This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2.
About every 45 days or so I go into a nice little panic that I am homeschooling wrong and am totally screwing over my kids. I know this is irrational, and that there isn’t a single “right” way to homeschool, but none of that logic matters in the moment. Read more
This is a guest post from Erin Wetzel. She is a artist who lives in Tacoma WA and homeschools her daughter. You can connect with her on instagram @ekwetzel.
Matt was laid off in January. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how it was affecting us. And then to our surprise, Matt accepted a new job, a better job than his old one.
What a relief. Read more
Here’s a good rule: Don’t expose your kids to stuff that’s good for them and don’t actively look for their passions. Instead, just listen and make good suggestions. The real purpose of education is for kids to learn to find their own passion – not for you to find it for them. Read more
A school in New South Wales is giving parents the option to excuse their primary school kids from homework. Decades of research that shows homework before sixth grade makes no difference in how well kids do in life. The school in New South Wales points to a recent OECD report showing that kids in private schools do two hours’ more homework each week than their public school peers but their results were are no better once socio-economic advantage was taken into consideration. Read more
This is a guest post from Greg Toppo, author of the book The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. He is USA Today’s national education reporter.
More than 15 years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General concluded that intensive media coverage of suicides may serve to “tip the balance” for at-risk young people who are considering suicide. Research suggests that consuming this type of media makes vulnerable people feel that suicide is “a reasonable, acceptable, and in some instances even heroic, decision.” Read more
This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2.
Socialization. Most people think this means to opportunity to play with children outside the home. I do agree with playing with other children, but I do not think that is the definition for a homeschooler.
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Recently someone sent me this question:
From your research, what makes ENFP mothers happy? What do happy ENFP mothers do? Do they have a part-time job and a messy house? How do they reconcile the need for outside stimulation to fuel their intuition with the need to attend to boring but necessary daily chores? Read more
A school in Manhattan just announced they would stop giving homework to kids in kindergarten through fifth grade. The letter home to parents said kids should play instead. And added, “In fact, you may be surprised to learn that there have been a variety of studies conducted on the effects of homework in the elementary grades and not one of them could provide any evidence that directly links traditional homework practices with current, or even future, academic success.” Read more
This is a guest post from Sarah Faulkner. She is a homeschooling mom in Washington state. She has five kids, ages 13, 11, 9, 5, and 2.
I am still feeling rung out from my decision to put my kids into Homelink. It has been such a long week, I feel like a piece of paper that has been wadded up and thrown in a garbage bin. So, I thought I would pick myself up and go visit a friend.
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The question is, of course, what makes a good role model? Or, better yet, what do we want to model?
And I think the answer is self-confidence. Whatever role you have in the world, if you do it with self-confidence, then you model for your daughter what one version of a self-confident woman looks like. And while you can’t expect your daughter to grow up to be like who, at least your daughter can have a reference point in her mind about what self-confidence looks like.
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