Today, we’re going to have fun with lines. All you need for this drawing are a permanent black marker (Sharpie or something similar), a set of colored markers, and some paper (the heavier the better). So, get out those art supplies and let’s have fun.

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Spring is here!

I love this time of the year so much because nature is coming alive everywhere, after a long cold winter. This can be such a special time for a family to literally take time to stop and smell the flowers, listen to birds, notice new buds growing and more.

If you have never been one to enjoy nature, you may not know how to begin to study nature and make it part of a gentle way of learning. I have included some affiliate links to some ‘good things‘ that I have used with my family when we study nature.

Here is how to study nature in the spring:

• Go outside and just observe what you see – Take 15-30 minutes once or a few times a week to just explore and see what can be discovered. During the spring, you can see so many changes that even an untrained eye encouraged to be ‘nature detectives’ can find much to get excited about.  Look down, up and at eye level, because discoveries are everywhere.
• Plan your discoveries – If your family is new to the idea to study nature, you may want to plan some things to discover.  During the active spring, you may want to look at budding trees and plants, flowers, busy insects, place a bird feeder on your window or go looking for tadpoles to raise (use the water they are growing in).
• Invest in some great reference books – Having some good field guides or the Handbook of Nature Study to use as reference when finding new discoveries is a great way to turn a nature time into learning time.  When my sons were early readers they have loved the Fun With Nature: Take Along Guide  and More Fun with Nature books for easier to read field guides.
• Journal your discoveries – My children have always had a journal to work within and enter their nature discoveries.  What a treasure to see their art work develop and improve with practice and over time.

If you use these easy to implement steps to study nature, you will quickly find that your children will be discovering things on their own and God’s creation will become exciting to them in a way that books just can never really do on their own.

What will be your first spring discovery?

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Project: Run Your Own Restaurant

Help, My Kid’s Not on Grade Level

Approaches to Christian Homeschooling Workshop

What is eligible? Anything applicable to homeschooling: daily life, stories, how-to posts, encouragement, curriculum reviews, giveaways…basically anything that another homeschool family might find useful or interesting. Link-up a few if you’d like!

What do we ask? It would be great if you would link back to our site so that your readers can find all of the great resources shared here, too. Just grab the code below!

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First of all, what is a lapbook?

A lapbook is a hands-on method of teaching your child about anything! Hands of a Child lapbooks contain activities and lesson plans you’ll need for a unit study. This is type of learning experience makes education fun and exciting! The great part about these lapbooks is that you can adapt them to fit the need of your child. Since my child is only a preschooler, I changed some of the activities for my child.  For example, instead of writing, he drew pictures.

How do I get started?

It is very easy to get started since it comes with a detailed planning guide. The guide shows what vocabulary words to introduce each day, as well as guided reading and activities for the child.

To get started, you will need to print the activities on colored paper and cut them out. It does take some time to get everything organized, but the best part is that all these activities are created for you and there’s no need to plan or come up with your own activities.

What does the dinsoaur lapbook cover?

This lapbook is designed for PreK-6th Grade. In my opinion, some concepts were a little difficult for my child to understand , so we adapted to meet his needs.

Here are the topics this lapbook covers:

• Reptiles
• Types of dinosaurs
• Sounds of dinosaurs
• What dinosaurs may have looked like
• How dinosaurs moved
• Where dinosaurs lived
• What dinosaurs ate
• How dinosaurs reproduced
• How dinosaurs protected themselves

My son’s favorite part was talking about large dinosaurs were. It had a good graphic and it was easy for a preschooler to understand. He couldn’t believe that an Apatosaurus was longer than 2 school busses and a Seismosaurus was about the size of half a football field. My preschooler also enjoyed lifting all the flaps in our lapbook!

Overall, this was a great lapbook. I recommend it for any child interested in learning more about dinosaurs. It was very well organized and makes planning easy for the homeschooling mom!

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Like every homeschooling mom, I have limited time to read homeschool blogs.  When I do have the time to sit down, I want lots of bang for my buck.  Encouragement, advice, solutions, and resources are a few of the things I’m looking for in a homeschool blog.  I had a very difficult time narrowing down my list to just 10, but here are my favorites.

I chose blogs that talked about different curriculum success and failures, the daily ups and downs of homeschooling, and the daily ins and outs of life.

These are in no particular order, and I hope you enjoy this list as much as I do!

1.  Teachable Moments – I love the way Jess shares about her daughters and all of the activities they are involved in.  She takes such a thoughtful approach to their education, I find it inspiring.  We have never met in person, but someday I hope we have the opportunity to meet.

2.  Homegrown Learners –  I was fortunate enough to meet Mary at BEECH Retreat last February, I’m not sure we could ever run out of things to talk about!  She is just as real and genuine as she appears on her blog.  What you see is what you get.  I love her SQUILT posts and her heart for her children.

3.  Like Mother, Like Daughter – I appreciate the collection of information about homeschooling, particularly in the older years, plus there are great posts about raising children {most of hers are grown} and living out the liturgical year in a family.  She gives great advice!

4.  See Jamie Blog – I love blogs where adoption and homeschooling collide.

5.  The Unlikely Homeschool – she has great homeschool posts! It’s as simple as that, plus I appreciate her organization.

6.  Harrington Harmonies – If you are a military family {we aren’t}, you will definitely appreciate this blog! She offers lots of encouragement and advice about the homeschool journey.

7.  Sprittibee – a slice of real homeschool life

8. The Chaos and The Clutter – I have been reading Sharla’s blogs for quite a while, we have much in common, adoption and homeschooling a large family.  I’m so glad we were able to meet at BEECH Retreat, she is such a blessing.  I love her tag line for her blog “finding joy amidst the chaos of everyday life”.

9.  The Marathon Mom – I find it inspiring to read about other moms who are trying to eat healthy and make time for exercise as well as homeschool.

10. The Homeschool Village – what’s not to love about The Homeschool Village?  I appreciate the different perspectives on homeschooling and daily life, I’m honored to be part of such a great group of women!

What’s your favorite homeschool blog?

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Spring rolls out all the homeschool conventions.  Conventions some of us might not be able to attend.  I didn’t attend our local homeschool convention for the first three years we were homeschooling.  It wasn’t easy to see all the photos of friends meeting up, nuggets from workshops, or discounted curriculum. But we survived just fine.  Guard your heart.

Spring rolls out all the homeschool planting, gardening, and field trip fun. Fun some of us are still waiting for our neck of the woods to warm up.  The Homeschool Village hosted a garden link up in blogs past and I was so surprised how many bloggers were unable to participate even after Easter! (what can I say, I’ve lived in FL for over 24 years).  Guard your heart.

Spring rolls out all the new homeschool curriculum your friends have purchased for next year.  Curriculum some of us aren’t yet ready to buy.  It’s the season of blogger reviews too! I remember a few years feeling so anxious because I still didn’t know what we were going to be using.  Guard your heart.

Spring rolls out the end of the year celebrations.  Celebrations some of us might not be ready to throw just yet.  We homeschool year round taking off more time in the winter than summer so we transition into the next grade earlier than majority of our homeschool friends.  But one year due to a late-term miscarriage and hard time healing emotionally, I felt “behind”.  I pushed a little boy to “catch up”, and he never should have been rushed.  Guard your heart.

Friend ~ it’s your homeschool.  It’s your family.  It’s your home.  Go at God’s pace He has planned for you and enjoy these moments! These crazy, messy, silly moments because it’s all we really have.  Who wants to look back on their homeschool with regret we rushed to keep up with what we saw on someone else’s blog or that church friend’s schedule?

Spring is here … Guard your heart.

Have you registered for Teach them Diligently Homeschool Convention, yet?

Early Literacy Stages

When Love Looks Like a Red Skittle

Garden in a Glove

What is eligible? Anything applicable to homeschooling: daily life, stories, how-to posts, encouragement, curriculum reviews, giveaways…basically anything that another homeschool family might find useful or interesting. Link-up a few if you’d like!

What do we ask? It would be great if you would link back to our site so that your readers can find all of the great resources shared here, too. Just grab the code below!

<div align="center"><a href="http://www.thehomeschoolvillage.com" title="The Homeschool Village"><img src="http://i1067.photobucket.com/albums/u435/ksorgius/hsvbutton150_zpsab2caeef.jpg" alt="The Homeschool Village" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

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The girls from here were talking about homeschooling styles as we were brainstorming.  Charlotte Mason came up.  Classical came up.  Several versions came up, and I jokingly said, “I use fly by the seat of my pants homeschooling,” to which LaToya said, “I’d read that post, you need to write it.”

And it’s mostly true, half of my lessons I come up with on the fly.  I’m not going to say this method works for everyone, but it works for the ADD, hyper-distracted person in me.  So, let me take you through my planning process.

First I spend way too much time at the computer deciding on curriculum.  For science my kids get to decide the topic from among the Apologia books we haven’t completed yet.  Once that’s decided it all gets ordered.

Then I spend the next few weeks or days, or some period of time that usually is just until I lose interest breaking the lessons down into manageable parts.  While I’m at it, I might consult the course lesson plans (if there are any) for any extras to add in.  Occasionally I’ve gotten good ideas from there.

But my best ideas come from the blogs I read, pinterest, Netflix, and my library.

I curate everything.  I obsess and have boards for lessons I’m not teaching for 3 more years.  I look up books in my library that I could use, and I randomly check out books and remember them 3 years later.

Now, I’m sure you’re asking how is this flying by the seat of your pants?

Because I don’t usually use them.  I spend hours planning it out, and I don’t use it.

Instead, I look at the lesson plan the morning of, and I don’t have the supplies for the craft or the project.  I didn’t remember to go and check out the well-crafted book from the library.

So, we start reading the lesson.  I get 2 paragraphs in and inspiration hits!  Elephants are huge, let’s go measure them.  So we read the rest of the short section and traipse outside with measuring tape, chalk, our science book, and start measuring.

Then we have to figure out how tall we are in comparison, so more measuring.  And then we start talking about how they use their trunks.  So I come up with an idea using straws to simulate trunks and tongs to simulate their proboscis.

Then we continue on to our history lesson, and it’s about the start of World War 2.  Well, the text book is incredibly dry and boring.  Very boring.  It’s driving me nuts, so I almost literally throw the text book, and say “give me a minute, you run  around while I get something ready.”  I head off to my pinterest board, where I’ve saved a map-making website.  I print off a giant map, and some smaller maps for them.  We color the progress of Germany across Europe and the kids have a much better understanding of how things work.

Why does this work?

Remember the part at the beginning where I said I put in hours looking at books, websites, and other things?  If I didn’t do that beginning search, and didn’t read voraciously, then I couldn’t throw my plans out the window.  If I didn’t know my kids, and know my boys need to be involved in the lesson and doing something, I couldn’t throw my plans out the window.  If I didn’t know my daughter wants to color while listening, then I couldn’t ditch the textbook and say, “Let’s listen to Adventures in Odyssey” episode instead.

So yes, my lessons are somewhat improv at times.  Yes, I am a bit scatter-brained and ADD.  But, it makes our lessons richer.  At times, I feel a bit like the absent-minded professor in so many of the movies and TV shows, I have nothing relevant to contribute until suddenly “BAM!”  There’s that genius idea everyone needed.

It’s probably not really like that, it’s just how I picture it in the movie of my life in my head.

Have you registered for Teach them Diligently Homeschool Convention, yet?

Host a curriculum swap!

There are many ways to do this. Depending on how big your homeschool group you will want to select a venue that supports the amount of people who wish to participate.

Ideas for venues:

• Local church
• Library
• Local town hall or civic center

Next, let’s fill that venue:

• Start asking for sign-ups from those who plan to attend
• Allocate the space for each family participating

How many tables will you need?   Make sure you ask the family to give this estimation of how much space they will need. Is your space limited? Tell your members that and give clear instructions regarding the space available.

What time will you hold your swap? Oh dear one, if I’ve learned anything it’s that not announcing time limits can cause crazy problems. You will have people who show up too early and those who stay too late.

• What time can your people set up? I suggest, “You may begin setting up no earlier than __  and we have to conclude the swap by  ___ in order to put the room back the way we found it. “ This is also a great place to ask for help with the set-up and tear-down.
• Offer helpful hints for how to make this a smooth transition. You might consider asking the teens to help.

To bring little ones or not to bring little ones. In my experience there will never be a time that at least one person won’t bring any of their kids even if you ask politely. I have witnessed everything from quiet events where people have brought rowdy (and loud toddlers) to Mom’s nights out where the kids should not be witnessing some of the conversation. Having small children, who are not old enough to understand how to behave around other people’s property should have an area where they can have supervised play away from the browsing adults. One of the ways I have seen this beautifully accomplished is having teens available to watch the littles. Make sure they have activities and toys! A donation basket can be in place so that people can contribute to their teen helpers. It’s a win-win.. the teens have an opportunity to earn a little money, your little ones will be able to play with other little ones, and your mom’s will have peace of mind while the exchanging is taking place.

Something to consider.. will you allow any money to change hands on the more expensive items? If so, encourage everyone who wishes to participate to bring small bills and change  for the sale. If not, make sure you add that to your list of instructions!

Now that we’ve gone over the basics I hope your family finishes strong this year! I hope that if you decide to have a curriculum swap that it is very successful.

Have you registered for Teach them Diligently Homeschool Convention, yet?

The more I worked in schools and homes though, the more I realized an unsettling problem:

The vast majority of boys are labeled ‘reluctant’ readers.

I heard this from teachers, librarians, and parents alike.  As I met with families in their homes it become extremely apparent that the majority of boys I encountered didn’t enjoy reading. Parents were desperate to find material they ‘would read’.  The nice thing about the publisher I was working with (Usborne Books) is they offer countless fantastic non-fiction books that appeal largely to boys.  It wasn’t a problem finding great books, the question always remained though – will the boys actually read them?

Countless Moms have opened up to me about their son’s reading problems.  They talk about how their son just ‘doesn’t like’ reading or how he struggles to find ‘good books’.  Many Moms also voice concern for their son’s inability to focus on a piece of literature.  As I talked through these issues with families I started to realize an undeniable trend.

Almost every boy who was reluctant to read, spent hours in front of a screen every day.

The conversation always came to me asking about screen time.  Sometimes, it went over well, sometimes, it didn’t.  I was never pushy or placing judgment, I was just to the point.  I just simply asked how much screen time was part of the child’s life.  The truth is, boys who play countless hours of video games or watch endless TV are not avid readers.  There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.

Some parents are not concerned with whether or not their boys are avid readers.  It’s the truth.  And I’ve met them.  But many parents, especially home educating parents, care deeply about their children’s relationship with books.  And screen time doesn’t only affect boys, it hugely affects girls as well.  I chose to direct this post to boys because in my experience, the problem of reluctant reading and screen time rested heavily on boys far above girls.

Some reasons why Screen-Time affects the love of Reading:

• Fast-paced screen-time compromises a boy’s ability to focus on simple things, like words on a page.
• Television and movies shut the brain down, weakening a boy’s desire to learn (and read).
• The high intensity nature of video games overwhelm a boy’s senses – making it hard for books to compete with that kind of action.
• After all that screen time, who has a time to read?

Let’s be intentional in nurturing healthy reading habits by limiting the competing factors like video games, TV, DVDs, internet, hand-held screens, and so on.  Boys who have reduced (or very little) screen time tend to enjoy reading and will frequently turn to reading for pleasure and entertainment.

Thanks for reading!  With two sons, I’m on the journey with you!

Have you registered for Teach them Diligently Homeschool Convention, yet?