Welcome to “Ask a NextGen Homeschooler.” It’s your turn to ask the writers at NextGen Homeschool — four formerly homeschooled moms who are now homeschooling our children — to weigh […]
Friday Flashback: A Slow Start to a New Year
This week I’m participating with a homeschool blog link-up called “The Homeschool Mother’s Journal” hosted by The Homeschool Chick. I love that this week The Homeschool Chick Sue’s post is […]
A Homeschooling Christmas: Final Week
It’s our final week in my “homeschooling Christmas” series! Although we had a full week left before Christmas, things quickly transitioned from busy preparation to vacation mode in our house. […]
A Homeschooling Christmas: Week Two
This week I’m participating with a homeschool blog link-up called “The Homeschool Mother’s Journal” hosted by The Homeschool Chick. I’m also continuing my series on “a homeschooling Christmas,” where I’ve […]
Ward Family Christmas Traditions: Week One
Three of our favorite family Christmas traditions happened this past weekend. Saturday afternoon we went to the local tree farm to pick out a tree and visit Santa. That evening […]
A Homeschooling Christmas: Week One
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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” […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
Why We Homeschool: Cristina Eklund
The reasons my husband and I decided to homeschool our two children are many. However, let me first start out with those things that were not our reasons to homeschool: […]
My, How Times Have Changed!
“When I was a kid, I had to walk five miles to school… uphill… in the snow!” We’ve all heard that one before — Grandpa’s way of saying, “Stop complaining! […]
What Role Can Dads Play in the Homeschool?
By Rosanna Ward Most of the time when you go to homeschool activities or see homeschoolers out and about during the day, children are with their mothers. Typically, dad is […]
High School Homeschool Record-Keeping
I am very blessed to live in “the best homeschooling state in the nation” (quote from OCHEC): Oklahoma is the only state with a constitutional provision guaranteeing the right to […]
The Title Hooked Me
By Rosanna Ward “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons,” the title beckoned me. Wait, what? Only 100 easy lessons? I can do that, or at least, I […]
A New Relationship With Learning: Charlotte Mason & Heart of Wisdom
After completing a fairly successful “warm-up to school” agenda the week of Sept. 12, my girls and I were ready to dive into our new curriculum from Heart of Wisdom […]
NextGen Homeschooler Reminisces
Tonight I am sitting here remembering the very first Homeschooling Convention I went to with my parents. It was in 1986 (or 85?) at the Mabee Center in Tulsa. I […]
Play is Child’s Work
By Rosanna Ward Elizabeth’s post about toys got me thinking about the things we use in our home to help teach our children. I realized that our children probably learn […]
Our First Week: Getting Back in the Swing
The Sunday before our first “scheduled” day of the new school year, our family spent about eight hours driving back home from Telluride, Colorado — pulling into our driveway as […]
Toys, Toys, Toys!
By Elizabeth Thomas During my first year of homeschooling, I realized that play has an important role in our children’s education. I also discovered that the kind of toys we […]
An Unexpected Path to Homeschooling
I’m not what I would call a typical homeschool mom — someone who got fed up with the public school system and made the choice to homeschool. Noooo, not me: […]
A Curious Campfire Conversation
Our summer vacation culminated in a family road trip across scenic Colorado. We wanted to enjoy the end of summer in the snow-free mountains, see some friends along the way, […]
How Often Do You Get to Pet a Rhino?
By Rosanna Ward Last Thursday evening was our first official school field trip for this year. The Tulsa Zoo was having its Member Appreciation Evening, so after Homeschool P.E., we […]