Not Another Homeschool Blog

Jordan and I evaluated her progress on Time4learning.com and it looks like she will be finished in a about 3 weeks. At that point I will order the CAT standardized exam which she will take, and we will take the summer off. Taking the summer off means she will use the program only when she wants to. She loves using the playground and she also loves doing the math . She is being promoted to 5th grade next year and has already started 5th grade math and we hope to finish 5th and 6th grade math next year. After that, she wants to do the local program her brother is using, so this is her last year using time4learning as her main curriculum, but she will probably continue to use it as a supplement .

The Chicago Tribune featured a story recently called Few guidelines exist in regard to home-schooling students . The story tells about a woman and her husband who took her brother from her mom for educational neglect...i.e. homeschooling. The article is very one sided, and the mother gets no chance to defend herself. Nevertheless, the writer takes this news of another homeschool experience gone bad to denigrate homeschoolers as a whole. "State law requires parents who home-school to keep daily attendance records and teach 180 days a year, but it fails to provide for any means of enforcement or specify what subjects must be taught. Indiana, where about 23,000 children are home-schooled, is one of about 30 states that has little say over home-schooled students. " Scope and Sequence is not what homeschoolers need to teach their kids effectively. (Although letting homeschooled parents know what local kids are learning could he helpful) They need to be able to educate and be...

Sure if can catch the right shows on PBS, or hook the computer up to it. The website describes itself as “a digital video-on-demand” service with more that “4,000 educational videos available for use in the classroom—at any time you wish”. Read more of the review I wrote about United Streaming , on associated content.com

How are children really socialized? Homeschoolers joke that public schoolers are socialized by getting beat up in the bathroom and offered drugs. All jokes have some element of the truth. I have yet to see positive socialization. Study hall no longer exists, and where it does, silence is demanded. Young children are forced to be silent during lunch, while wating on line, while waiting in the classroom, while using the bathroom etc. When they do conversate with each other, it is heavily regulated, or against the rules... which brings us back to the 'Joke'. Meanwhile, homeschool critics believe (quite seriously) that homeschoolers have no opportunities at all to socialize and are therefor inept. That could not be further from the truth. Althouh not all homeschoolers socialize, most have opportinites for socialization in addition to their academic activities . Personally, my children have hundreds of opportunities to socialize with other children. I wrote about just a fe...