Last week in My Tango with Traditions, I shared my struggle with establishing and maintaining family Christmas traditions over the years since becoming a mom — and my resolve to change that this year. As a family, we decided which previous traditions were keepers, and what we wanted to do […]
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Christmas & My Tango With Traditions
I love the idea of traditions just as much as the next person, and the warm and fuzzy feelings that word evokes in my heart. However I’ll admit that try as I might to establish and keep traditions, I’ve really struggled over the years with consistency. Which is a problem […]
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Rethinking Our Holiday Session
In our homeschool, we have made it a tradition in the past that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, we stop our regular school schedule and lessons, and we focus on fun seasonal subjects. We take extra time to learn about the birth of Jesus and his gift of salvation. […]
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Friday Flashback: Thanking God For Another Day!
By Renée Gotcher This week I’m participating with a homeschool blog link-up called “The Homeschool Mother’s Journal” hosted by The Homeschool Chick. It’s been a pretty steady week of “ups” in the homeschooling department thanks to our recent school area “reorg” — which has been really refreshing — but it’s […]
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Schedules, Routines and Time Management
MUST. GET. BACK. ON. TRACK. Somehow my life has gotten totally off track this year. I realized long ago that as a stay at home, homeschooling mother married to a small business owner who works nights, that I needed to stay flexible. Whatever “schedule” I may have, it has to […]
5 min read
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The Role of Homeschool Support Groups
This weekend I attended my first board meeting for our local homeschool support group, Homeschoolers of Castle Rock. I recently accepted the board positions of Membership Coordinator and Web Admin (yes, I’m a perpetual volunteer), and with a few other board members besides myself transitioning on and off the board, […]
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Where’s the “Reboot” Button?
Lately (and more often than I’d like to admit), I have found myself in the midst of trying to gracefully navigate the twists and turns of a homeschool day gone awry, until I finally reach a breaking point where I am asking myself: “Where’s the reboot button?” Seriously. Can I […]
6 min read
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My Biggest Homeschool Blunder: Thinking I’d Be Ready
Being a homeschool graduate could have turned out one of two ways for me: I could have loved the experience and known from the start that I would want to pass on that same gift to my children, or I could have gone the other way and felt that there […]
7 min read
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Homeschool Traveling as Student & Teacher
When I was 16 and soon to be a homeschool graduate, my dad planned the ultimate homeschool traveling “field trip” for our family. He planned it for months and had every minute of the trip planned out, literally. When it was time, our family of five loaded up in a […]
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Standing Out in a Crowd
By Renée Gotcher Last week our homeschool group took an interesting field trip to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. It was interesting because although these days most museums, zoos, performance halls, and the like have no problem hosting homeschool groups as they would any other school group, our […]
4 min read
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Guided Free Time
By Rosanna Ward When I was homeschooled, I remember having a lot of free time. After our school work was done, Dad would pretty much leave us on our own. We didn’t have cable TV, the Internet, cell phones, or other forms of electronic entertainment to distract us, and I […]
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When You Don’t Have a Proverbs 31 Day
I do laundry, pay bills, wash dishes, return movies and library books (sometimes on time), shop for groceries with coupons I spend hours clipping, buy birthday cards and gifts, wash the car, take care of three cats and a dog, cook dinner, and, once in a while, I get the […]