This week was an exhausting rollercoaster ride for my family, complete with exhilarating highs, unexpected turns, and stomach-dropping lows. I debated whether I was still motivated to write today, but I think it’s important that we share the highs and lows of homeschooling in the face of all sorts of…
By Rosanna Ward My son Joel, age 7, enjoys taking old electronics apart, such as DVD players, cable boxes, and more. My best friend was here a few weeks ago, and she told me how much her son loved the Elenco Electronics Snap Kit they had bought for him for…
Welcome to “Ask a NextGen Homeschooler…” It’s your turn to ask the authors of NextGen Homeschool — four formerly homeschooled moms who are now homeschooling our children — to weigh in on your homeschooling questions. From the practical to the personal, all questions are welcome — whether you’re a current…
This has been a very busy week for us, but great educational steps took place in spite of my crazy schedule. With my husband traveling and my best friend visiting from out of state, I was a pretty distracted teacher/mother. In our homeschool this week… Despite all of this, Joel…
I have to admit I am pretty late to the Pinterest bandwagon, but I have finally figured out how to make it work for me instead of becoming just another social media time vacuum. I love spontaneous projects. They are an easy way to inject some energy into a routine…
This week was the absolute best first week back to school after an extended vacation. The fact that I spent most of Monday at the local day spa utilizing my husband’s 40th birthday present to me probably had a lot to do with it, but there were other reasons too…
Long gone are the days when having one computer in the house was a boon for a homeschooling family like the one I grew up in. Back in the late 80s, our family computer was a top-of-the-line HP with a green screen running DOS, but at least it had a…
Like most homeschooling mamas at this time of year, I have been busy preparing for the new year: From lesson planning and making necessary tweaks and changes to our school schedule and curriculum to plotting our family’s goals and activities. As I look ahead to the second half of our…
This week, it hardly seemed appropriate to begin sharing our stories of NextGen Homeschool family Christmas traditions and how we homeschool during the Christmas season. Our hearts are heavy and grieved, and like most other moms, we’re grappling with the unthinkable news that we all started our days with this…
By Rosanna Ward I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday. This year for Thanksgiving, the Gotcher family gathered in force at my home in Oklahoma. Mom and Dad Gotcher finished their eastern speaking tour here, and Kenny, Renée, and their girls drove in from Colorado. We had a…
By Renée Gotcher This week NextGen Homeschool is joining forces with Creation Conversations and Kathy Balman @Kathy’s Cluttered Mind to bring you Wildlife Wednesday — posts about nature with a giveaway and a link up for your nature posts. My family is an outdoor-loving family, and one of the reasons we feel truly…
After our recent close encounters with mule deer in our neighborhood, the girls wrote the following poems to express what they learned about deer in our factual research, Biblical study and personal experiences with these beautiful creatures. The details of our experience and nature writing assignment can be found in…