Homeschooling for His Glory

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL So the new year has started. 2014 is here and life goes on. What do I wish for this year? Of course better things. What kind of better things? One thing I have come to realize is what a dear friend once told me: "The biggest room in the whole world is called Improvement." Indeed we always have so much to learn. I know I have failed in the past and I want to do better in all areas of life this year. The starting point though for everything is our dedication to love, know and serve our God. So for this year, yet again I need to start at the start. The issue though is how do I keep on doing what I need to be doing? I think the issue lie in a matter of values . What we value guide our action. No matter what we say, if we act a certain way it is because that is what is important to us and it shows and reveal what our values our. So, what should my values be?: My growth in love and knowledge of the Lord The nurture of my relationship with my husba...

At the risk of repeating myself, homeschooling is all about flexibility and innovation, taking advantage of any opportunity to learn and to grow in our understanding of life and everything around it. With that in mind the kitchen is great a place for learning life skills and practice other kind of theoretical knowledge. How does this work in our homeschool? Here are a few things I do with the kids: I try to have them help me, as much as they can and are willing, in cooking and baking. This is a great way for them to practice Math skills such as measuring and fractions to name a couple. I involve them at the store in computing amounts. This is good practice in arithmetic, rounding and estimating. Most of our science experiments are done in the kitchen. When the kids were younger, helping me bake was helping improving their reading skills as I would ask them to tell me what the next step on the recipe. The reason why the kitchen can be such a great place for learning i...

I am not the most creative person there is. As a homeschooling mom this fact has been my pet-peeve, as I often associated being a good homeschooling mom as being able to be innovative in the way I teach. To some degree, I still feel that way but I have come to terms to the kind of person I am and try to make the most of it. I like to think that homeschooling is not so much " doing school at home " (though that is what I tell the boys), but " home educating ". What is the difference you might ask? Well, when I think of school I think rigidity, mold and pattern. When I think homeschooling I think flexibility, innovation, out of the box. That is not to say that there are no constraints to homeschooling, because there surely are if you want your kids to be truly educated. They have to know how to read, write, count, do algebra, have a good vocabulary, know science, history, geography and if possible foreign languages, but all of this gets to be taught in a fam...

I find that when it comes to money, I have major issues and that is because I have always struggled with contentment. The Lord commands us to be happy in every circumstances, in want as in abundance. By His grace I have come a long way, but there is still a long road ahead . . . So much out there . . . Anyway . . .  Our financial situation is not that of being in abundance, and I will guess to venture that it is the case for many homeschoolers, as most of us live on a single income (and in my case a pastor's salary). So when it comes to supplies and books for our homeschooling needs, what am I to do? Well you have to tighten the belt just like in everything else. It is possible to homeschool for free. The internet abounds with resources and many homeschoolers do just that. I can't. It takes me way too much time to search for the stuff, plus the printing, and on top of that I find that when you homechool that way there is a lack of coherence, it tends to be bits and pie...

The TOS Crew has been sailing for about 2 months now and it is now time for the blog cruise to get on its way. What is the blog cruise, you may ask? It is a sort of blog carnival where members of the crew share about a specific topics and how it plays out in their homeschooling. Every two weeks there will be a new topic, so let's board! The first topic for this year is about homeschool related goals for the year. To be honest, I am not a big goal setting person. I think it is because I do not like to fail, so I shy away from specific goal setting. I do not usually have new year resolutions for example. That said, I do believe that setting goals is important. Someone well said : “aim at nothing and you will be sure to reach it every time.”, that says it all. So what do I do about this? This year I will use this blog post to set some goals for our homeschool year. Usually even if I do not set specific goal,s I do have an overarching goal of finishing up whatever curriculum I purchase...