A wise mom once shared with me….
It’s not only about what they learned this year….
It’s also about the person they have become..
Looking for a way to keep track of time online? It’s so easy to start reading or facebooking and get completely lost in my own time zone.
Here’s a tool to keep you in touch with reality. Minuteplease allows you to put in the url and the time you want to spend there and then it will give you a warning and close the window when the time is up.
This will be a very helpful site when taking breaks while working on projects. Try it out. Let me know what you think. It’s completely free.
As a homeschool mom, I think it’s very important to include a couple of internet courses for your children. Many community colleges offer online classes that high school and upper elementary students can easily take online.
Upper education is moving in the direction of online education and it’s helpful to prepare our kids before they get to that point. Most classes do not require a student to be online during specific times but rather to complete the work as laid out in a syllabus.
Give your kids a well balanced education by teaching them how to be successful at online courses. Here’s an article about online course at the secondary level.
BY MICHAEL VASQUEZ
MRVASQUEZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Online college courses are exploding in popularity — far outpacing the growth of higher education as a whole — but it’s not just the number of online students that has expanded.
The online class experience, too, is more wide-reaching — encompassing far more than just keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.
At local universities, students are getting medical training, practicing their public speaking and doing their own “kitchen-based experiments,” all online.
This richer online learning experience — combined with the convenience of scheduling school when you want it — has boosted the medium’s popularity to the point that today more than one in four college students takes at least one course online.
“People are becoming more accepting, and used to technology,” said John Bourne, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Sloan Consortium, which tracks online enrollments. The organization’s 2009 report showed a 17 percent year-to-year surge in online students nationally, while the total number of U.S. college students rose a mere 1.2 percent.
~~I didn’t write this-but I wish I had. This information helped me a bunch so I’m passing it on to you~~
So you’re talking about your youngest student, right? Third grade?
Okay, this is what I did early on with my gang.
I say, “Okay, first sentence, first paragraph. What do we do with the first sentence of a paragraph? That’s right, we indent it. Okay, the first sentence is ‘My dog, Spot, ran.’ My (I wait for her to write it–I used to have to remind her, what do we do with the first word of the beginning of a sentence), dog (I wait for her to write it) Spot (then I might remind her–this is a name so what do you do) ran (wait for her to right it),” Then I say, “End of sentence (I wait for her to punctuate it).” At this point, I might say, “Okay, we talked about appositives, remember? Which word is an appositive? And what do we do to a word that is an appositive? That’s right–we surround it with commas.” Then I move on to next sentence. If somebody is talking, I tell them that someone is talking.
Now that time has passed, I don’t have to remind anyone to indent, capitalize first words, names, etc. My oldest daughter doesn’t require any help with punctuation because she really gets the rules and why and when to apply them (she is entering 7th grade). Her dictations are usually flawless. My son (entering 5th) requires very little assistance beyond my reading the sentence as well. Sometimes I need to remind him of a rule (if it’s new or not used a lot), but he had several flawless ones last year. My youngest is getting there. She verbalizes what she knows to me (she is going into 4th) by saying what she knows to me before I tell her. Like she said, “Okay, mom, somebody else is talking so I need to start another paragraph.” Great! Done deal. I know I don’t have to remind her anymore about it.
Then we look at the dictation together and go over it and correct mistakes and go over the rules (like if they forgot to put a ? after a question or a comma or whatever).
Don’t be afraid to walk him through the material until he grasps it. The biggest mistake I made the first year was expecting them to guess until they guessed it right. He will let you know when he’s got it. Also, another mistake I made was to read a whole sentence and expect them to memorize the sentence and write it. We all got extremely frustrated. Now they say to me, “Mom, I already got the sentence, ” or “Could you read more than one word at a time as you’re going through the sentence again?”
Also, I will spell words for them that are really above their “working” level. Now, I make them try it and we immediately correct it, but I certainly don’t expect a 4th grader to write “excruciatingly,” but I do make her try it. Any words that I feel like she should know (like “school” or “special”) go on a trouble word list that we practice.
I know this is long, but I just wanted to encourage you. I really feel that dictation is a GREAT learning tool because it really works for us. It forces them to think about the rules and apply them and make decisions, rather than spit the commas back on a worksheet that tells them to do the same thing.
~ annonomous
Find a Home School Mentor
Mentoring is key to becoming a strong homeschooling parent. Look for someone you respect who is homeschooling their children.
It may be a well known author. If so, read all their books.
It may be someone you admire from afar. Ask that person to have coffee. They will most likely be flattered that you think so highly of them.
It may be a close friend or family member. If so, you may feel comfortable asking them to mentor you.
Regardless of your situation, find someone who can encourage you on your homeschool journey.