Category Archives: Homeschooling

Blog Hop for Hip Homeschoolers

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Welcome, Hip Homeschoolers, I’m glad you’re here.

If you have never been to my blog before, let me give you the five-second tour. I mostly write about books and reading. Books capturing my imagination, books that make me think, books that move me to action. Books I love. I also blog about the books my children read and the titles that find their way into our days.

I occasionally offer my opinion as to books I believe are better left on the shelf, rather than in your child’s hands. Hey, I’m a homeschool mom. We are known for our strong opinions, right?

My homeschooling posts are more informative (Look at this cool website!) rather than the mommy blogger fare (This is what we did today in our homeschool!) only because now that they are getting older, I want to protect their privacy.

My children are 12, 10, 8 and 5 years. We’ve been unschooling since May 2009. I cannot imagine any other way to live. The simplicity of our days, the freedom to do as we want – I would never trade it for the world. Homeschooling is a wonderful gift that I’m happy to share with my children.

When I do mention my children, it’s always as Susan, Peter, Edmund and Lucy. If I had known my husband and I would have two girls and two boys, I may just have really given them those names. (If you recognize where those names come from, then you and I are going to get along just fine.)

We work and play in the beautiful Garden State. I love coffee, Twitter and dream of owning a kayak.

Thanks for visiting. Leave a comment so I can visit your blog too.

New learning resource : FindingEducation.com

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Friends, I have seen the future of our learning at home and I like it.

Now that my children are getting older, I want to use the Internet more to our advantage. I have my Delicious bookmarks account that I’ve been using to hold sites I find for my children, but that always felt awkward to me. I didn’t want the kids to have to wade through my personal bookmarks to find what they needed. I thought of using email, but they don’t have email accounts yet. (Does my 8 year old need gmail? I’m going to go with No.) I thought of writing down the website addresses on scraps of paper, but that seemed too cumbersome.

Thankfully, I found a website that solves the problem.

At findingeducation.com, you set up a “classroom” to give “assignments” to your students/children. You can tag assignments by grade and subject and make “due by” dates. If you blog with WordPress, you will feel comfortable right from the start with how the site works. (I’m not sure it’s run on WordPress, but it looks eerily similar.) I’m not too keen on the labels (classroom, subjects or due dates), but since that’s the language of the rest of the world, those of us with a nontraditional approach to homeschooling will just have to ignore that part.

This is my findingeducation.com classroom. So far, I have one lesson posted for my baking-crazy preteen.

I’ll be posting links of educational interest for my kids; feel free to poke around my site. Let me know if you make a classroom too. There are no comments, which I love. No way for spammers to come and stalk my kids. There is a built-in search engine that looks promising.

I’ll let you know how how my kids respond to this virtual way of helping them pursue their interests and our learning at home.

Does any one else think the future has arrived?

Isabel in Chains: learning with YA historical fiction

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Madam looked down without seeing me; she looked at my face, my kerchief, my shift neatly tucked into my skirt, looked at my shoes pinching my feet, looked at my hands that were stronger than hers. She did not look into my eyes, did not see the lion inside. She did not see the me of me, the Isabel.

O, joy! A new literary heroine to love.

I’ve fallen for the spunky slave girl in Laurie Halse Anderson’s YA historical fiction book, Chains. Isabel is a fighter, despite that fact that she is a slave in 1776 America. She has nothing, yet she fights with a fierce determination within her. Like the patriots fighting around her to be free from a British king, Isabel is waging her own private war. Her goal: freedom from slavery.

I was never much for history as a subject in public school – I hated the memorization of dates and dull text books – but now as a homeschooling mom, I’m filling in the gaps of my own learning. I have much to learn about slavery and Revolutionary America. I’m happy to have Isabel teach me.

I picked up Chains for my 12-year-old, my girl who gobbles up books with an eager hunger for more. Susan has yet to let the Story in history capture her imagination. I’m hoping Isabel, a true-to-life, spunky girl will help my daughter discover there is more to history than just past truth that happened to now dead people.

I’m hoping historical fiction, like Chains, will be the gateway for my daughter to love learning history.

In the meantime, I wait for the sequel, due in October. And I’ll be looking for more books by Laurie Halse Anderson.