Special Connection Homeschool

You have finished your schooling and all of your chores and now you have to run to the store to do some shopping.  You are in a hurry but you notice your child is dragging behind.  They keep stopping to look at everything!  It's so frustrating because you are tired and just want to get home so you can finally relax, or worse yet start dinner and do more work for the day.  What do you do? Typically we hurry the child along and scold them for continually stopping.  The problem is that we are missing some valuable opportunities for learning.  The hardest thing for me to do as a homeschool teacher was to stop thinking that my school had to look, act and function like a brick and mortar school.  The fact that you school at home does not mean that once the clock hits a certain time or when the lessons are complete that school is over.  Homeschooling means that the child is constantly in a state of learning. Being the parent of a child with special n...

The key to learning is to make it fun and there is no better way to do that than to start by studying what kids already love.  That is why I think that Delight-directed teaching is one of the great benefits of homeschooling.  Since you as the parent get to choose when you learn various topics you can let your child's passions guide you.  That's certainly what I do and Gess has excelled greatly because of it. Gess has a passion for science.  That passion certainly didn't come from me because it was always my least favorite subject.  She has that passion because we were able to direct her learning around things that she was curious about and interested in.  Gess is particularly fascinated by the weather and wants to be a meteorologist when she grows up.  That dream was sparked during a Hail Storm in 2009. Gess was scared of the storm but at the same time she was drawn to watch those huge balls of hail fall from the sky.  She could not pull ...

You can read articles all day about how to teach a subject, what worksheets to use, what hands on activities to include, etc., but what every parent really wants to know is how do we teach our kids to enjoy learning? One thing I try to do is make sure that Gess has plenty of opportunities to succeed in whatever it is she is trying to learn. I think that idea really hit me when I went to a homeschool convention and listened to a speaker discuss it.  (I am sorry I can not remember his name.)  When talking about teaching reading he said that the problem with typical education is that it teaches children to read but fails to teach them to learn to love to read.  Teaching reading should go from learning to read to reading to learn however somewhere in between we need to teach them to learn to love reading so they will want to read to learn.  How then do we do that? One idea that he suggested I put into practice and still utilize today.  It is our reading c...