Sadly, there is one aspect of homeschooling often overlooked by parents—spiritual self-care. We are overachievers when it comes to making and checking off homeschool planning checklists:
Continue reading
“You can do it all!” That’s the mantra we hear from all directions. It’s intended as an expression of encouragement, but it's not true. We can’t do it all.
There are only so many hours in a day, and we all have limits to our physical and mental capacity. As homeschooling parents, it’s all too common to take on the task of educating our kids without adjusting the rest of our responsibilities accordingly. When paid employment, volunteer work, ongoing medical appointments, or other outside commitments are also part of the picture, burnout is likely.
If we try to do it all, we’re guaranteed to fail. We’ll either do all the things poorly, or some things will be totally neglected. Either way, we’ll be discouraged and stressed out.
When we’re confident that homeschooling is the right choice for our family and that we’re the adult primarily responsible for teaching, it’s essential that we delegate some tasks to other people.
Household tasks are often the easiest ones to hand off to someone else. I think kids are the best workers to give those jobs to.
That being said, spouses, hired help, and other services can also help to lighten our load.
With the time we save by not being in charge of those jobs, we can grade math, give a spelling test, or curl up on the couch to read a great Read-Aloud to our kids.
Even if the responsibility of homeschooling falls primarily on our shoulders, we don’t have to do every single part of it ourselves. Sometimes the best option is to let someone else handle academics while we take care of other things.
While a portion of homeschooling is handled by someone else, we can knock out some of the tasks on our family’s to do list or relax for a while. Self-care and hobbies are a valid use of any time you gain by delegation!
We can certainly educate our kids and manage our homes at the same time, but it’s crucial that we know our own limits. Sometimes we’ll have to lower our standards in one area of life in order to succeed in another area. Other times we’ll have to drop something completely. Often, however, we’ll discover that sharing the workload allows everything to be accomplished in a satisfactory way. We simply need to have realistic expectations, then act, and delegate, accordingly.
Investing in a well-planned curriculum is one of the best ways to delegate your homeschool tasks. Let Sonlight do the planning for you. LEARN MORE HERE.
STEAM is all the rage in education circles, and it’s easy to see why. Making science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) meaningful opens doors to a deeper understanding of key topics and even career options that might otherwise fly under the radar for students from all walks of life. Like classrooms all over the nation, homeschools are now exploring robotics, digging in to coding languages, and learning problem-solving skills by planning long-range building projects.
But one of the main strengths of Sonlight is its strong focus on high quality, engaging literature! How can you bring STEAM to life in your family through books? Do you need to ditch all the hours your family will spend exploring culture and history through Sonlight read-alouds in order to latch on to this new focus on the sciences? Do you need a supplemental curriculum, or something else altogether? And what if your child has a natural STEAM bent? Can Sonlight possibly work for your family?
Making connections between literature and STEAM topics is easier than you think. It requires no special skill on behalf of the teaching parent (promise!) and no additional curriculum resources.The bulk of what you need is at your disposal the minute you open your Sonlight box!
Have you taken a deep dive into your Sonlight Instructor’s Guide? You already have a STEAM guide at your fingertips! There, mingled in with notes on vocabulary, plot points, and historical context, are science rabbit trails waiting to happen.
Sonlight has done the bulk of the hard work for you in illuminating animals that may be unfamiliar, pointing out new technology for the time, mentioning innovators, and more. Utilizing those notes and simply highlighting them as you read and discuss with your children is the simplest, most streamlined way to begin integrating those hard sciences and creative problem solving skills into your homeschool.
If you want more out of your homeschool’s STEAM focus, it’s easy to turn any Sonlight Read-Aloud into a treasure trove. You can create your own unit study of sorts by simply pulling a notebook alongside as you read and jotting points as you go. Mark your sheet with the acronym, and note topics to explore more deeply later.
Don’t believe it’s this easy? Consider this quick list from the unlikely STEAM candidate The Land I Lost, the story of a boy growing up in Vietnam in the mid 1960s, included in Sonlight’s HBL F:
…and that’s just a quick list of options from a book set six decades ago in a rural, agrarian society!
Once you have an idea you’d like to follow up on, enlist your kids to help you explore that rabbit trail! Library books, internet resources, and hands-on projects will all reinforce your learning and put skin on those STEAM connections.
You don’t have to abandon your love of literature-based learning to pursue a STEAM-enhanced education for your children. Simply embrace the great tools already at your disposal, and read with an eye towards the full feast on display. Finding—and following— the opportunities for learning about the sciences as they’re presented in story form is perhaps the greatest method of making those coveted STEAM connections of all!
A few years ago I found a homeschool planning method that has completely changed my life! I switched from weekly homeschool planning to planning for the entire year, and I will tell you...I will never go back!
Continue readingSonlight Curriculum encourages students of all ages to store goodness, truth, and beauty in their hearts and minds. In every level, students memorize Scripture. As the students progress, they memorize poetry, songs, and great speeches. These treasures will shape your child’s character and world view; they’ll be a comfort and help throughout life’s ups and downs.
Continue reading
"When my three-and-a-half year old asked to learn to read, I panicked. I had no idea where to start. I talked to one of Sonlight's Advisors, and she got us all set with Kindergarten Language Arts. The Instructor's Guide is so helpful, and I now feel confident about teaching my daughter."
—Jordan B. of Mound, MN
When asked which subject new homeschoolers are most anxious about teaching their children, reading usually tops the list. Most other academic subjects require a child to read, making it feel essential to teach this skill early. When children reach plateaus in their learning, parents may panic, wondering what they are doing wrong or how they can help speed up the process. But teaching reading early doesn’t mean you will have better readers.
Parents often compare their children to other young children. They see other children reading and are quick to assume that a child who isn’t reading at the same age has a problem.
But reading is a process created by brain connections not intelligence. Not all children make the same brain connections in the same time or in the same manner. Some children devote a lot of brain power to learning how to read very young and do well.
Other children devote that same brain power to skills they find more important, such as learning to climb, kick, sing, or do math. When their brain is ready to focus on reading, they will make the necessary brain connections.
Reading is a series of developmental skills, not one large skill. It's a lot like walking. A child doesn’t just start walking. There are many milestones before that child ever takes the first step:
Parents can help children build those muscles, but they can’t rush the developmental processes that need to take place in the brain for each step. Some children learn how to walk early and others later. But after children have been walking for a year or two, the exact age begins to matter less and less.
Reading is another developmental process including many increments. Trying to rush reading doesn’t make your child read better, any more than trying to make your child walk sooner helps them be a better athlete.
Often an attempt to teach reading early backfires, convincing your child that reading is too hard. Wait for your child to be ready for the next stage before pushing on. The less rewarding and enjoyable that reading seems, the less they will want to read.
A variety of studies show students who begin school (and consequently reading) before they are ready have higher levels of dyslexia, speech impediments, low self-esteem, higher anxiety, less motivation to succeed, and higher levels of frustration with or dislike of certain school subjects.
Wait and watch for your child to show developmental signs of readiness before beginning reading instruction. Some signs of being ready to read include:
These signs are not a guarantee that a child is ready. Some children love books from birth and enjoy being read to, but aren’t ready to read for years to come.
Despite public schools pushing preschool reading skills, teaching a child to read at that age isn’t endorsed by most child development experts and researchers.
Some children do teach themselves young. You’ll find there are children who read everything and seem to do very well with little instruction. But, if your child isn’t one of those, don’t worry. Your child is normal, too!
The best football players aren’t the ones who hold a football in the delivery room or throw a ball before age one. The best athletes are the ones who practice the hardest and have a natural ability even if they never hold a football until age ten. Here's another example: My husband is a musician who composes, writes, and performs his own music. He didn’t learn how to play his first instrument until he was 18. He didn’t learn his second until 22, or his third until 23. By standards in the music community, he should not be able to play well enough to be a professional musician. Yet, he does play professionally!
It’s hard to watch neighbors bragging about how early their children are learning certain skills in preschool, but by fifth grade, you’ll see that those early reading abilities are no longer important. No one will care anymore whether your child learned to read at 4 or 10. No college application will ever disqualify your child for learning to read later.
Once your child learns to read, no one will care when they learn to read. Only that they can. And that they do.
The age at which a child learns to read does not indicate their intelligence level. Many gifted and advanced children don’t learn until first or second grade, some even later.
Schools are evaluated by reading test scores of their students. Having younger children do well looks good for them when standardized testing scores are tabulated. But the truth is children will learn to read when their brains are ready. Some read very early and others very late.
Children develop their distance vision before their close-up vision, so allow your young child to play in wide open spaces as much as possible. Park play equipment, nature exploration, beach-combing, outdoor sports, and backyard shenanigans are all useful in developing a good reader. Eyes mature around age eight.
As their eyes develop, teaching reading becomes easier and easier. Some children will still struggle beyond age eight. Playing outdoors is even more important for these children so they have opportunities to exercise their distance vision.
There’s actually no proven benefit to teaching your child to read early. There is research that supports surrounding them with books and reading to them often, but none that supports actually teaching them to read young.
Dr. Sebastian Suggate, a researcher in childhood education in New Zealand, conducted multiple studies into the benefits of teaching children to read young (age 5) or late (age 7). His research shows that around age 10.89, there is no discernible difference between the two groups. The group that learned to read early showed no advantages for having done so.
Children who start school when they are ready tend to show more motivation, improved grades, better leadership skills, and a greater interest in school subjects. Overall, research shows there are benefits to teaching reading later rather than earlier.
If your child is impatiently waiting to start reading and seems to do well, by all means, start. But, if your child is balking at reading lessons and frustrated by the process, it is likely a sign their brain is just not quite ready yet.
Starting early isn’t a prerequisite for excelling:
If your child isn’t reading by 5 or 6, all is not lost. They’re just beginning their life-long journey of reading a touch later because they’ve been so busy focusing on building other skills first.
Talk to an Advisor who can help you decipher if your child is ready for reading instruction (or remediation) and what program fits best. It's free!
It was Bible time, a part of every homeschool day and scheduled in our Instructor's Guide. Bible was one of the subjects that our whole family did together before going separate ways to tackle our own subjects.
Mom would read the assigned passage from Scripture and any additional book that was assigned for the Bible portion of the schedule. She'd ask questions about the passage and point out key concepts about God's character. We'd recite our Bible memory work as a family.
Obviously, this was a good thing. I had nothing against studying the Bible. The Bible is great!
But I was a teenager in high school, and I had geometric proofs to write, theater scripts to memorize, research papers to outline...
Mom loved teaching the Bible so much that she tended to go overboard, in my opinion. She would speak with great passion and at length during the teaching and commentary portion of the Bible lesson.
One day, she caught me tapping my foot, just a little, antsy to have this part of the day over and done with. Maybe I was even glancing at the clock, calculating the time I could be finished with the rest of my work for the day if Mom finished talking within the next five minutes.
She stopped her lesson immediately and said,
"This. This right here—the Bible—is the most important thing you're going to learn about all day. If we end up spending the entire day discussing this passage of Scripture, and don't get a single other thing done, but by the end, we truly understand this passage, that will be perfectly okay. This is what you need to know. The rest of school is good to know, but knowing your own faith is non-negotiable. This is the most important.”
It's been more than ten years since my mother's calm rebuke and her reminder about what my priorities should be. In the time since, I've earned my college degree, worked a couple jobs, and had a son of my own.
And I've learned that she was absolutely right. I use my knowledge of English grammar regularly, and on rare occasion I've found being able to calculate geometric formulas for area and volume comes in handy. But I haven't used calculus since senior year of high school, and I'm no chemist, either. I enjoyed what I learned in those subjects and when my own children reach high school age, I'll enjoy teaching those subjects.
But what do I really need to know for my everyday life?
I shouldn't have tried to rush through those Bible lessons as much as I did. Scripture was the most important part of our day. More than anything else she did, teaching me the Scriptures has irrevocably shaped my life and set me on the path that I now walk daily.
So, no, Bible may not be the most impressive class on a transcript. It may not increase SAT scores, be a key factor in being awarded lucrative academic scholarships, or help me get hired at an impressive job. But knowing your Creator—knowing exactly what you believe and the reasons why you believe—is going to matter in every aspect of your life for every day of your life.
Homeschool moms and homeschool students:
Consider whether impressing the wider world is the mission of your homeschool, or whether you are aiming for something different, something more like transformed hearts and minds and lives that have been surrendered to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps, instead of seeing Bible time as a box that we check off in our schedules each day and get over with as quickly as possible, we ought to take a more holistic view, and more actively look for ways to integrate faith into every aspect of home education.
When we are intentional about integrating faith with learning, we realize that we can see our Creator revealed as we study Creation, we can consider our own characters as we read of the men and women of faith who have gone before us, and we can allow the Word of God permeate every aspect of our homeschool schedules. Sonlight provides this kind of education.
