Special Connection Homeschool

During last week's 5 Days of Homeschooling Essentials I mentioned DonnaYoungs.org Printables and Resources during my post about Planning .  Well I wanted to highlight that resource here because she has a lot more to offer than just planners. Donna Youngs.org Printables and Resources are FREE!  Along with general information on Homeschool and ideas for those who are New to Homeschooling Donna Young has helps for every step of the way. You won't just find a Calendar or two here.  You will find school calendars, blank calendars, 12+ month, horizontal, event, blank dated, big and of course monthly.  On top of that there are tools for teaching the calendars to children.  There are even instructions for making your own desk calendar ! There are printable and helps for teaching Art, English, Handwriting, History, Math, and Science. There are also maps, handwriting paper and worksheets, household helps such as chore charts and so much more!  Here are...

Were you aware that on February 4th Bill Nye "the science guy" has agreed to debate Ken Ham, the founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum?   That is one week from today!  I am excited that we are finally getting a few moments in the media to publicly make our arguments for creation known.  I have heard statements from Bill Nye and I am amazed that he has no idea who or what he is even debating.  He seems to be under the impression that creationists don't "believe in science."  That, however, couldn't be further from the truth! You can watch this debate live online for FREE!  It will also be available on YouTube shortly after it has aired live.  They are not sure how long that will last so if you can't watch live, tune in soon.  A few days after the debate digital downloads and DVD copies will be available for purchase.  Be sure to check out debatelive.org for more details!  I will not be able to catch it live...

Every week I try to have a FREE Friday post in which I share a helpful resource that is FREE.  Sometimes it is a temporary deal, sometimes it will be some free printables and other times they are just free online resources that you may not know about. Below are a few of my always FREE resources. The Old Schoolhouse Magazine .  This is an excellent resource for information, encouragement, support, and ideas.  There are articles for every kind of homeschooling and some are special needs specific.  You can also find product reviews and other curriculum information.  This product is digital and is always free ! If you are struggling to find a curriculum that works and are on a tight budget, try Easy Peasy All-in-one Homeschool .  This is an entire homeschool curriculum!  You can choose to use it for all your studies or just fill in what is lacking for your home.  I know parents who use the entire thing, those who use it for one subject an...

Now that we have prayed , planned and are becoming flexible , we need an area to actually get our work done. There is no right or wrong way to set this up.  In fact, every homeschool room will look different.  I have seen some very extravagant and well organized rooms.  I also know moms that simply turn their kitchen table into workspace for the day.  No homeschool classroom is better than the other.  The important thing is to find what works best for you which is mostly dependent on how much space you have in the first place!  Our school room started out as a corner of one room of our house.   However, after my son graduated from the junior college and went off to the university, we upgraded to an entire room! Our school room consists a desk for doing seat work and an area to keep all of our books.  As you can see we are not into fancy, just practical.  We have an old school desk that was actually left in the garage when we moved in....

Yesterday I talked about the importance of planning .  Of course, there is nothing more frustrating then spending hours planning something only to find out in practice that it didn't go at all as you planned!  Homeschooling happens in the midst of real life and therefore we have to expect that the unexpected will happen! My mother got very ill last year.  She was hospitalized with congestive heart failure and it took her several weeks to recover enough just to get back to doing her daily tasks.  After that she suffered a mini stroke.  Believe me, taking her to the hospital and for testing were not in my "plans."  I improvised as best I could.  I took a back pack full of school activities and did them at the hospital with Gess.  When mom had an exploratory surgery, we did lessons in the waiting room. Even packing all those books around with us, I didn't get everything done I wanted to do that week.  Sometimes that is OK.  Having pu...

As I said in my previous post about Prayer , I am a planner.  Planning in its proper place is important and is an essential tool in my homeschool.  Since I only homeschool one child I do great with an simple teacher's lesson plan book like this inexpensive one from Rod and Staff . However, if you have many kids in different grades, doing different things in each subject, that probably isn't idea.  I know that there are lots of other great homeschool planners out there.  Donna Young's website has tons of homeschool forms available for free.  Among them are some pretty great planners. The Old Schoolhouse has a really awesome one.  While it isn't free it is worth the money.  These are formatted by a typical school year calendar so this one is half over but hey, it's at a really low price now too! Once I have my planner I start by making a sample lesson plan for the week.  I try to follow that as best I can but many times I use it t...

I am a huge planner.  I plan everything out, including the birth of my children.  I had it all figured out.  I knew exactly how it would be when I brought my last child home from the hospital.  I saw it all in my head and I was ready.  God, however, had other plans.  We didn't come home, well at least not for awhile.  After almost six weeks in the NICU and another 10 day stay for open heart surgery I learned that things do not always go as planned!  Now, I tell you this not to keep you from planning, but just to remind you that planning is not enough.  You see, I was going to title my first Homeschooling Essentials post just Planning but I think I will leave that for tomorrow.  Instead, I felt that it was important to first start with the reminder to pray.  Sisters, we should start everything we do with prayer.  That should be such a part of our lives that it should not have to be mentioned.  I might also add that along...

At one of our homeschool support group meetings I learned about this handy little website called Xtramath.org .  This is a great tool to help children memorize math facts and it is totally FREE! Because Gess has Down syndrome she has really struggled memorizing her facts, but I am giving this a try.  I figure it can't hurt.  What is really neat about it is that it continues to give you problems you miss over and over again until you really get it right consistently.  They also ALWAYS make you put in the answer, even if you get it wrong.  So, once you get the problem wrong, it not only shows you the correct answer, but you must then actually type the answer in to move on. The other nice thing about Xtramath.org is that it takes only about 5 minutes a day and that is all they let you do.  It is simply for extra practice.  Once you complete your lesson it tells you that you are done for the day!  You can't come back until tomorrow. Here is h...

My son Tim, the one that is studying music and theatre in college and who also went to public school, feels that every child should take recorder lessons in the 5th grade.  It is something he enjoyed and it is an instrument he believes that has true value. Anyway, when he came home from college for Christmas break he decided that he would give Gess some lessons on the recorder. To help him he found a really neat website Squeaky's Recorder Playhouse that teaches you all about the recorder and had some great fingering charts like the one below. Wikihow also had some good instructions on how to play and care for your recorder. I just love introducing Gess to new things.  What tickled me the most was when she was in her room reading her dictionary one day (yes, she sits and reads her dictionary) and noticed that the word recorder was in there!  She came out, got her recorder and was reading about it while exploring her own. While we haven't done much with...

Last year I reviewed Logic of English   and absolutely love it.  I have people ask me questions about whether it is good for all kids with special needs, and when they should start it, among other things.  So while in my review I told you about how it worked, here I am going to tell you about what all they have to offer.  I am not an affiliate or getting compensated in any way.  It's just a great product and I want my readers to have as much information as possible so they can decide if it will work well for them. Logic of English has a vastly different approach to learning about English.  You can read that in my review .  They also offer a large variety of information on their website as well as several sample pages for every book they offer.  Read everything and view the video.  It shares a lot about how it works. I reviewed the Logic of English Essentials curriculum.  It can be used for five to six year old students who are lea...

Here is a great tool to help homeschoolers start off the new year, the always FREE digital edition of the The Old Schoolhouse Magazine .  Check out the current edition by clicking on the cover below! You can also get The Old Schoolhouse To Go by downloading their FREE app available for Iphone, Android, Kindle Fire and Nook!

Ever since Gess saw the video Dinosaurs, Genesis and the Gospel she has been fascinated with dinosaurs.  Every time she picks up her bible she is in Job reading about the Behomoth and she keeps looking up songs from the show on Youtube.  So for Christmas we got her a few new products from Answers in Genesis so she could learn more about dinosaurs. To add to that theme I  thought I would also introduce Gess to paleontology, in a very hands on sort of way.  After watching I Dig Dinosaurs she got to dig one of her own with another Christmas gift we got her: a Geo World Dino Excavation Kit of her favorite dinosaur T-Rex. (The kit does come with evolutionary information inside, but we just ignored that.) Gess really had a blast digging for the dinosaur!  It was hard and tedious work but she was so diligent.  I tried to tell her it didn't need to be completed in one sitting, but she was not giving up until she had discovered all the bones! ...

This will be our second year starting our school calendar from January to December and I wanted to share the curriculum we will be using for 2014.  Of course as I get opportunities to review new products I we will be adding, supplementing or sometimes breaking from these for a period of time, but our main focus will be on the materials listed below. Bible God's Great Covenant: New Testament - We are going through this again now that Gess is older.  We got so overwhelmed our first year we ended up stopping this before we were even half way through.  However, since our adult Sunday School class is going through the gospels it seemed like it would be a perfect time to pick it back up with Gess.  We started it last fall so we will finish this at the end of the spring semester. English/Language/Spelling/Speech Logic of English - We started this last summer and it has been one of the best finds yet.  I particularly love how it helps us focus on speech ...