Special Connection Homeschool

Last night as I was sitting watching television my husband looks up from his computer and asks me, "did you purchase something on Ebay?" I think for a moment and answer, "not that I am a aware of." He checks again and asks, "you didn't purchase a Jumpstart Advanced Preschool game" and we both get nervous at that point realizing what probably happened. "No, I would not have purchased the preschool game, Gess played with that years ago, and she is way too advanced for that now." We both start trying to figure out exactly how this all went down when he tells me, "Well we are currently the high bidder and the maximum we are willing to pay is $68.00!!" The current bid was only $5.51 with 17 minutes left to go and we were really hoping that no one took the bid any higher. So here is the deal, my daughter has been using the computer for several years and she is really good at it. She used to have her own user, well she still does, bu...

We had the most awesome weekend at the MPE Homeschool Convention in Kansas City. I had been to the TPA Convention in Wichita the last two years and really enjoyed those but this year my daughter has her ballet recital that same weekend, so we came to this one. We were very pleased with it. I actually enjoy both and if I could I would go to both each year. Then again, I absolutely love conventions and conferences. If you have an opportunity to attend one in your area I highly recommend that you go! Homeschool Workshops The Key Note Speaker was Michael Farris and as most of you probably know he is the chairman of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) of which we are members and the chancellor of Patrick Henry College. He is also the president of ParentalRights.org of which I am very passionate about. His original Keynote address was on the issue of protecting parental rights and encouraged me to work even harder on getting the Parental Rights Amendment passed....

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter. This is a special holiday for me and though I try to keep it about the true meaning of Easter, I do allow my daughter to have a basket, color eggs and hunt for them. We simply do not tell her that a bunny had anything to do with it. We explain, like the Veggie Tales do, that while those things are fun they are not why we celebrate Easter. In light of that fact our favorite Easter video is Veggie Tales - An Easter Carol . In fact in Sunday School we also read the story An Easter Carol from the Veggie Tales Bible Storybook . Those are nice because they are followed by the actual Bible story from the NIrV and it went went right along with our sermon. At home we also read the story from our Read with Me Bible which also uses the NIrV and she would read some of them herself from The Beginner's Bible . I am amazed at how well she can read those! We did a few crafts. On Palm Sunday we made palm branches using the Palm Fan Craft from Sundays...

I am a Christian who wants our faith to play a role in all aspects of my daughter's education, for I believe that true faith does affect every part of our life. Well, one of the areas that I was actually surprised to find our faith helping her education was in speech. However, when you actually think more about it, you will see how easily it fits in. We have always read her bible stories, even before she was verbal. In fact she used to sign before she could speak and one of the earliest signs she learned was "Jesus." She could also sign church, God, Lord and many other words from the Bible. Once she started to speak more often, she started to learning how to say these words. If you read the Bible very often you know that there are some very hard to pronounce names, even for adults. I believe that seeing these names in print and learning to pronounce them is a really good exercise. By pointing out certain names and places in the story and having them repeat it also ...