Mimi Rothschild - Home School Support & Home Education News

-by Mimi Rothschild

Probably most of us have had days when we think it might be better for us as homeschooling parents if we just had a set of twins. Then we could do one lesson for all our kids, instead of hopping back and forth from one to another.

On most days, though, we realize that it’s a blessing to have all the different ages together. Mixing up the ages helps our kids have the natural socialization of the family instead of being segregated into age groups. It gives the younger children the opportunity to look up to the older ones, and it gives the older children the chance to show care and tenderness for the younger ones. It lets children see how far they’ve come in their skills and learning, and look forward to where they’re going.

Can we have all those blessings without exhausting ourselves? We can, with a little planning. Here are some tips for homeschooling when you have a range of ages in the family:

Dovetail the work.

Work with the younger children while the older ones work on their own, and then settle the younger ones with play or a project while you check in with the older ones. It’s a sensible approach, but we have to plan ahead in order to accomplish it. Otherwise, we find ourselves getting one child started while the others wait, then starting the next one, and then the next one – and finding that the first child needs us again before we have the last one settled into work. This is a recipe for feeling frazzled by the end of the day!

As long as we get each child’s first activity of the day organized and set out before the day begins, we will be able to start everyone at once, with only one activity at a time needing us.

Get the older children involved.

Older siblings’ reading skills can benefit from the chance to read to the younger children. A six year old can cement his understanding of counting by explaining it to a five year old. A teenager learns from helping younger siblings plan and produce a play on the subject they’re studying.

Again, it takes planning to make sure the older child’s involvement in the younger ones’ lessons fits into the older child’s lessons, too. It helps to list an objective for each of the lessons. When our seven year old reads a story to the three year old, the three year old is practicing listening and the seven year old is practicing reading aloud. It will be a cherished memory for both of them.

Take time for yourself.

With all the planning and thought this requires, you need to be sure to build time for yourself into the day. The kids’ reading time could be your recreational reading time. Their time with online lessons could be your quiet prayer time. Nap time for the children should be nap time for you, too, and the kids who are too old to nap can spend that time in quiet play.

Once our family was driving to the nearby botanical gardens for a visit to support our lessons on plants. As we drove, we were talking about the history lesson the older children were working on: the Renaissance. In a break in the conversation, our baby spoke up: “Ty-renaissance rex,” he said confidently.

We all laughed. We figured he had put together snippets he’d heard from our study of dinosaurs with the history discussion he was listening to, and made up his own new word.

Over the years, we’ve seen how the younger kids’ enjoyment of family lessons has made it easier for them when they get ready to study, and encouraged the closeness of our whole family. It can be hard, but it’s certainly worth it.
**********************************************************
Mimi Rothschild is the Founder of LearningByGrace.org the nation’s leading provider of online PreK-12 online Christian educational programs for homeschoolers.

-by Mimi Rothschild

Incorporating what is happening in politics today into your homeschool lessons is a critical part of developing well-rounded, balanced students who are armed to face the world as they grow older. There is no better time to do so than now, with another presidential race in progress right before our eyes.

But what is the best way to draw your children in, and make it interesting? How do we instill in them the importance and gravity of selecting a leader for our country? It can be difficult, particularly with the media bias. It is quite evident that most national news networks favor liberal parties in their reporting. So the responsibility to provide your children with a true idea of what is happening in our country lies with you. Talk to them about the presidential race, and the candidates who are running. Explain to them, on their level, the difference in the views of each party, and what they both stand for. Encourage your children to ask questions, and take part in discussions about politics. Depending on their age, ask them to define what they believe to be the most important topics that our future president (and other political leaders) should stand behind.

Discussing current politics is also a great way to tie back into the subject of U.S. History, and remind your students of how this country was founded on freedom and democracy, and most importantly, Christian principles.

Relay to them the importance of voting, when they come of age, and how critical it is that we all have a say in who leads this country. Every vote really does count, so make that clear to them at a young age. And don’t forget to make it fun. If you have two or more students, organize mock political debates so they have the opportunity to think critically and articulate. (Not to mention, this will also help with public speaking skills.)

Discussing the topic of government and politics is also a wonderful way to remind children of the importance of praying for our country, and its leaders, so be sure to include this in your devotional as well. If you make a point to work at incorporating current events into your daily lessons, your children are sure to benefit on many levels in the future. And so will our country. God bless America!

**********************************************************
Mimi Rothschild is the Founder of Learning By Grace, Inc. the nation’s leading provider of online PreK-12 online Christian educational programs for homeschoolers.

-by Mimi Rothschild

As autumn comes on, we love to get outdoors into the crisp fall air! You don’t have to choose between study and fresh air when you take some learning scavenger hunts to support your studies.

Just give your students paper and writing implements, maybe a digital camera or a sketch book, and a list of things to hunt for. Have a great walk, and come home with a lot of teaching points for the rest of the day.

Signs of Fall
• Birds flying south for the winter – monarch butterflies, too.
• Color in the leaves of trees and shrubs.
• Seed pods on the ground, sticking to your socks, and floating in the air (collect them and make a lapbook or labeled display).
• Chipmunks chattering.
• Ripening fruits: grapes, pumpkins, apples, more.
• Blooming flowers: Michaelmas daisies, chrysanthemum, and bittersweet.
• Cooler temperatures at night.
• Morning mists.
• Pine cones fallen on the ground, along with some nibbled acorns and nuts.
• Yellowjackets getting busy.

Architecture Walk
• A-frame
• Arch
• Casement window (a window that opens by swinging out, not sliding up)
• Columns
• Dutch door (a door divided in half, so the halves open separately)
• Eaves
• Gables
• Keystone
• Mullions (the vertical piece between windows)
• Oriel (a box-like window that sticks out from the wall)
• Shutters

Alphabet Walk
• Try to find an example of every letter before getting home.
• Decide whether you’ll include “accidental letters” – the half-circle gate that looks like a C or the O-shaped manhole cover.

You can take scavenger hunt walks at any time of year, but the fall is a particularly nice time to do it.

**********************************************************
Mimi Rothschild is the Founder of Learning By Grace, Inc. the nation’s leading provider of online PreK-12 online Christian educational programs for homeschoolers.

-by Mimi Rothschild

If the leaves are turning color where you live, you can make use of them in your homeschool lessons. Here are some fun ideas:

• Press leaves. Just find an assortment of fall leaves and put them carefully between the pages of an old phonebook or another book you won’t need to read for a while. Lay the book flat in a dry place and set a couple more heavy books on top of it. When you return in a few weeks, you’ll have perfectly pressed leaves for your scrapbook. Label them to make a leaf identification book or leaf collection. See how many different leaves you can find in your neighborhood!
• Preserve leaves. You can buy glycerin at the drugstore. Collect freshly fallen leaves and set them into glycerin just as you would put flowers into water. Soon you’ll have beautifully preserved leaves for plant study, or for household decorating. Spraying leaves with hairspray doesn’t work quite as well, but it’ll do if you don’t have access to glycerin.
• Wax leaves. Old fashioned waxed paper makes great leaf art. Put leaves between two sheets and carefully iron them together at low heat. You can make many different designs, from simple single leaves to complicated pictures built up from leaves, and then fix the leaves in place by this method.
• Rub leaves. Put leaves down on a flat surface so that the veins show. Lay a sheet of paper over the leaf and gently rub with the flat side of a crayon or with a pencil. You’ll have a fine textured tracing.
• Pound leaves. Put leaves between pieces of white cotton (a pillowcase is perfect). Take your cloth and leaf sandwich out to the sidewalk or patio and carefully but thoroughly hammer the cloth everywhere there are leaves. The leaves will make neat patterns on the cloth. Iron them to set the color. Some leaves work better than others. Try different kinds, keep track of your results, and you have a good science experiment, too.
• Bleach leaves. Arrange leaves on the front of colored T-shirts. Put a fairly strong solution of bleach into a spray bottle and spray on the leaves and shirt. An adult should do this part, with care. You’ll be surprised by the colors that appear!

**********************************************************************************
Mimi Rothschild is the Founder of Learning By Grace, Inc. the nation’s leading provider of online PreK-12 online Christian educational programs for homeschoolers.

Using multimedia in your homeschooling program.

Many homeschoolers are beginning to think about how to create an educational program for their children that meets the needs of the students that we currently have, not the students that we used to have, nor the students ee wished we had. Homeschooling programs should adapt to today’s student, not them adapting to us. Homeschoolers should begin to think about how to adapt their world to today’s 21st-century. It is not wise to teach the sam,e exact way we have taught for the past 200 years anymore. It is important to change ourselves to adapt to their world

Today’s student who was born between 1982 and 2001 are the first people of the networked generation. They are hyper communicators, and when they are doing their schoolwork, they do not necessarily lose their desire to be in instant communication with everyone. Students are writing more blogs in short text messages than ever before. They are videotaping their lives. Do students even read lengthily documents anymore? I do not believe so. I believe that the rapid firing messages that our students are bombarded with on a daily basis have actually rewired the brain. Today’s students has grown up in a very visual environment, and they love it.

By Mimi Rothschild
Founder & CEO, Learning By Grace, Inc.

One of the reasons why parents choose not to homeschool their children is because of the extracurricular that public schools offer like team sports, clubs, music competitions, and others. Most homeschoolers are not allowed to participate in those things because they are reserved for students who attend that particular public school system full time. So, many parents give in to the pressure and ultimately trade a better education for their children’s social life.

Certainly homeschooled children need to learn social skills, just as we all do, but parents must not let them spend the bulk of their time with others who will not be a good influence or example to them.

It has been shown that more often than not, homeschooling parents in general are very diligent about the people their children socialize with. They want more control over their children and situations with those people their children are spending their time with, so they choose to monitor their children’s friendships and relationships more closely.

When we began homeschooling our children, one of the first concerns others would convey to us was about the “extras” that our children would miss out on. We were constantly being warned that our children would be isolated and socially inept when it came time to get a job, go to college, date, or just make friends. They even called them social misfits. However, now that our kids are grown and have moved on with their lives and their own families, those same people have come to us with a different story.

Now these folks are telling us how happy, encouraging, congenial, and respectable our children are, how wonderfully they get along with people of all ages, and how proud we must be of them. One gentleman even told us he had been wrong about his statements in the past, and he apologized.

My encouragement to you is to keep your children’s academic education first and foremost, and let their social skills develop naturally through time.

By Mimi Rothschild

Here is part two of the visualizing article I posted yesterday.  Let me know what you think!  Have you tried a visualizing strategy before with your children?  Did it work?  If it didn’t then what has worked for your child’s reading comprehension?

Taking Visualizing to the Next Level

Visualization activities lend themselves to follow-up lessons. For example, the few sentences suggested in the “Starting Small” activity lead the way for deeper discussions about making inferences. Students can discuss not only what they visualize when they hear or read given text but also the questions that the text suggests, such as, “Why do you think Joan received all of these gifts?” or “What do you think Joan will do next?” You can take this particular discussion further by allowing students to personalize the experience by answering questions such as, “What would you do if you were Joan?” or “How would you feel if you were in Joan’s place?”

When Can You Use It?

Reading

Students can sharpen their visualizing skills as they read independently, participate in small group reading activities, or listen to a text. To encourage visualizing, turn out the lights and ask students to close their eyes as they listen. Pause frequently to allow students to share their images and mental pictures with the class. The ability to generate visual images from texts becomes increasingly important as students move from richly illustrated storybooks into “chapter books” with relatively few pictures. Ease the transition by explaining that skillful writers use descriptive language designed to generate imagery in their readers’ imaginations. Encourage students to create their own mental images, thereby illustrating the books themselves-filling in the pictures that the author paints using only words.

Writing

Text that is easy to visualize is often filled with vivid descriptions or strong verbs. Watch for sentences or paragraphs in students’ writing that lend themselves to practice with visualization. With students’ permission, share these examples with the class, encouraging discussion not only of the images created by the text but about why the chosen text allows for visualization. And encourage young writers to use language that generates images-this is when writing really sparkles!

Math

Visualization is a helpful skill in mathematics as well. Students often use manipulatives to make math concepts more concrete, and visualization is a way of internalizing the concepts the manipulatives reinforce. For instance, a class that has been studying fractions and using fraction bars can segue into a discussion comparing the sizes of fractions using common images. A question such as, “Would you rather have 1/2 or 1/3 of a pizza?” is more easily answered if students can picture a pizza (or at least a circle) and what 1/2 versus 1/3 looks like. At the beginning of such a conversation, you can draw two pizzas on the board, shading in 1/2 of the first and 1/3 of the second. As the discussion continues, (1/4 versus 1/8, 2/3 versus 3/4, and so on) challenge students to picture the pizzas in their minds or to draw their visual images.

Social Studies

As students study history, they are sometimes presented with a list of dates and names. For students to really visualize historic events, they need sufficient details to create rich pictures. Allow students opportunities to listen to or read personal accounts of an event or time period they are studying. When available, pieces written from a child’s perspective are helpful in forging personal links between students and the time period in question. For instance, Sarah Morton’s Day: A Day In The Life of a Pilgrim Girl and Samuel Eaton’s Day: A Day In The Life of a Pilgrim Boy, both by Kate Waters, provide context to help young children understand colonial life.

Science

Visualizing is sometimes a good challenge with some of the more abstract concepts studied in science. For instance, many classes study plants, and students are told that plants need water to grow. While students can memorize the fact that water travels from a plant’s roots through the stem to its leaves or buds, putting a white carnation in a vase filled with water that has been tinted blue with food coloring provides a vivid example of this process as students witness the flower eventually turn blue.

Lesson Plans

Visualizing: Following the Drinking Gourd
This lesson is designed to establish the skill of visualizing for primary students. In this lesson, students use clues from the text to be able to create their own images and imagine how characters are thinking and feeling.

Visualizing: Hill of Fire
This lesson is designed to expand the skill of visualizing for primary students.

By Mimi Rothschild

It is crucial that homeschooling children perceive and understand what they read, no matter if they’re in first grade or twelfth grade.  The ability to comprehend text is an absolute necessity for students in the current fast-paced competitive digital world.  One way homeschoolers can improve their reading comprehension is by visualizing.  Read all about visualizing below in this great article I recently discovered.

What Is It?

Visualizing refers to our ability to create pictures in our heads based on text we read or words we hear. It is one of many skills that makes reading comprehension possible.

Why Is It Important?

Visualizing strengthens reading comprehension skills as students gain a more thorough understanding of the text they are reading by consciously using the words to create mental images. As students gain more deliberate practice with this skill, the act of visualizing text becomes automatic. Students who visualize as they read not only have a richer reading experience but can recall what they have read for longer periods of time. (Harvey & Goudvis 2000)

Visualizing text as it is being read or heard also creates personal links between the readers/listeners and text. Readers who can imagine the characters they read about, for instance, may become more involved with what they are reading. This makes for a more meaningful reading experience and promotes continued reading.

How Can You Make It Happen?

Visualizing is a skill that can be helpful in many domains, and while it is often associated with teaching early readers, even experienced readers can benefit from practice with this skill. When selecting a text for a visualizing activity, start with a piece that contains descriptive language and strong verbs and that lends itself to conjuring vivid images. It is not necessary to start with an entire book-even a well-crafted sentence or short paragraph can provide a rich springboard for a visualizing lesson.

Starting Small

To begin a series of lessons that will focus on improving visualizing skills, you might choose to start with a short passage taken from a text or of your own creation. For instance, the following sentences could be used to spark discussions:

Joan could barely believe her eyes. All these gifts were for her! She had never seen so many packages, not even on all her birthdays combined!

After listening to or reading the sentences once or twice, students can discuss the mental images created by the sentences. Students will likely differ in their descriptions of the scene. For instance, some may picture a small child surrounded by stacks of gifts. Others may imagine an older girl in front of a table piled with presents. There is no single correct answer, and those three simple sentences, though not particularly rich in detail, do offer enough information for the reader or listener to begin to form a mental picture.

Group Activities

Students can work on their visualizing skills as a whole class or in small groups. One way to challenge young students to improve their visualizing is to read a picture book aloud, sharing only portions of the illustrations. Then ask students to create their own illustrations based on the text they heard. More advanced readers might listen to a selection from a novel that the class has been reading and create a picture or written description of a character or setting based on the information in the text.

Independent Reading

Students can also practice their visualization skills as a follow up to independent reading. Ask young students who keep track of their reading in reading logs or journals to respond to prompts regarding the images created by the text they have read: “Does the main character remind you of anyone you know?” “Have you ever been to or seen any place that is like the setting of your book?” Very young students can also draw images in their journals, recording their mental pictures in response to their reading. You can discuss these drawings during one-on-one reading conferences.

Older students who are reading novels can think about questions such as, “If you were going to make a movie based on your book, who would you want to play the main characters?” “What would the scenery look like?” and “Where would you want to do the filming?” These questions get at the imagery created in the mind of the readers and encourage those readers to share their mental pictures in their responses.

By Mimi Rothschild 

Math and science are not always the easiest subjects to learn, I wish they were because there are so many fascinating lessons to be learned in both subjects.  While surfing the web I found this excellent list of strategies that will help your student improve in the areas of math and science.  Each strategy includes articles or lesson plans so homeschooling parents can better understand how to apply them into their child’s homeschool curriculum. Below are the different methods scholars use to better understand math and science. 

By Mimi Rothschild

What are your homeschoolers doing this summer? Going back in time? Sailing on the high seas? Hanging out with the three little pigs? Summer is the perfect time for homeschoolers to improve their readings skills and have a blast while doing it. We’ve compiled a comprehensive summer reading list for each Grace Academy grade so that your homeschoolers can improve their reading skills over the summer and have fun reading a variety of amazing stories. Encourage your homeschooler to read everyday and see their reading skills improve dramatically over the summer!

Homeschool parents should also check out our homeschool summer school program. Our summer school program helps homeschoolers grow their minds, gain credit toward a high school diploma, and surge ahead academically instead of developing lazy habits. Have a great summer!!!