Category Archives: Homeschooling Methodologies

Renaissance of a Handcrafted EducationFrom the time I was pregnant with my son, Sean, until he was a toddler, if you had asked me what I wanted him to be when he grew up, I would have told you I wanted him to be a Renaissance man. To me, the term Renaissance man means a person (male or female) who has a deep and nuanced knowledge over a broad range of fields. It refers to a person who is literate and can express oneself through writing, speaking, or both; a person who is a creative thinker; someone who is not …

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The Benefits of HomeschoolingThere is a revolution going on right now in education. It’s called homeschooling. I am part of a fringe group in this revolution. You don’t hear a lot from us, but there is a group of homeschoolers who consider our style to be secular, eclectic, academic homeschooling. You don’t hear from us because on the one hand we are the unloved mongrels of the homeschooling community, so we keep a low profile, and on the other hand, we are too busy figuring out how to best facilitate our children’s education. We spend too much time on academics …

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“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” Susan Sontag Travel is a big part of our homeschooling journey. When we can, we worldschool. Worldschoolers incorporate travel throughout their children;s journey through learning. My husband and I want our son to be a global citizen. We want him to understand that many different cultures have looked at situations and come up with equally viable answers, one not necessarily better than the other. We want him to experience and appreciate different cultures and this big beautiful planet he lives on. We started traveling with Sean when he was two years …

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Things To Do and See in Atlanta by Shawne Taylor Atlanta is a city of contradiction – thoroughly modern and progressive and, at the same time, steeped in the history of both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s fast-paced and metropolitan, yet still retains its down-home southern charm. It’s a true international city, great for young professionals, and also a wonderful place to homeschool and raise children. And thanks to a generous tax incentive from the state, which has led to an increase in the number of movies and TV shows being filmed here, the city has …

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About 11 o’clock Friday night February 3, I got the call every parent with a teen aged driver dreads. My 17-year-old son had been in a car accident, and they were taking him to the hospital. He will be okay. He had part of his small intestine removed and a tear in his colon sewn up. As I sat in his hospital room, I reflected on our homeschooling journey and homeschooling in general. This might seem like a strange thing to be thinking about; perhaps it was because the weekend was supposed to be a work weekend focusing on finishing …

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By Kate Laird Kate Laird will be participating in SEA Homeschoolers’ School of Choice Week, 2017, airing from January 22 to 28, 2017. Kate’s podcast will air on January 25. Our school is an intersection of classical education and unschooling.  I think of my philosophy as unschool when you can; teach when you must. Children love learning, they love making discoveries and they love being left alone to learn. I trust them to do this. Almost. If I left my children to completely unschool, they would read thousands of books and paint thousands of pictures, but they wouldn’t do math. …

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Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge. http://bie.org/about/what_pbl         This year we used Project Based Learning, PBL, for one of the most dynamic and exciting years of all the 10 years we have been homeschooling. Several times this year, my son told me he had never been so proud of himself. Our journey through homeschooling has had highs and lows. What happened this year to make it such a high? Project Based Learning: …

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Homeschooling a Special Needs Child I am a huge advocate for families homeschooling their children with special needs. I believe schools are high stress, low engagement, and very punishing environments for children who learn out of the box. Parents are vested in the overall well-being of their children and know their children the best. This makes parents who can manage it, the best educators for these children. It is easy to become overwhelmed, though, when your job extends from parenting to include educating. In the years I have worked in education, I have applied the following methods in both home and …

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Handcrafting High School On the Road, Sinks Canyon, WY Early in my relationship with Jim I had to establish a rule. We can only drive so far before stopping. Jim is one of those people who will drive as long as it takes until he gets there. He loves to drive places too. After a couple of trips like this, early in our relationship, I told him either he did a better job of stopping and enjoying the journey, or I would only go places with him if we flew there, so now we stop after a set amount of …

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Handcrafting High School: Year 2, Custer State Park I think the year you study geology and environmental science, you should spend time outside looking at the subject of your studies, so we did. I did not keep a daily journal, because I had writer’s block. Something I had never experienced before. It gave me insight into what happens for kids who have good ideas but can’t get them onto a page. My writer’s block made me feel like my brain was constipated. I had so many ideas running around in my head I had trouble getting anything out at all. …

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This young man is incredibly creative and he is twice-exceptional. He makes movies, writes stories, animates, composes, records original songs, and works on other creative endeavors all day long. He is never idle, never bored. My son works from the moment he wakes up, which is usually before 7:00, and stays busy until around 10:00 at night when he finally tires out and heads to bed. Sleep usually comes an hour later when his mind finally calms down. Most days I am in awe of all he does. It really is amazing. But it is also incredibly frustrating, and at times, overwhelming …

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Handcrafting High School: Year 2, Month 1 The first month of tenth grade might have been the best month we ever spent homeschooling. You might be thinking, “Well, Yeah! You were traveling and hanging out. How could that not be great?” 🙂 That is true, of course, but it was more than that. The planning and intent for this trip focused on enriched learning. The choices for where we stayed and what we did were planned with the intent that what we studied on the road would enrich our understanding of a situation in science, culture, and/or history. We were …

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Science and the Secular Homeschooler I live in Southern California. I taught science at community college, and now I write about it. Those two sentences convey a lot of information about how easy it is for me to negotiate my way through the homeschool community. Where I live in California, there are many large secular or inclusive homeschool groups. In my experience in California, unless a group states that it is faith-based, it is understood that it isn’t. With one exception, the religious homeschoolers I have met in California have never seemed put-off by my stance about science or my …

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Homeschooling the Early Years I have been part of the online homeschool community for a number of years, and I often come across posts from a parent who is panicked about whether their young child or children are doing enough school work. Often the posts will list all the curriculum the parent has purchased and planned for the year and then go on to discuss how frustrated both the parent and the child are becoming with their school day. Sometimes the child becomes grumpy and uncooperative, sometimes the parent feels like all they are doing is yelling at the child, …

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A Day in the Life: Charlotte Mason Inspired Homeschool Every homeschooler wants to get a peek into another’s day. We’re always curious about how other mom’s manage. Maybe your homeschool tends toward very school-at-home, or classical, or project-based. We all picture every other homeschool mom as being a Pinterest-worthy super-mom, but really, we’re all pretty much the same – just doing our best to educate our children as well as we possibly can. This school year, I am teaching a 11th grader, two 8th graders and a 1st grader. My plate is FULL. I can honestly say, this has been …

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