2011-2012
The excitement of a new year is upon us once again. This year, however, I’m looking at our schedule and wondering how I managed to approve so many extra activities. We have music lessons scheduled for Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and homeschool PE at the YMCA on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. The younger boys have Royal Rangers on Tuesday evenings, and the teens have youth group on Wednesday evenings.
We continue with our eclectic approach this year, selecting curricula for individual subjects. I very much like what I’ve seen of the Writing Strands series, and wish I’d found it nine years ago.
Best of luck with your school year!
The Fed-Up Homeschooler’s Wish List
author unknown
- Please stop asking homeschoolers if it’s legal. If it’s legal – and it is – it’s insulting to imply that we’re criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?
- Learn what the words “socialize” and “socialization” mean, and use the one you really intend instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the necessary skills to do so successfully. If you’re talking to me and my kids, that means we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other humans on the planet, and you can safely assume we’ve got a decent grasp of both concepts. Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer practice to ask her if, as a homeschooler, she ever gets to socialize.
- Don’t assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know. If that homeschooler you “know” is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a “reality” show, that goes double.
- Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You’re probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you’ve ever heard. We all hate you, so go away.
- We don’t look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they’re in public school. Please stop drilling our kids like potential oil fields to see if we’re doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.
- Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.
- Stop assuming that if we’re religious, we’re homeschooling for religious reasons.
- We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes with homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either a personal affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.
- Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn’t complete a course in catering to successfully prepare dinner for my family; I don’t need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can’t teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there’s a reason I’m so reluctant to send my child to school.
- If my kid’s only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he’d learn in school, please understand that you’re calling me an idiot. Don’t act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.
- Stop assuming that because the word “home” is right there in “homeschool,” we never leave the house. We’re the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it’s crowded and icky.
- Stop assuming that because the word “school” is right there in “homeschool,” we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we’re into the “school” side of education – and many of us prefer a more “organic” approach – we can burn through a lot of material more efficiently, because we don’t have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.
- Stop asking, “But what about the Prom?” What about it? Having my kids skip one over-hyped, over-priced social event does not break my heart. Go be shallow somewhere else.
- Don’t ask my kid if she wouldn’t rather go to school unless you don’t mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn’t rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.
- Stop saying, “Oh, I could never homeschool!” Even if you think it’s some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you’re horrified. One of these days, I won’t bother disagreeing with you any more.
- If you can remember anything from high school chemistry or calculus class, you’re allowed to ask how we’ll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can’t, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn’t possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.
- Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child’s teacher as well as her parent. I don’t see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing her around the way I do about everything else.
- Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he’s homeschooled. All the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood, and homeschoolers should be granted the same forbearance.
- Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she’s homeschooled.
- Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy or saint because I homeschool my kids.
- Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won’t get because they don’t go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.
- Here’s a thought: If you can’t say something nice about homeschooling… don’t say anything at all!
A Pinkie’s Width
While checking my kids’ penmanship workbooks, I found it annoying that one child would leave gaping empty spaces on the page, writing only three or four letters per line. It seemed that he was trying to see how little work he could get away with. A part of me remembers how tedious it can be to write the same boring letter over and over again, I tend to be lenient.
One day, though, I was exasperated. “Child! You are supposed to be filling up these lines with letters. You learn to have good penmanship by practicing. Why do you keep leaving so much space between your letters?”
“But you told me to leave a pinkie’s width between my letters,” he replied as his eyes filled with tears. He thought he was doing it perfectly, and was devastated to learn he was doing it wrong.
I don’t yell at my kids, so the tears puzzled me. I tried to simultaneously calm him down and find out how he could possibly think his pinkie was two inches wide.
Ah, the old pinkie’s length between letters! I must’ve needed a reminder to show instead of tell.
Growing Up
The new schoolyear is underway, and what an adventure this year looks to be, especially since the older kids are planning to take nearly a month to do short-term missions trips.
First is a one-week trip next month to help with some maintenance and repairs on a YWAM base. Then in mid-winter, they’re planning to spend two weeks in Guatemala. Passports arrived yesterday, so it looks like they’re really going to do this. Guatemala is still reeling from Hurricane Agatha; the group will be doing all sorts of work with a couple different agencies:
- Proyecto Fe Int’l – runs a sponsored children’s school in San Pedro, La Laguna
- YWAM Antigua – does missions & disaster relief in Guatemala (as well as in Belize and El Salvador)
- In The Shadow Of His Wings – orphanage which takes in young, severely abused girls, and proves a nurturing living situation
- The Potter’s House – helps feed, shelter, and educate the 10,500 people who live and work in the Guatemala City dump as a means of survival (6,400 of whom are children)
My children will see poverty like they didn’t know existed.
In between school assignments, they’re working to raise money for their trips. The past week has been spent cleaning stalls for a nearby horse arena, and two people in our church have expressed an interest in hiring them for short projects. Obviously, they won’t be able to earn the entire amount and we will fund the difference.
I’m incredibly proud of them, that they would give up the little free time they have to earn money – not for toys for themselves, but so they can give of their time to help others.
GIGO
They say that to write well, one must read material of high quality.
Kids’ writing will reflect what they’ve read. If we want our children to become good writers, we need to provide examples and then let them practice. For a sample that we can encourage our budding authors to emulate, read The Reverse Peeper. This writing is fabulous!
Saving Money on Homeschooling Curriculum
Whether your family survives on $20,000 a year, or $400,000 a year, making the most of every dollar is important. I’ve written about this before. Today I want to share one more tip for saving money on books you buy for your homeschool.
credit card points
Similar to frequent flyer miles with the airlines industry, many credit cards allow you to accumulate points based on the dollars you charge on your account. Those points can then be used either for cash back, or for gift cards to a variety of stores.
We discovered that Barnes & Nobel is on the list of places that have gift cards for our credit card reward points. Charging all purchases on a card that gives us the maximum point benefit, then turning those points into a B&N gift card can help keep our homeschooling costs down.
Last week I visited the bookstore for some of the books my kids will be using this year. Not wanting to buy everything too far in advance, I just bought the books we’ll need during the first month. The total was $170, however Barnes & Nobel extends their educator’s discount to homeschoolers, so I got 20% off, thus saving $34. I also had a gift card from previous credit card purchases, which knocked another $40 off the price. I saved $74 dollars off that $170 worth of books.
To make future purchases less expensive, the final amount that I owed was charged on our credit card with the best points reward. Since I just spent nearly $100, I’ll be able to get another $10 gift card. In reality, I’ll get a bigger discount, because I will run other purchases through that credit card, too. If I put my weekly grocery purchases on my credit card (then pay the credit card off so I don’t owe interest), monthly pharmacy purchases, and fuel for the car – all on the card with the best rewards program – I will be able to get a significant credit toward our book purchases.
It keeps adding up. Next month I’ll order the rest of the books we’ll need through Christmas, charging them to the same credit card. That will give me more points toward a discount on the next purchase.
Every little bit helps.
Sending Young Adults to College
Planning to send kids to college? From TaxProf Blog, here’s another thing to think about:
Sending a child off to college for the first time is wrenching enough, but a slew of conflicting rules and changing banking and health-care laws are making this year’s move-in season more confusing than ever. And with college costs and student debt at record levels, it is all the more important for students—and their parents—to avoid the new financial traps cropping up on campuses these days, from debit cards to health insurance. …
Even as parents foot the bill for health care, privacy laws restrict doctors, nurses and student health from sharing information without an adult student’s permission. That is where the lawyer comes in.
After a few clients ran into difficulty getting information about adult children who were ill, Sheila Benninger, an attorney in Chapel Hill, N.C., began recommending that clients’ children designate a health-care power of attorney after they turn 18 to identify who can speak for them if they can’t.
She also includes a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, release form that allows patients to determine who can receive information about their medical care and whether information about treatment for substance abuse, mental health or sexually transmitted diseases can be disclosed.
You don’t have to use a lawyer. Generic health-care power-of-attorney forms can be found online. If the school has a HIPAA release online, it’s best to use that more-tailored document.
Parents should keep a copy in an email folder, where it can be easily accessed in an emergency. And students should designate a general power of attorney so someone can pay bills or handle other issues if they go abroad.
“Even if you end up never using these documents,” Ms. Benninger says, they help young people “understand the obligations of adulthood.”
h/t: Dr. Wes
Visiting History
How did it get to be June already?! So much for my thoughts of posting weekly updates; looks like that didn’t happen again this year.
Old Faithful
We took at long field trip last month in hopes of enriching our U.S. history studies. For two of our kids we purchased a special book, Passport to Your National Parks. I hope the other children don’t someday regret declining our offer to get them a book, too. Every year new stamps (stickers) are printed so that you can spend even more money decorating your passport. Thi$ is completely optional. When you go to the visitor’s center of a national park, you can get a “cancellation” for free.
Entrance into the parks isn’t free, however we learned about the America The Beautiful – National Parks and Federal Recreation Lands Annual Pass. Given the number of parks we visited, this pass saved us money on our trip (and we can continue to use it for the next eleven months).
Our family took over 1000 pictures at some incredible locations. My favorites were: 1) our horseback ride through Garden of the Gods, 2) Golden Spike, and 3) Zion.
Steam Engine at Golden Spike
We were at the Golden Spike Monument first thing in the morning, so had time to talk with the ranger and explore the displays in the visitor’s center before the steam trains arrived. Prior to our trip, the golden spike was just a paragraph in boring history books. Now it is so much more!
Another stop was the Grand Canyon. Magnificent! Now that we’ve seen the north rim, we’d like to return to see the south rim — some of us would like to spend enough time there to hike across (there’s even a place down in the bottom of the canyon where those who make reservations ahead of time can spend the night).
Many of the places we went had school busses full of kids on end-of-the-year field trips, so I’m not the only one who thinks these were educational locations. The educational aspect was a bonus; this was a fabulous vacation. If you’re looking for some great places to visit, here’s a start:
- Lewis and Clark Caverns
- Grand Tetons
- Jackson Hole
- Yellowstone
- Buffalo Bill Historical Center
- Little Bighorn Battlefield (definitely take the time to attend a ranger talk)
- Mount Rushmore
- Crazy Horse Memorial
- Jewel Caves
- Wind Caves
- Garden of the Gods
- Pike’s Peak (the road closes at 3:00, so make sure you get there early enough)
- Four Corners (unfortunately fenced off when we visited)
- Great Sand Dunes
- Grand Canyon
- Zion National Park
- Grand Staircase-Escalante
- Glen Canyon
- Bryce Canyon
- Capitol Reef
- Great Salt Lake
- Golden Spike National Historic Site
The national parks service has educational materials available here, as well as having a “teachers” link in the sidebar of every park, so it’s worth taking a little extra time to explore the resources available before you go. If you decide to visit any of these locations, I’d love to hear about it!
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