Rebecca Capuano
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Pregnancy is, for most people, an amazing personal and family event. It is a marvelous emotional and physical transformation, and, for many, a true gift from God. The anticipation of baby #3 is certainly all of those things for us. But, because we’re homeschoolers, it’s also something else… the educational experience of a lifetime! Continue reading »
No matter the form it takes, we all have episodes of inadvertently teaching our children “Do as I say, not as I do”. And if we’re really honest, we’d admit that sometimes we just wish the adage could be true! But the reality is that homeschooling makes it abundantly clear that over the long haul, children do what we do more so than what we say. No matter how good our words, we just can’t get past the fact that it’s what we do and who we are that impacts our kids’ behavior the most. If we tell our children to not stress about their scores on standardized testing, but we spend the six months prior to testing working on testing practices every day with our children, worrying about how they are going to perform, and agonizing over testing results when they arrive, what message do the kids really get? Kids know when the message and the messenger don’t line up – and when they don’t, kids get the message; just not the message we want them to get. Continue reading »
Cures for Spring Fever
Redbud tree in bloom
Do you have it yet? That illness that strikes all children as soon as the weather gets warm and the trees start budding? That’s right… spring fever! It’s the malady that causes you to wake up in the morning with absolutely, positively no desire whatsoever to do anything other than get outside. It often closely occurs in conjunction with the urgent wish to neglect homeschooling in the pursuit of anything involving warm breezes and sunshine. Let’s face it, if you don’t feel like sitting inside at the table working on academics, your kids certainly won’t! Continue reading »
Many a homeschooler feels “tested” by testing time. It often feels like standardized tests are a test of us. Of how we’re doing, of our efficacy as homeschoolers, of our success as educators and parents. And it is easy to transfer our own inadequacies and fear of failure to our children at test time. Sure, we want them to learn. Sure, we want them to do well on tests. Sure, it would be great to have high scores to show off to nay-saying friends and family members as “proof” that our little homeschooling experiment really is working. But in order to be responsible homeschool parents, we need to take a true look at how much our focus on standardized testing is about our children, and how much it’s about us. Continue reading »
Springtime usually means “testing time” for homeschoolers. And if you’re at all like me, it is not your favorite time of the year. Although standardized testing is a state requirement for many homeschoolers, it can easily become the most dreaded part of homeschooling. Why? Because many of us feel like test scores are a definitive measure of… well, something. Something, uh, important. Good scores mean we’re doing a good job, and bad scores mean we’re not. Or good scores mean our kids are really smart and bad scores mean they’re not. Or good scores mean our children are learning what they need to know and bad scores mean they’re not. Good scores mean homeschooling is the right thing for our children, and bad scores mean we need to shift to some other educational option. Right? Continue reading »
