Homeschool Journal Writing

BY CHRISTINA · AUGUST 5, 2014

I shared recently about writing to pen friends as one the ways we try to make writing fun, another tool we use is Journaling.  I have done this for the last few years. I have my children draw about activities that we have done during the week, or at our homeschool get together, and depending on there age, they dictate what they want to write, or when old enough write it themselves.  I don’t correct the spelling in this journal like I do there other forms of writing activities, because I want it to be a good record of their abilities, and something we can look over and see how they have grown over time.  I am also hoping to help them develop the skills of keeping a record of there lives, and will aim to journal most days as they get older and older.

This is an example from my 9 years journal, I let her choose the ones that she wanted share.

Do you have your children keep a journal? How to do work it for them?

- Christina

Pen Friends - Homeschool Activity

 Pen Friends 

One of the challenges that I face sometimes when it comes to homeschooling is to make writing fun for my children. I see it as a need in our family that they are able to hand write well. To get good at something you need to practices.

In the early years of their education I use an Abeka workbook to help me with teaching them the skill of writing and forming letter and words.  Which for us has proven to be useful in our household, and has helped several of my children learn to read. However  once they are reading well they do get bored of it. So I have come up with a number of ways my to help my children learn a love for writing. (that is still a work in progress with some of them)

One of the ways we practise our handwriting skills is with Pen Friends. 

I am also trying to teach my children to BE the type of friend that they would like to HAVE.  All my children love to get letters in the mail. So we are learning that if you would like to get letters in the mail, then you also need to be someone that writes letters to other people.

So this is where pen friends come in handy.

This year I have made a concerted effort to help them grow and develop qualities of a good pen friend.

The first quality would be "someone that writes back".

It can be very discouraging when your children spend the time and effort writing to people that don't write back. So to help avoid some of that, I have gotten several pen friends for my children. They have a least three friends there age, and a few relatives that they can write to. Relatives are good, because they will often pop a card, postcard, or letter in the mail in return.

I have also scheduled a time in my homeschool week for letter writing. For Us Monday is the day! It's the beginning of the week and we get the most done on that day. I also know myself, while I LOVE to fly by the seat of my pants, if I don't make time for things to happen in our crazy, lovely home, sometime they don't get done. Or months have gone by and we suddenly remember that we haven't done, or have missed out on..... So for me I HAVE schedule and make time for things that we REALLY want to do in our lives.

It is the beginning of term 3 for us, so Monday was the day we sat down and made cards for our pen friends. The children had great fun. This time we made and sent one off to every pen friend on there list, because I did get a little slack in my schedule in the last month of last term. So just to bring us all update on everyones pen friends there are lots of letters going out from our house this week.

Having Pen Friends doesn't have to be something that is hard and tiresome, you don't always have to write a big long letter. Often we will be out shopping and find that we card or a postcard that they can easily fill in a send.

For us Aunts, Uncles, and Grandparents are really good value when it comes to getting letters back.

Leave me a Comment

Let me know your pen friend experiences? Or things that you do to help encourage your children to develop there handwriting skills.

Setting your Goals - Homeschool planning

Over the next few months I'm going to sharing with you my tips for planning your homeschool, giving you an idea of how I go about making plans for my family each year. So today is....

Step One: Creating your Goals

• What are your goals for homeschooling?  

Knowing what you stand for, and what you hope to achieve will help you know where you are going,  what tools will fit YOUR homeschool, and will help you stay on track when the winds of change come your way, which they inevitably will. For example, you might go to a homeschool group, join a online group or two, read some blogs and websites, all of which will be filled with great ideas. There are so many resources and ideas out there in the world that you could use, but not all of them will fit YOUR homeschool. So defining your goals, how you want to teach, how your children learn best,  what will fit into your schooling day, what your schooling day will look like, etc. are all decisions which will help you refine what will work for you, and what won't. A lovely idea isn't any good to you if it won't work in helping your family and will quickly become more of a burden to you than a help.

1.  Why are you choosing homeschooling or home education?

People make the choice or decision for many many reasons. What was your reason?

* It's no good if you choose to home ed because you want your family to spend time together, but then you construct your homeschool in such a way that you are always on the run from one activity to the next and the only time you spend together is in the car or around the table at night, exhausted.

2. What lifestyle do you want to create for your family?

If you want a structured lifestyle, then a structured curriculum might be the way to go for you, however If you wanted a more relaxed lifestyle so you could be a bit more free to be able to take advantage of the different things that are going on in your local area. <   >Or you might like to be a mix of both.

3. What skills do you value and wish for your children to learn?

Is it Cooking, Gardening, Building, Craft, Sewing, Caring for Livestock, Horse Riding, Etc.

4. What are your educational goals with your children?

For me, I aim to create independent learners and thinkers, and not just rote learners, so I am working towards teaching them how to learn something they don't currently know, and interactive thinking about what they are learning. I am also trying to build discerning learners, as not everything that is presented as truth actually is.

5. Do you have a particular passion or topic area that you want to share with your children?

For example, you might have a cultural background that you want your children to learn about, or special interests that you feel are important for your children to learn, like growing food to feed themselves?

6. What are you family goals for the year?

Do you have some particular things that you as a family are working towards for the year?
- it could be living with less.
- Giving more to charity.
- A family trip.
- Growing enough food to feed yourself.
- Start a business.

The list is endless.

7. What goals do you have for your children in each subject area?

• Reading - e.g. reading independently
• Writing - e.g. effective letter writing
• Math - e.g. learning multiplication
• History - e.g. Learning some local history
• Science - e.g. Doing experiments 

• Art - e.g working on learning painting skills
• Music - e.g. Music appreciation 
• Handicrafts - e.g. Wool Crafts

• Spiritual - e.g. learning bible verses
• Emotional - e.g. learning to express feelings well. 

• physical - e.g. good body health
• Social - e.g. learning to introduce yourself to others
• Financial -e.g handling pocket money
• Home skills - e.g. learning skills in cleaning. 
• Business skills - e.g. learning to type on the computer. 

You might have very different goals for each of your children, some might be same.

So what are your goals?

Did you find this useful? Leave a comment to let me know what you thought.  ~ Christina

Pocket money.

Last fortnight I posted our new point system at home to help with rewards and behavioural management. We are also using it as a way to help the children to learn to manage there money.  So each point equals 5 cents.

To help our children develop good money habits, we are starting with the idea of using 10% for Charity, 10% for savings, and then they can choose what to use the remainder for with in reason.

With the remainder I hope to encourage them to start setting up there businesses, but for now we are focusing on the saving and giving elements.

So this was our first week of them giving from their own money. They had $5.40 to give. I asked my facebook friends for some advice on charities that they could give the money too.

Here is the working list of charities and ideas that they can give too.

Of course the first meaningful one on our list is the
Hope for Accreta Foundation.  Others on the list are;
Samaritans Purse Operation Christmas Child.
Australian Red Cross
Baby Mum Australia
Tear Australia and "useful gifts"
Heartfelt
SIDS
Starlight
Ronald McDonald House
SIM - Serving in Mission 
Guardian Care
Cycstic Fibrosis
Gospel for Asia 
Chilout
Oxfam
Kiva.org
The Good Shepherd Agricultural Mission
Compassion Australia
Epilepsy Australia
Heart Kids
Cancer council

So that is a good start. They give there money this fortnight to buy a chicken via Tear Australia "Useful gifts", and look forward to researching and learning more about the other organisations and what things they do to help the communities they are working for. Maybe one day they will start their own, or run some fundraising events for charities that they find are close to their hearts.

Do you have your children give to charity? What works for you? And who do you give to?

Conducting a Choir.

Since the restarting of life after Marcella's birth, where I came very close to dying, there have a been a number of things that I have taken on for the first time in my life.

One of these things is conducting the homeschool choir this year.  It was a fun, stressful, challenging and a nerve wrecking experience. LOL.  I have sung in choirs all my school years, and for me it was one of my highlights.  I was in my high schools concert choir, getting to perform at many events. This was the first time I have ever conducted one, and I new have a new found respect for my conductors growing up.

The song that we sang was "King of Kings"
which seems very simply until you add in the round. So my challenge was to keep each group singing the correct part of the song, while also keeping track of how many times they sang then song, then getting them to sing it as fast as they could.

The performance went really well, and the children did a great job scoring 84 points. Our choir was much younger than the other choirs that entered their category. That being said there was only 6 points between the winners and us.

I was very proud of the children and their efforts. I am also proud of me for swallowing my normally shy self, and jumping back into to something that I have loved for most of my life.  It was a good reminder of how much I enjoy the performing arts.

~ Christina

Gaps Intro day 8

I feel like today was the a day to start getting life back to normal, it was our first big adventure out as a family while on Gaps. We took the children to the library and the shops to spend their pocket money and birthday money. They have been waiting nearly two weeks due to the car being out of order. I started study again, I have put it off whole on the first part of intro because my mind just couldn't take in the information at the time, for those of you that don't know I'm studying to be a naturopathy, and nutrition is my current subject of study. Actually now I'm starting to thinking that maybe at the end of my study I might take on the training to be a GAPS Consultant as well, but that is a while a way so we will see when we get there. It has been the same with the children school work, up until now I didn't really have the brain space to teach them or even correct their work. However life is starting to fall back into normal. We took out some great books from the Library about Volcano's as Sophie has been talking about them the last couple of weeks, so I though why not jump into a unit study on them, so we have some interesting reads, and I got a build your own volcano kit, which you build, paint, and then erupt. So we will have some great fun with that and it's totally not food related. :0) I think one of the biggest challenges is when cooking not to just stick things in your mouth. At the moment I'm tending my cultures to keep them alive, I'm making yoghurt, Kefir, milk and water, and Kombucha, the children are eating them but we are waiting until we introduce them back into the diet, which we are not that far away from doing, I want to wait until after we get our probiotics and supplements. We have ordered them but they are probably still a week away. I know that we probably should have got them before we started the diet, but we had a window of opportunity were we couldn't really go to far from home, and could get strong on the diet before we HAD to face the world, so we took it. So I'm very excited about that order coming. Something that I have been thinking about recently is that just because you are limited to your food choices doesn't mean you can't be creative. I have also order a veggie twister

Which I think is really fun. It means that I can add noodles to our soups to make life more fun. I'm also thinking of trying to make a seafood soup, just to change this up and exposes us to lots of variety will still in the limitations. I feel like my creative juices in the kitchen are coming back. SO I'll keep you up dated on those as I give them a try. After watching Course 2 of the GAPS Diet on Youtube, we heard more abut magnesium and think that Ben in particular my have a deficiency in that area. So we have also ordered some Magnesium oil for us. So will let you know how that goes and how we are using it when it arrives. We also brought another juicer yesterday, we did have one but I gave it away when we brought our thermomix but as we soon will be introducing carrot juice every day we thought having one would be handy, this particular is not top of the range, but it does separate the pulp and the juice which means that it's easier to keep the pulp for a recipe, or to feed our worms. We have also got our Fermented Cod liver oil coming as well. We have been taking it for just over a month, before we started the diet, but stop everything we had start and will reintroduce it back in slowly when they arrive. One step at a time, so it seems that we will be here on stage two for a while now. Oh we received a package in the mail yesterday, I had totally forgotten that I had ordered them, it was actually a couple of months ago, they were a preorder item. In the package was 5 fun egg and pancake pans, they are all different shapes, like a heart shape, star shape, a pig, a frog, and a bear. SO this is another way I'm going to make food fun in our house. Yesterday when we were in the Library, I heard Ben sneeze. It wasn't until that point that I realised that I actually hadn't heard him sneeze for while, and neither had I. Before starting the diet we both would have sneezing fits almost daily were we would sneeze over and over again. Ben in particular had lots of mucus and sinus, itchy eyes, and the like. So there is another positive for doing this. However saying that today was his worst day feeling his stomach was bad, he was irraible, grumpy, snappy, and generally unpleasant to be around. We both have lost some weight. Not sure how much as we don't own some scales but we are thinking of buying some so that we can monitor that side of things as well. Ok enough chatter here is what we eat today. Mineral water - we are making a mix of water and colloidal minerals in a jug ( we purchase ours from www.changinghabits.com.au) and leave on the table overnight so that it is room temp in the morning. Chicken stock Lunch we had left over pork, diced and heated in some stock with peas and carrots. Dinner was boiled turkey legs, in chicken stock, served with peas, carrots, and Marrow, with chicken and onion gravy. Ok bye for now. Christina.