Lessons During the Busy Times of Life

To those of you that are new to homeschooling, you may ask, “How do you homeschool on days when you are busy with other chores?” The answer is two fold. One, the reason we homeschool year round is to make up for days that we are unable to. Two, we look at the day using a broader interpretation of homeschooling to see what we learned.

When my children tell people that we homeschool year round, they often get looks of pity while I get glares. I usually quickly interject that I am no slave driver. By schooling a little everyday, we avoid having marathon sessions. Also, if something comes up and we miss our base lessons then I know that we can make it up on another day or relax and know that we do enough on the other days that I don’t have to worry.

Furthermore, as I believe that living is the best teacher, sometimes instead of planning lessons for the future, we look bak at what we did learn while living. With the vision of hindsight, you can often see that you learned far more than you could have with regular lessons. Accept the gift and record your achievement.

Any veteran homeschooler will tell you that home schooling is a misrepresentation of who most of us are doing. Schooling / learning happens everywhere and every day often without any planning or preparation.

Can you name the capitols of all the states? Can you name the states in order that your family drove through on their trip to Florida? Do you know the formula for calculating area of an irregular shape? Do you remember how you and your father figured out how much tile to buy for the bathroom floor?

Internet Resources

I want to let you know about a website, Homeschool Helper, that I found that has some great homeschool rescources. It seems that they are building the site and some of you may have resources that they could add to it. They have unit studies, worksheets, and record keeping forms.

Of course it does not have as many entiries as Enchanted Learning, but on the otherhand, it is free. When the kids were younger though, the $20 that Enchanted Learning charged was well worth all that I received from the site. It actually probably saved me money in fact, because I did not buy whole books for things that I only needed one or two pages of. Better than that, Enchanted Learning offered me meat in my hands when I was hungry i.e. when a question or thought came to mind, I had information and activities in my hand within minutes. I did not have to wait for the next time we went to the library or the store.

I often wonder how I would have survived before the internet.