Affordable Homeschooling

Tuesday's Blog Cruise topic is how do you afford to homeschool and how do you save money while homeschooling.  In once sense, we save money BY homeschooling because our second choice for schooling our children would be the local church school so we would have the tuition expense for that if we chose to STOP homeschooling. BUT . . . that aside, here are my thoughts on the topic.

We save money buy not buying expensive "boxed curriculum" and textbooks. The internet provides so many options, and we prefer to use more of a delight driven approach anyway (we choose topics that are of interest to one or more of the children).

If I find a free downloadable resources, I save it, whether I think we'll ever use it or not.  Homeschool Freebie of the Day has a freebie every weekday, I check it daily and I'm not sure I've ever NOT downloaded it.  Currclick offers a weekly freebie they also have special promotions a few times a year where they have lots of freebies, if you sign up for their mailing list, you'll know when they are. The Old Schoolhouse Store has a Free section, that I check every so often, there's also a link there to sign up for TOS's special offers list, which gives you 2 free ebooks a month. And again, being signed up for TOS's mailing list will notify you when they have other promotions that often include free, or greatly discounted products.

Over the last couple of years I have collected a huge amount of resources, if the children say they want to study xyz, I just search on my computer and often can find what we need.

Even though we school year-round, I make sure to buy any school supplies that I know we'll need, during the back-to-school sales, basics likes glue sticks, paper, crayons and markers are generally much less during the back-to-school sales.

Ask about homeschool discounts. In most cases I've found that it just means I sign up for their "teacher discount" program. But it can often save a small percentage off of purchases &/or they send you coupons. Craft supply stores (AC Moore, Michaels, etc) and bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Nobles are good places to check. Also, teacher supply stores.

Remember to save the pennies too. My kids could go through REAMS of paper with their craft projects and writing stories and such. Whenever any of us print things out one-sided and then don't need them, we put the paper in a bin, and that's the paper the kids can use as much as they want, whenever they want. They generally don't care about the printing on the back and it's paper that would have been recycled otherwise. Also, if I know they'll need extra practice on something, like handwriting, I'll slide the page into a plastic page protector and then have them write on the page protector with a dry erase marker, rather than having them go through several pages of paper.

We use our library whenever we can. And when we need books that aren't in the library, I try to order them used from half.com  Amazon sells used books too, but you have to pay full shipping on each used item. Half.com gives a discount on shipping if you order more than one item from the same seller. So I keep a list of all the books I'd LIKE to have, then when we need a specific book for something, I find the lowest price on half.com and then check that seller (which is typically a company that sells old library books and has lots of books available) for all the other books on my wish list, often I can find at least a few, at $1-$2 each, and then combine the shipping, for further savings.

Library and Educational Services is another site we love. It's a site that provides wholesale/discount prices for books and other media for schools, churches, etc. And homeschoolers can sign up for an account too.

Another way to save money is to buy memberships to zoos and museums.  Last fall we had an extra day in Columbus, OH on our way back from Indiana (visiting family), and we decided to take the kids to the science museum there. Even though we didn't figure we'd be back in Columbus within a year, the membership was reciprocal with other science museums all over the country, so we decided to buy a year's membership instead of just the one day passes (the year's membership was less than 2 days entrance for the 4 of us, Little Bit of course was free). So far this year, in addition to our day at the COSI museum in Columbus, we have spent 3 days at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, 3 days at the Children's Museum in Pittsburgh, 2 days at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, and an afternoon at the small museum in our own hometown. Needless to say, the purchase of that membership has been well worth the money.

Keep your ears open for other homeschool deals.  Colonial Williamsburg in VA holds a 2 week "homeschool days" every spring and fall, during those dates homeschoolers can go to Colonial Williamsburg for a FRACTION of the normal admission fee AND there are extra demonstrations and hands-on activities planned during that time as well.

All of these are things we've done to keep costs down. And even in these things, it can be adjusted based on budget. Obviously, if we couldn't afford the science museum membership, we wouldn't have HAD to go to science museums. Since we could, we made the money stretch as far as possible by getting the membership instead of a one day pass. Combine trips, all those days I mentioned at Philadelphia and Pittsburgh museums, were when my husband was working in one of those cities anyway, we just traveled with him, his company paid the hotel, so that saved that cost, and in addition to the fun of the museums, and getting time with Daddy in the evenings, we had an indoor pool for the children to play in.

When you do buy resources, try to get things used, and try to plan things that can be reused.  After A1 and A2 fell in love with the Little House books when we read them for bedtime stories, I decided to go ahead and buy a year-long unit study on the Little House books. I bought it and we used it last year, adjusting things as needed because they were younger than the recommended age, BUT they enjoyed it, and now we have everything and can re-use it in a few years when the big girls are old enough to do the more advanced activities and Little Bit will be old enough to enjoy the stories and easier activities by then. So we'll get 2 years (at least) out of that purchase. And who knows, Little Bit may choose to use it again when she's in the recommended age range (3rd to 6th grade). I'm also loaning it to a friend this year, so that's another year's use someone can get out of it.

Think of ways to make things yourself, or make do.  When I was at a teacher supply store last week, I saw teh CUTEST "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" set! It was a big palm tree with velcro letters to stick to the tree, I loved it! Little Bit already loves the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom book, BUT rather than spending the money on it, I filed the idea away and at some point will figure out and make something similar. perhaps just a felt tree with felt letters, but I'd love to have a 3-D tree like that one was, we shall see . . .similarly, there were some cute games for improving fine motor skills where you use plastic tongs to "feed" the monkey plastic bananas (or whatever), even my 7 yr olds thought it looked fun, but instead of buying a $20 game, I ordered some of the plastic tongs from a homeschool site, when they get here we can design our own games with dried beans or whatever. . .

I honestly believe that, if we needed to, we could homeschool for several years without any "cost" just by using the free resources I've collected, and other free options (there would be some "school supplies" needed, but those are needed for school children too). Remember, you don't need math manipulatives, you can teach your children to count using tomatoes as they help pick them from the garden, or gravel in the driveway or little toys you already have. My children are learning fractions by helping to cook. As they get older, I sometimes have them help me to do the calculations to double or halve a recipe to further learn fractions. They learn to read by reading "real" books that we have or get from the library. They practice their writing by copying Bible verses. . . nature is all around us and provides a lovely science curriculum free for the taking. If we don't

Weekly Wrap-Up

We've been busy around here this week.

We officially started our new school year. The girls are LOVING using felts for Bible. I wasn't sure, when they were younger I got several sets of felts related to nature or Bible stories and they were never interested, so I originally thought we might just use the book of stories that came with the church history felts and skip the felts, but when I asked them about it, they wanted to use the felts too, so for the last couple months I've been spending every spare moment cutting out and gluing together a million, trillion (ok maybe not quite, but it felt like it) felts. As I was doing it, in the back of my mind was the fact that they've never LIKED felts, and I was probably doing all this work for nothing, but, at least so far, they are LOVING it!!! And were very disappointed when we skipped school one day this week so they didn't get their daily felt-play LOL. I read the story & they move the felts around accordingly, they're LOVING it.

We're also continuing to work on cursive, handwriting, it can be challenging at times, but the girls are sticking with it.  Little Bit is so funny, since we do handwriting at the dining room table, she's discovered that she can climb onto a chair and then on up onto the table. The big girls use dry erase markers to learn the letters, so once Little Bit is on the table, she finds a marker, and a piece of paper and pretends she's writing on it. I had to giggle, someone at church this week commented that her "pencil grip" (she was using a magna-doodle) was really good for a toddler, guess all that handwriting practice is helping, hee hee.

With all our travel, AND the struggles the girls (and who are we kidding, me too) have with keeping their supplies organized and not losing things, I'm constantly on the lookout for ways to consolidate and streamline. This summer I got a Pro-click hole punch, so I decided to use it this year to make each of the girls a "workbook" that has the worksheets, paper, etc they need each day. That way, when we travel, they can just bring that one book with them and we'll have what we need for all subjects. So that was another project for this week, finally got A1's done on Friday, I'm hoping to write a post in the next few days, complete with pictures, showing off their books. While I was at it, I made a "lesson plan" book for me too.

Also this week we took a day and went to IKEA and a teacher-supply store that's near IKEA. The girls were disappointed to not get their daily felt-play, but it gave us a chance to listen to a CD of stories about early SDA church history, so that worked well. Little Bit is a challenge to shop with right now, she does NOT want to ride in the cart, and doesn't tolerate hand-holding for very long at a time. As long as we can keep moving, she does ok "helping" to push the cart, but the second we stop, she's off in 15 directions. The big girls were a huge help though, and didn't complain about holding her hand or chasing her, as needed.  Of course, a trip to IKEA is never complete without eating lunch there, and as a bonus, they're having a "kids eat free" promotion right now, so I only had to pay for my meal, and got meals for all 3 kids free, woo-hoo! 

As always, the teacher supply store had SO MANY tempting things, but in most cases, I just made note of the concepts and figured I could make something similar for less.

On Thursday we went to a small local museum that I've been wanting to go to since we moved here. It's literally down the street from hubby's office, and the science museum membership we have includes this museum, so it's silly that we haven't been.  It's a small museum, not alot for young kids, though there IS a small "please touch" area that includes costumes and such, so the kids had fun there. They were relatively interested in the rest of the museum, but it was abit over their heads, especially with Little Bit being restless so I couldn't take as much time to answer questions as well as I'd have liked. We do need to go back to the Planetarium sometime (currently it's only open on Sundays) and we'll keep an eye on the banner outside the museum to see what the "special exhibits" are when they change.

To add to the over-all busyness of this week, I had 2 book clubs, which usually are a week apart, but happened to fall on the same week this month.

While Little Bit and I were at one of them, Rodney took the big girls miniature golfing. Sounds like they had a blast, and did pretty well too.

And finally, we finished up our busy week, by hiking at Hawk Mountain on Sabbath afternoon. I'd figured we'd spend some time at the visitor center, then walk up the easy path to the first overlook, and call it good. BUT the big girls and Daddy had other ideas, they wanted to see if we'd see anything else from the other overlooks. So THEN I figured ok, we'll go on up the path and stop at the 3-4 overlooks that are along the path while it's still an easy path, then turn around when it changes from easy to "rough".  Nope, they wanted to keep going. Little Bit, had HER own ideas too, she walked the entire way on the easy path, and wanted to keep walking when we hit the rocky trail, but that wasn't safe, so I put her in the sling (with much protesting from her) and went about halfway to the North Overlook (their goal) before deciding that she was NOT going to settle down and be content in the sling and I had had enough of trying to safely navigate rocks, in crocs, with a fussing, fidgeting toddler in a sling (and, since I hadn't planned to HIKE it was a ring sling that I'd brought in case she wanted to nurse for a few minutes while we were walking, not a nice supportive wrap that would have been my choice for real hiking). So at that point, Little Bit & I turned around, but Rodney & the big girls kept going. Rodney said the path got even rockier and would have been hard to navigate with Lina in the sling, so sounds like I made the right decision. He and the girls said the views WERE amazing when they got to the North Lookout though.

Considering Homeschooling?

One of the fun things the TOS Homeschool Crew is doing this year is hosting a weekly Blog Carnival called the "Blog Cruise" with a variety of homeschool topics.  The first Blog Cruise will be posted on Aug. 17 and the topic is advice for those who are considering homeschool or just starting out.

So let's see . . . my advice is, first pray about it and discuss it with your spouse, and if, at that point, you feel it is God's will for your family, don't stress about it too much!

 If your children have been in school, there may be other considerations, like helping them re-discover a love of learning, and de-school and such, and I'm not going to even pretend to give advice on any of that because our children have never been to school. I'm sure there will be others on the Blog Cruise with great advice on those areas, but I'm going to speak with the assumption that your children are just approaching school age, and haven't been to school yet.

I see so many people worrying about "doing it right". When it all boils down to it, homeschooling is really just 24/7 parenting of your children, instead of sending them off to someone else to train for the better part of each day.

Young children love to learn. You would have to work at it to KEEP them from learning!! Do you worry and stress about teaching your infant to talk? No, they learn to talk by listening to you. And homeschooling is just continuing on, not sending them away to learn when they hit that magic age of 5 or 6 or whatever.

Ask your children what they'd like to learn about (my kids always have 101 ideas, but obviously not the attention span to learn it all at once), observe what they're interested in, and go with it.

I do have one more suggestion. Develop a "teacher mentality", when they ask questions, ANSWER them, or help them find the answers. My husband sometimes gets frustrated trying to watch shows from the History channel and TLC and such when the girls are around because they want to UNDERSTAND everything, but that's really a great thing, it's how they learn!

Planning for an Organized School Year

One of the challenges of homeschooling is organizing everything. I wrote some earlier this week about how we organize our house for homeschooling. And in a week or so I'm planning on doing a post about the specifics of how we're organizing papers this year, but today I wanted to tell you about an AMAZING product for organizing, not just your homeschool but your whole life!!! 

The 2010 Homeschool Planner is unlike anything else I've ever seen (except maybe the 2009 Homeschool Planner, hee hee). This is over 600 pages of information and printables for organizing not just your homeschool, but your home as well. 

Every year I search for the perfect calendar/lesson planner, and every one I find isn't QUITE right for our family. The 2010 Homeschool Planner is a .pdf file that you can purchase as a CD or instant download (that's right, you don't even have to wait for it to come, you can get it as SOON as your order it!!!). And then you can print out whichever pages work for your family, and as many copies of each page as you need. It's even set up so you can fill in your own information and SAVE it, so you don't have to hand write everything like you would if you bought a paper planner.

And what about planners for your children? You can make those too. So for one low price you get not ONE planner, but planners for the whole family!!

But wait! This isn't JUST a Lesson Planner, it's a HOUSEHOLD PLANNER too! A few years ago I wrote about my household notebook. My household notebook is in desperate need of a re-vamp, and all the amazing HOUSEHOLD forms in the 2010 Homeschool Planner are just perfect for the re-vamp, now to find the time to actually DO it! But wait, with all the lovely calendars and to do lists in the Homeschool Planner, I'm sure I'll be able to find more time in my days. If only I wasn't spending so much time reading all the recipes and homeschool articles and resource links and . . . 

Not only does the Homeschool Planner help you organize your home AND your homeschool, but for each month it provides ideas for unit studies and homeschool subjects as well. 

AND if you buy in the next couple of days (until August 15), you get an awesome free gift as well!!! I reviewed one of the Planner Modules here, and you get a whole year's worth of modules FREE!!! How great is THAT?!?!

Disclaimer: As a member of the TOS Crew, I wrote this blog post while participating in the The Old Schoolhouse advertising campaign, making me eligible for a prize. I received a free copy of the planner to facilitate the writing of this blog post. All opinions expressed are my own.

Our "School Room"

 

This week's topic on the Not Back-to-School Blog Hop is School Rooms.  And again, we don't fit nicely into a box.  We kind of use the whole house for school.  But here are some of our school spaces:

I wrote here, about our homeschool bookshelves on one end of the dining room. And for the most part, they are still like that.

One change I made was to put the pens, pencils, etc (that I had in jars) all into a crate that slides onto the shelf.  Little Bit was just tall enough to grab the edge of whatever jar, or pencil sharpener or whatever was closest to the edge and pull it down, so, while having them out was more convenient for the big girls and I, we needed to contain them in the crate for the sake of toddler-proofing (especially now that Little Bit has learned to take the caps off markers and pens.

Next to the bookcases we have our maps. My dad helped me find some little, but STRONG, magnetic things designed to hang on the wall in a garage or workshop to hold tools, we hung those at the top 2 corners of the map and then we can use magnets to hold whichever map we're currently using on the wall. The other maps (we have 2 different US maps, plus a world map) slide in beside the bookshelf, you can see the world map peaking out there.  We could also hang any other charts or whatever on those magnets.

Another dining room wall holds our white board. It's kind of messy at the moment, we have our "consequences" chart hanging there, the small blue framed white board in the middle has the day's Bible copywork verse. I bring that into the family room with us while we discuss Bible, then we hang it on the big board when the girls do their independent work (currently the Bible copywork, handwriting worksheet, and sometimes a Spanish worksheet). There's also a sheet with how to write all the cursive letters, some alphabet magnets, etc on the main white board.

We started our new fall curriculum this week. For Bible, we're learning about church history using felts .It's a full size set of felts, intended for church, so kind of big for home use, at least OUR home. Originally I'd thought we'd hang the backgrounds on the "map magnets" in the dining room, but the chair rail would get in the way (the backgrounds are taller than the maps). So I decided to just take the cushions off the couch and lay the background against the back of the couch. It's working well, the big girls can sit on either side of it to change the felts as we read through the story, and they are LOVING it.

And my final picture is of my crate. The recliner is my main "teaching" spot in the living room. It's also where I nurse Little Bit. It works well since my laptop can sit on the sofa arm (they're at right angles right next to each other). And I tend to put "stuff" in the corner between the recliner and the sofa. It's ideal because Little Bit can't get to it very well. And I can reach it when she's nursing or sleeping or as we're doing school . . . BUT it tends to get messy, so when I found these great crates (the same kind I used on the bookshelf in the dining room) at Walmart this year I put one in my "corner". It keeps everything contained, stands the books and papers up so I can reach them more easily than if they're laying on the floor, and they don't get wrinkled as easily, AND I'm hoping it will force me to keep things "pared down" to what I really need to be able to reach, by cleaning things out when the crate gets too full. While it's not ALL school stuff, this does hold our Spanish teachers guide, My Bible First "quarterly" (which is our Bible stories for church, we read them in teh evening), pens, sticky notes, etc.

So that's at least SOME of our "school room" spaces. The whole outdoors is another one. The dining room table is where the girls sit to write, the spare room upstairs holds our printer & photocopier, and the girls often use that room for doing crafts.

Weekly Wrap-Up

We "took the week off" from school this past week. We got home from our trip, had just finished our Polished Cornerstones study, it seemed like a good time to take a break before we jumped into the new fall curriculum plans. So, we had an exciting week of catching up on laundry and such instead, hee hee.

That said, it was a good week. The weather was, overall, pretty nice for August, so the big girls spent alot of time outside.

The extra laundry led to us going outside early in the day, and the big girls watched Little Bit, which is good for all 3 of them.  So that will be carried over into our new daily schedule.

The big girls used some of their extra time to write a "puppet show" and plan it all out, they performed it for me today. Very cute.

One of the evenings we went for a walk, we walked around the "circle" of road near our house twice, which is equivalent to about 1/2 mile, and Little Bit walked the WHOLE way!! It's all up & down hills too.

It seems like I'm forgetting some things we did, but oh well . . . it was a quiet week, I LIKE quiet weeks.

Not Back to School Blog Hop - Curriculum Week

This week is the first week of the Not Back to School Blog Hop over at Heart of the Matter. And this week’s theme is curriculum. Which is an interesting topic for us this year . . . Last year was a “planned” year. Between Polished Cornerstones and Prairie Primer, we had our daily “lessons” that had to be done, if not truly DAILY, at least regularly. And now this year, we’re going back to a more “unschooled” approach. Or at least “unplanned” LOL. Lots of factors . . . this is our last year that we don’t have to worry about reporting to the state (PA law requires that we start reporting when the girls are 8, so we will be “official” homeschoolers next July). We have quite abit of travel planned for this fall, including a week in Williamsburg, another trip out to western PA, and a trip to Disney, etc. Also, this is our first year on the TOS Crew I’m really not sure how that would fit in with a planned out year, since we don’t know in advance what we’ll be reviewing or when. So, by not planning out a cohesive year, we can be free to review whatever’s thrown our way when it comes along.

Also, these last 3 weeks of traveling and spending lots of time at museums, has reminded me that we haven’t explored the area closer to home very much. So, I’d also like to keep time open to visit museums and historic sites in our area.

So, the “curriculum plan”, such as it is, is as follows (and because it’s so many little things, it ends up being so much longer than a boxed curriculum, or even a couple different unit studies:

Bible – This is by far our #1 priority subject. If my children don’t learn anything else from me, as their mother & teacher, but grow up with a good relationship with God, I can live with that. A couple months ago A1 asked me if we could study the history of our church (Seventh-day Adventist). So that’s what we’ll be doing for Bible this year. I don’t have a curriculum as such for it. There’s a set of felts that used to be used in Sabbath School, and my parents had a set of them. Another SDA homeschooler mentioned that the book of “lesson helps” that comes with those felts tells the basic stories of church history, so we’ll be using that. I think Little Bit’s at an age where the felts will help to draw her into the stories abit too, even if she doesn’t really understand. We'll also be using the Pathways of the Pioneers CDs to tell the stories of our early church pioneers. I really have no idea how fast we’ll move through this or how long it will take, if it takes all year, great, if it only takes a couple months, that’s fine and then we’ll play things by

ear.

Spanish – This past year we had several “electives” that we spread out over the week and Spanish was one of those. We’re using The Easy Spanish curriculum(Junior level) and I think we’ll try to at least spend a few minutes EVERY day (or every day that we “do school” anyway) on Spanish this year.

Nature – The girls love nature, I love that they love nature! I was reminded, recently, while re-reading Raising Your Spirited Child that we need to schedule time outside every day, for so many reasons. So I’m hoping to make that a priority this year, WHAT specifics we study, I’ll let the girls decide, sometimes we may just go for a walk and see what we see, and that’s ok too. . .

Handwriting – This is one of our current TOS Crew review subject. The timing is great. A couple months ago A1 asked to learn “curlicubes” (she INSISTS on calling it that, not cursive), so I started just giving them a letter to practice every couple days. Interestingly, A1 has struggled with it, and I think if it were just her, she’d have decided to stop for awhile, but A2 has blossomed, I love seeing her enjoy writing more and I really think cursive is the key for her, for whatever reason, she’s struggled with printing, and is finding cursive much easier. And then, we were sent a cursive handwriting program to review, so that’s encouraged us to “kick it up a notch” so that we can give it an honest, and comprehensive review at the end of the month. So, handwriting will for sure be a daily topic for the month of August, after that, we shall see . . . it will depend on where we’re at at that point. I for sure want to keep focusing on it until we’ve worked through the whole alphabet, then we’ll see . . . I must admit, as long as they write legibly, I don’t see a whole lot of value in a specific “class” seems like we can practice handwriting while writing things that have other value.

Math – Just today I got notification that we’ll be reviewing Pyramath so once we receive the product, we’ll have math class for a month or so while we try it out, then we’ll probably go back to learning math through life, though people say this is as addictive as Suduko and we all love Suduko so we may be hooked LOL.

Cooking – A2 especially is interested in learning to cook better, so as much as possible (Little Bit’s getting to the point where this should be at least a tad easier) I’d like to expand on that and get both big girls cooking more and learning more about nutrition and kitchen skills in general.

Handwork – we’ll also continue to encourage their knitting, weaving, cross-stitching, and other handwork, if my mom has time later this winter we might move into some beginning sewing machine lessons as well, we shall see. . .

Be sure to hop over to Heart of the Matter to check out what others are using for curriculum this year.