KindergartenChildren who know their letters may like to memorize and make simple consonant-vowel-consonant words, such as M-O-M, D-A-D, D-O-G, C-A-T, even if they can't yet tell you that T on its own says "tuh, tuh." The kind of store that sells cheap alphabet blocks and refrigerator letters may also have little word-and-picture jigsaw puzzles for ( Read more... )

Posted because somebody was curious. I created this file in Notepad, so the spacing turned into a big mess ( Read more... )

The Baby, Toddler, and Preschool Years
We think of reading as the fundamental educational skill, but it's not. Think of what you do as you read. You look at the page, decode what is written there, and turn the encoded sounds and numbers into words and images in your mind. So the fundamental educational skill is actually looking. That's what a small ( Read more... )

I've heard from or about a lot of people who think that homeschool has to take about six hours per day, five days per week, or else it isn't really school. Nonsense! Most of an in-facility schoolday is taken up by logistics. Count up the time it takes for a teacher to make sure that every student in a class of 20 or 30 has opened the book to the ( Read more... )

I am not going to try to distill an entire college course in teaching into a few articles. People have taught their children at home since there were people on this Earth, and somehow civilization has continued. However, some very useful terms were first articulated by people who made the study of education and child development their life's work ( Read more... )

If your budget is tight, it's wise to find as much homeschooling help as you can. Here's a list of resources to look for within feasible travel distance ( Read more... )

Educational philosophy is the framework on which we hang our daily lesson plans. It covers how children learn, what should be taught and when, and what education is for. If you attended public school, or most private schools for that matter, your teachers worked from the assumption that a child's mind was a receptacle to be filled with selected ( Read more... )

People start homeschooling for various reasons, sometimes with very high ideals. If you're homeschooling on a tight budget, however, you have to adjust your expectations. MNHK is not designed to:

Make every kid into a top-performing student. Instead, the end goal of this curriculum is to pass the GED test battery. It is nearly impossible to ( Read more... )

We all write what we know. I am a lower-middle-class American citizen, a lifelong resident of an isolated small town in the extreme north of the Pacific Northwest who married the boy next door, and a cradle Christian raised in one centuries-old mainstream denomination and currently teaching Sunday school in another. I live in a multicultural ( Read more... )

This will be the master post for a series about homeschooling with a bare-bones budget and a slow old computer with restrictive download limits. Watch this space.