TEACHING ARCHIVES

Help your children to love writing by writing a story or a novel together! You can take it in steps... first talk about the idea, the plot, characters and start to slowly write it down. Make it fun, talk about it in a car, when you have free time. When you are enthused about the process, your children will be excited. If you make writing a chore, it will be just that. A chore. Make is fun and interesting... get involved! You can even write a bit and then ask your child to continue the scene, or do the next bit. When you become a writing "partner" instead of a "coach" the writing magic comes alive!

If you think your child needs more experience reading... consider comical books and joke books. My daughter loves to read Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbs and if I slip one of those fun books into her library stack, she always reads and re-reads it during the week. Garfield is another family friendly cartoon! And joke and riddle books.... encourage your budding comics to entertain at dinner and you've got a hit as well as a fun way to encourage more reading!

Beginning readers often enjoy colorful flashcards and word games. Buy a set of multicolored index cards. In red or another bright color, print the new words your child is working on. The different colors can be used to separate word categories. For example: green can be nouns, yellow - names of family members or friends, blue - animals or sight words, etc. Play the cards like a game. The cards they get right go in one pile and the other ones get reviewed. Each day see how many more they have added to the pile of words they know.

To make colorful and easy creative notebooks, try this: Give a few magazines to your children. Have them cut out some pictures they would like to write about (nature, travel or home magazines have a ton of great pictures). Cut out the picture and tape or paste it on the top of a page in their writing notebook or journal. Under the picture they can write a story, descriptive or narrative paragraph about what they see in the picture. For comparative paragraphs, have them choose two smaller pictures to compare or contrast. For younger students you can write a story starter under the pictures like "One day in the middle of winter..." or "Deep in the jungle I saw..." etc., to get them started.

A portable tape player can be a great learning tool for your beginning reader. Create a few "books on tape" for them, by reading their favorite books into a cassette back and giving them the opportunity to read along whenever they want! Kids love the novelty of the tape recorder and it really helps to get them reading on their own!

If you're learning about the human body with your kids... how about finding and downloading a food diary and exercise log online and keeping track on your computer! So many of these programs are free and have many extras that show your kids the direct correlation between food, calories and exercise. My kids thought it was neat to watch all the stats change as the weeks moved on. We even created a fake person and fed them TOO much, and bad foods and it was very eye-opening when the programs showed how poorly that person was eating, etc. Great tool!

Not only can you place maps under a clear kitchen tablecloth like someone here suggested... put all sorts of great readables under there! Diagrams of the human digestive system or other science things, newspaper clippings of interest, magazine articles, fact charts, interesting bits and pieces relating to your studies. If you change it often, your family will look forward to finding what's new. It's a great way to encourage reading with younger kids and more fun than reading the cereal boxes at breakfast!

If you have a reluctant writer and reader in the family, try this fun trick... Start emailing your kid!

They will need to have access to a computer and have their own email account. Everyone loves to get mail! And be sure to ask questions that beg to be responded to. Send funny pictures and links to safe sites. Just keep at it. Be silly, short and sweet and build on this. It might take a little while to get hooked, but I know it really worked with my daughter. Now she even starts the ball rolling with her own first email to me. (We're in the same house, but it's still fun and always smile when I get an email from my kids!) Her typing is improving as well and I know it's safe, because I'm the one writing to her. My older daughter now does the same and it's kind of fun. We have even caught ourselves IMing silly things back and forth about dinner or chores or just a good laugh!

If you use text books for your schooling plans, take the number of pages in a book and divide it by your number of school days. Record how many pages a day you need to accomplish and you will have a game plan to help you keep the year moving ahead smoothly.

If you get behind, or are going too quickly, you can always adjust the page numbers to get back on track. I like this plan and I hope that it helps others too!

I love to plan out a month of lesson plans or our quarterly unit studies but finding a block of time is often difficult. What I've discovered that works great is to "time swap" with another homeschool mom. I can take my time at home where I can assess my resources and use my computer or I can use the quiet and resources of the library. The other mom takes my children for a few hours and then I trade and take here so she can use her time alone to prepare her homeschooling plans. It's is important to schedule Teacher Planning Days periodically throughout the year! It really helps!

To encourage my young daughter to write poetry, I decided to start by example. I wrote her a poem and then asked for one back. My poetry writing is a little rusty, but it was delightful to see her light up to the idea of swapping beautiful prose with her old man! We've been exchanging poems now all week and we're both getting much better. She has been reading more poetry to get ideas and we have been discusing each other's work as well! Sometimes you need to teach by example instead of just assigning work for your kids!

After reading the "The Hundred Penny Box" by Sharon Bell Marthis, we decided to make our own timelines with pennies. It was great fun to find a penny for each of our own years of life and then we took an index card and wrote down four different events that happened that year.

Two events were personal, such as learning to ride a bike or getting a pet. The second pair were about world events and we wrote those down, too. Even Mom and Dad joined in and we all started penny boxes of our lives!

One of the best things we ever did in homeschooling, was to have each child have a "school box". We got those plastic totes that are more upright and with a handle. Each child has their own. All their workbooks and papers and reading books and favorite pencils and such fit in their box. And when the day is done, they neatly stack in the kitchen and the clutter beast is under control!

If your child is not able to write out complicated sentences in a journal or projects, yet has a good grasp of the flow of language, spend a little time as their "secretary" and allow them to dictate their thoughts and ideas as you or an older child writes them down.

You'll find that with repeated use of the secretary, their writing skills will improve dramatically and they will love to re-read their own works on their own too! It makes writing FUN!

Involve your children in as much LIVE music as possible. When they actually see people, average people, playing and enjoying any number of instruments or musical styles, it really means SO much more to them, then just hearing CDs or music on the radio. Especially when they see other kids playing music live. There is nothing better than to spark the musician within by this wonderful example.

Lots of communities have jams, or concerts in the park for free, or even sing-alongs, or any sort of live music is GREAT!

One of the best things we ever did for learning the countries and landmarks of the world, was to take a full sized poster of the world and place it under a clear tablecloth!

Every time the kids and I sat down at the table, we would look at the map! We would laugh when the ketchup was covering Italy, or challenge each other to find some city or body of water. We could point out areas that were in the news. Pretty quickly, my family had a very good sense of their world geography and it was fun, too!

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