Tips & Tricks: Learning Space

How do you set up a homeschool space? What does yours look like? Everyone's learning space is going to look a bit different and it may also change as your children get older. You definitely will change the space when your kids are no longer in the preschool to like kinder ages. Some people have enough space to that they can have a dedicated school area but other do not and that is just fine. You do not need a lot of space to get school done. We complete our school day all over the house, in bed, in the living room or dining room. We have gone to the beach and finished school there. One day I hope we are able to turn the garage into a room and then I will have a nice little area just for homeschool. When we did preschool and pre-k I did have a little table set up in the dining room for school but as we got into higher grade I transferred to doing school at a larger table. You do not even need a table to do school a lot of the time our daughter chooses to do school on the floor. And yes I do understand how weird that is but as long as she is doing her school work I honestly do not care where we do school. I do have education posters up on the walls in the dining room since that is where we starting doing school in the beginning and All About Reading came with some really cute posters. I also hang up their artwork all around the house. For storing all of our homeschool stuff I do keep it in the dining room. If we ever get a dedicated learning space then I will definitely take pictures to show how I set it all up. Let us know how you have your school space set up.

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Review: Geoboards

A fun way to help kids get great hand-eye coordination isn’t with Geoboards . I love that with these there are 4 boards included so you can use it with multiple students. The rubber bands are different colors and 2 different sizes. The pictures are fun, colorful and you get a bunch of them. My daughter really likes these. For some reason she thinks it’s so funny when the bands pop her. At first I just let her place the bands anywhere to get the idea of how to put them on. Then we started places them just on the white lines in the picture. She always wants to do more than one so I let her do as many pictures as she wants. I do wish there was a blanket picture so she could design her own things.

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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