in this example, happens to be 86.25, and plug it back into your grading scale. The percentage 86 falls between 80 and 90, so the semester grade is a B. To make things fair, you may want to count each test score twice (also known as weighting the test) so that it actually counts more than your general quizzes. Otherwise, a student who blows a quiz or two yet aces the chapter test may be in trouble when he actually learned the material. Another option is to only construct tests and not use the periodic quiz checkup at all.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

It's the first question you get from strangers who learn that you homeschool. Among veteran homeschoolers the topic is simply referred to as The Question. The dialog goes something like this: "Hey guys. I met somebody at the mall today who asked me if I homeschool and then asked me The Question." At this point everyone in the room responds in unison: What about socialization? Making The Question clearer How do you address The Question? Before you can answer, you need to determine the question at hand. Is the person asking about social outlets, the time we allot to spend with friends and do fun things together, or is he actually asking about socialization? These are two entirely different questions. Social outlets Social outlets are a no-brainer. Many opportunities exist for homeschool families to spread their social wings and meet with other homeschooling (as well as nonhomeschooling) families. If someone asks you how your child finds social outlets, list the myriad of activities that nearly every homeschool family involves themselves with. Religious organizations, sports, scouting, and so on fill our children's time and create excellent social opportunities. Socialization The majority of questioners ask about something much more nebulous than scouts or Sunday school. The words are the same: What about socialization? However, they don't want to know what you do so much as where your children will stand when they mature. Now when The Question is posed to you, and you truly understand the query, you are free to answer the question instead of providing a few fluffy comments or blindly running through your after-school itinerary. The question is really How will your child fit into society if he doesn't go to school? The answer, of course, is that your child fits into society just fine. Your child learns from you and the other adults and almost-adults in his life. He gets a much better view of how life really works because he isn't incarcerated with a selection of age-mates all day long. Your child sees wisdom at work as she watches you plan and complete tasks, interact with people in your community, and schedule your life to get (almost) everything done. She learns your values and morals as she listens to what you say and watches what you do. In the meantime, your child learns to Interact with the people around him, regardless of age, sex, or social class. Observe and join adults in conversation that includes more meaningful topics. Work with others as a team for longer than an hour on the playing field. Working together becomes a way of life with homeschool students and parents. Spend concentrated time and effort becoming good at a skill, such as dance, engineering, or computers. This is the kind of interaction that leads to healthy, independent citizens. Letting your proverbial hair down Homeschoolers who've been at this long enough to develop a network of friends can readily tell you that finding something other than homeschooling to do is easier than staying at home and teaching. Not that working with the kids is boring, but the thought of spending the afternoon with other people always raises interest. We could be ice-skating with friends or lunching at the park. Maybe it's not too late to attend that field trip. But no, here we sit, finishing the daily math assignment. It's enough to give one the doldrums. Math assignments have their place, but so do relaxation, volunteering, and group activities. All of anything makes your student lopsided. As Aristotle once said while gazing out the window at the other homeschool boys whose work was already finished for the day, "Moderation in all things is good." Although your social adventures are only limited to your imagination and the number of hours that you're willing to leave the house each week, here are some general ideas to get the thoughts churning: Join the scouts or 4-H. Many communities offer homeschool 4-H groups, and a few areas contain scouting groups whose members primarily homeschool. (If you join a homeschool group, it generally meets when you're available during the day, instead of using evening or weekend hours.) Ask around. Volunteer for a local nonprofit organization. Many organizations may appreciate helping hands. The animal shelter, library, and local food bank are only a few of them. Look in the nonprofit section of your local phone book and locate a worthy cause. Play ball, tennis, or golf. Regardless of your favorite sport, the local parks and recreation department probably offers some kind of spring or summer classes. It's a great way to meet other people and maybe even find someone to play with. After signing up for tennis lessons last summer, the parents in my time slot sat around the picnic table to get acquainted. It only took us a few minutes to realize that all but one of us taught our kids at home. Meet a playgroup at the park. Homeschool park groups incorporate all ages from preschoolers on up. Some families pack a lunch and stay most of the day, while others drop by for a bit to spend some time and then wander off to other activities. Play in the homeschool orchestra. And brush up on your note theory at the same time. If your community doesn't offer a homeschool orchestra, maybe it organizes a theater group, choir, or some other artsy conclave. Join or create a field trip group. Some homeschool groups meet once a month or so only to participate in field trips together. This is a way to meet other families, see new sights, and not feel like you're committed every week for the rest of the semester. If you find yourself driving around your community from event to event several days a week, you may want to pick up a set of foreign language tapes. Pop one into the car as you head down the driveway and work on your foreign language skills as you ride together. It not only makes the travel time useful, but it also marks off one more subject from your daily list. Even if you can't look at the book (which is certainly not recommended if you are driving) you can learn quite a bit through listening.