Tips & Tricks: Homeschooling With A Little

I see a lot of post asking about how to do school when you have a younger kiddo running around. Our second will be 2 next month but she has been doing "school" since she was around 15 months. If you have a newborn and want to get school done with your newest addition for us it was pretty easy, she stayed in the bouncer or did tummy time while the oldest did school. As she started walking around it got a bit harder. She did not walk until she was a little older than 1 year so I had quite awhile to do school peacefully. Once she started being able to walk around and of course wanting to do everything big sis does it got harder. At first I just gave her toys to play with but toys that would keep her interest for a long time.

Some Items I Use:

Even now I use these items when we are first starting school. It is almost like school of her own because all of the items I give her during school are educational in nature. Once she gets tired of these I switch gears a bit and give her some paper and a crayon. She can color all she likes I have her use both sides of the paper and give her more if need be. This is super effective as it keeps her busy for the remainder of school. Our oldest can complete school in 1-3 hours depending on the games we play and experiments that we do. The items she plays with take a good portion of school. I do not give them to her all at once but rather a new toy when she gets bored of one. Then coloring last. She loves when she gets to color and she fully thinks she is doing school as a result. Another thing you can do is to do school where the little can not get to. If you have a separate area to do school that may work better for you or at a table that the younger kiddoes can not reach to grab things.

At some point we will have a dedicated area for homeschool and will use that but I am pretty sure that both girls will be doing school by then. I will have a space for each of them so they do not take each others stuff since they will be in different grades learning different things. How do you do school with smaller kids around? If you have anything special you do please let us know in the comments below. If you have any questions or do not understand something let me know. I would be happy to explain.

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Tips & Tricks: Making a Review

I recently posted on social media the reviews that my daughter did. They were for the 1st 6 weeks of our 2nd grade year. I got asked a lot about them. How did I make them? How did your daughter remember all of this? I also got comments that it is too much, public school does not do that, your history is too involved, etc. So let's start off with how I make a review. For math it is very easy I make a list of everything she learned. On the last week of that 6 or 12 week any math she does that is on that list counts towards the review. Anything on the list that is not done during the week I give her a few problems on each. Because I want to make sure that she has understood the concepts I make the problems hard. If they are too easy there is no way for me to know if she really understands or if she can just do easy problems. For history I make questions based off what I have read from the textbook. I pull out the key information. We also do social studies and geography. I make questi

Tips & Tricks: Grading

When grading first thing you need to do is check your state laws on homeschool. Some states require you to keep record of your curriculum and and grading while some don’t. I do not have to keep any records or grading. Since I use Timberdoodle they have an awesome online scheduler that I use. It has all the curriculum that we use and in the check boxes I put the grades. At the end of each year I keep the scheduler pages so I have records. Below is how I grade things. I also do not show our daughter the grades or tell her them. I don’t want her to worry about getting a bad grade. When she’s in middle school and high school grades that’s when I’ll start letting her know about grade. My grading system: Pre-K - 2 Grade: she will not see the grade E: excellent; no extra work needed; 100-90% S: satisfactory; give a little extra work; 89-80% N: needs improvement; give a lot of extra work; 79-0% 3 - 5 Grade: she will only see letter grade if she wants to know her grade A: 100-90%

Tips & Tricks: Class Schedule

How do you make a class schedule? When do you do which subjects? How long do you do a class? Does each day look the same? It is easy to make a homeschool schedule since you can school however you like. Since we use Timberdoodle we have access to their online schedule which over the years has been updated to be an outstanding way to schedule our subjects. If you do not use Timberdoodle I would suggest using Excel. If you know a website that allows you to create a schedule (for free) then let me know in the comments. The first thing I do make our schedule is make a list of all of our items and mark which ones I think will be challenging and which will be easy. Core subjects would be harder than things like STEM and thinking skills. Then I use that list to make another list on what day we will do each item. Making sure that not one day will be to hard or to easy. I like it to be pretty even as well as each day having about the same number of items. Some subjects we do everyday those are E

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