This meeting is geared toward all those thinking about homeschooling, just starting to homeschool with 5- or 6-year-olds, those pulling kids from a public or private school setting, or those opting to homeschool as an alternative to COVID online learning.  Come armed with questions, concerns, fears, doubts, and leave with a vision, confidence, and tools to help formulate your plans.

*what to teach when/subject guide by grade/defining grade levels
*curriculum/resources/co-ops
*state requirements
*%, letter grades, standardized testing, assessments
*supplies/projects
*daily living
*involving husbands or other family members/facing opposition from family and friends
*arts
*socialization

Homeschool 101: The Homeschool Basics

• Guidelines by Grade Document

We will talk about ways to make good use of the space you have, optimize the materials you have, and being creative about how to make home, school, housekeeping, marriage, and work all meld together without losing your sanity.

Homeschool 101: Creating Work Space and Decluttering/Homemaking

• Decluttering Work Space Notes

This evening will focus on how to fit the subjects you plan to teach into daily/weekly/yearly chunks, how to combine subjects, different ways to organize your school hours, ways to accommodate different ages/needs, and how to set reasonable goals.

Homeschool 101: Scheduling

We all need to jolt ourselves back into getting and keeping our priorities straight.  Come to discuss ways to reboot the entire family with Christ at the center, kick the bad habits and discordant living in the rear, compare punishment with consequences, and set up a system to encourage Godly living.

Homeschool 101: Keeping Christ at the Center

Most families have children in multiple stages of growth and development, so this evening will outline strategies for keeping little ones occupied while offering important one-on-one time with older kids, how to use family dynamics to everyone’s advantage, and thinking outside the box to take much of the stress and contention out of the homeschooling equation.

Homeschool 101: Teaching Multiple Ages

Motherhood is exhausting and certainly under-appreciated with very few opportunities for regular support and encouragement—never mind adding homeschooling into the picture!  There are ways to focus on God’s blessings and to train ourselves, and therefore our children and our families, to keep a positive outlook on school, chores, and life’s ups and downs.

Homeschool 101: Keeping Our Parenting/Teaching Positive 

Many homeschool moms wonder about how to keep themselves accountable to God, to the plans, to their long-term goals for their children, and we will discuss strategies for doing so.  Also, it is easy to be sidetracked from what is important by getting sucked into inane internet traps and unimportant daily interruptions.  However, developing a routine to better ourselves through reading and focusing on healthy communication aid us in holding on to the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Homeschool 101: Accountability 

This session addresses the overwhelming issue of kids who don’t fit into the prescribed version of what school is or should be.  Every child is created in the likeness and image of God and can learn!  Come find out about how to get to know your own child better and to shift your thinking from “she can’t” or “I can’t” to “she can” and “I can.”

Homeschool 101: Special Needs (and labels and how to avoid them/different learning styles)

This is the perfect time of year to discuss resting and renewal; Christmas is around the corner, and you’ve survived the first semester.  So take time to enjoy the month before next semester begins by embracing the peace of Christ.  Some reading ‘assignments’ will be given, along with encouragement, so we can head into the new year with courage and confidence born of a well-rested soul. 

Homeschool 101: Rest and Renewal

Coronavirus has changed the world—for good and ill.  It is time to discuss how to forge our way as homeschoolers in a world in which education itself has been in upheaval and the world has been forced to look at non-traditional options for education.  Remote learning is not an equivalent to homeschooling, so we all need to prepare ourselves to encourage those who have not chosen homeschooling, but find themselves with kids at home doing school, while not losing our own focus in our individual home schools.

Homeschool 101: Post-COVID

Most of us like to think paganism a thing of the past, but like it or not, most of the  is sinking into indifference or unbelief and/or, worse, falling into rampant paganism and calling it ‘freedom.’  It is more important now than ever to identify modern paganism and arm our children with the proper tools for combat.

Homeschool 101: Battling Modern Paganism

Enough said.  It is February and we are all stir crazy.  Let’s figure out how to keep our children, and our boys especially, healthfully and heartily occupied while we are cooped up for long stretches—and how to count this activity as school.

Homeschool 101: PE/Boys in Winter

It’s that time of year when a character/attitude reboot is in order.  Close living brings out all our habits—good, bad, and ugly—so let’s discuss ways to train our children to be Godly disciples filled with obedience, respect, and diligence.

Homeschool 101: Attitudes, Keeping Kids Interested, & Sibling Rivalry

We are mostly through with our year and more likely than not things have strayed from our original plans and too many things have been added to our schedules. We need to rethink our priorities and discern when to say ‘yes’ and when to say ‘no’ to things asked of us.

Homeschool 101: Finding Balance

This meeting is for those of you who have 6th, 7th, or 8th graders and are looking with some trepidation toward those high school years: can you do it?  should you do it?  what is best for the kids?  what do the kids want?  how do you meet requirements?  what about languages or upper level math and science?  How to discuss and find solutions to these questions as well as helpful tips on planning the high school curriculum and creating college-approved transcript will feature at this meeting.

Homeschool 101: Discerning for High School/Transcripts

Service is my knee-jerk reaction to any difficulty in life because it forces oneself and/or one’s children out of the Self and into the Selfless.  There is no such thing as talking too much about different ways to serve others, especially as we look ahead to the summer months and begin planning for next academic year.

Homeschool 101: Service

The world and the media expect us to transition from one thing to something completely different within nanoseconds, but our natures require time to deal with transitions in a healthy way.  Every year brings transitions of growth, new abilities, kids growing up or moving on, job changes, you name it.  We need to find ways to cope with transitions because they will never stop.

Homeschool 101: Transitions

Keeping up on our marriages often gets lost in the to-do of raising children and homeschooling.  We need to remember that we are modeling Christ’s love in the love we show for our spouses; our domestic churches are our children’s first taste of what is to come.  We will talk about how to prioritize cultivating our marriages without dipping into the saccharine or the unrealistic.

Homeschool 101: Marriage

God created us male and female, but according to our secular world, gender is yet another “choice” available to humanity. Never did we suspect that we’d have to teach our children about Godly roles for men and women, nor did we ever suspect it would be so difficult to find public role models of Christian men and women. It is time to face this issue head on and arm our children with confidence in who God created them to be while teaching them to love all our brothers and sisters in Christ. 

Homeschool 101: Godly Roles for Males and Females

Homeschool 101: Habits of Faith

This sessions discusses many facets of discipline, including self-discipline and disciplining children. We distinguish between discipline and rules, between punishment, consequences, and making reparation, and list do’s and don’ts for parents.

Homeschool 101: Discipline

In order to define progress, we must know where a student begins and have specific goals we want the student to reach. Using a variety of ways to assess students’ whole-person growth will help us make the most of our assessments, tests, and activities throughout our homeschool experience.

Homeschool 101: Defining progress/Testing versus Assessment/What to Count

This segment offers advice about how to prepare ourselves within our marriages and as individuals in order to best use the talents of both spouse in home schools. Attention is given to finding support before it is needed, and many specific ideas of how best to include both spouses are discussed.

Homeschool 101: Including Our Spouses

In our outcome-driven, success-oriented society, we must step back and look at how failure, and letting our kids flounder a bit, builds adaptive skills that allow kids to take responsibilty, to be more creative and imaginative, and teaches them how to take initiative. This video gives personal examples, gives ten good reasons why we need to let our kids fail, and then closes with several pointers on how we can watch our kids fail without breaking them.

Homeschool 101: Letting Kids Fail

We all have attitude problems, but teens and pre-teens struggle to a greater degree due to all the changes happening to them. Identifying root causes of attitude problems, giving advice on how to counteract or head attitude problems off at the pass, and reminding parents to encourage kids through corrections are all discussed in this session.

Homeschool 101: Attitudes Problems

With an introduction to all viewers, parents especially, about friendships and how to teach children to be, make, and keep good friends, this video goes on to discuss specific issues as kids age within three separate age groups: under 8 years old, 9 to 13 years old, and 14 through 18 years old. A short bit of advice on how to assess friendships ends this session.

Homeschool 101: Fostering Friendships

This HS101 session addresses how parents can sift through ugly attitudes, especially as reflected during school time, and presents systems or a process for evaluating the root causes of these less-than-virtuous attitudes. From preK through 3rd, 4th through 8th, and high school are the three general age groups for which specific advice is offered.

Homeschool 101: Attitude Toward School Work

It is too easy for parents, especially homeschooling parents, to wallow in self doubt and second guess our choices, our materials, our progress. We quickly lose perspective about what is important. This session gives a run down of justifiable reasons we spiral into second guessing, then offers tips to regain confidence. The second half talks about the top ten ways we tend to lose perspective and applies them to homeschooling issues, also offering tips on how to put things into a healthy perspective.

Homeschool 101: Perspective/Second Guessing

This session introduces the seven types of homeschooling, giving positive and negative aspects about each, books for further research, and some mainline publishers and online resources for each. For those of you who are overwhelmed by the process of picking a curriculum for your family, this is a good place to start. For those of you who already have your favorites, you might find some new ideas.

Homeschool 101: Curriculum Overview

As our children grow into independent and even interdependent adults, we need to adjust, remain compassionate and patient, and learn to listen and love in whole new ways. This video discusses 12 steps that help move parents toward the next phase of parenting.

Homeschool 101: Parenting Adult Children