The government's words not mine!

So there is a new report out that has the statistics of homeschoolers out and I thought that I would share it with you. Now mind you I'm not really one of those that listens to statistics since they can usually be manpulated in just about any direction if worded just right. And I have better things to do with my time that to try and figure out just exactly what they're saying. But I did find this one interesting merely because of an observation that I made when I went to the bookstore (will remain nameless cause it's not their fault) earlier the same day I seen the report. The report said that they estimate that there are 1.5 million homeschooled students in the States from the data collected. Now mind you I don't think that they included children like my next door neighbor who is homeschooled but uses the public school system to do it. If you look at the information it breaks down the numbers. But I digress (normal for me!) anyway it says that of those polled the number one reason for choosing to homeschool was the concern about the school environment. Now back to the bookstore, earlier I was looking "The Well-Trained Mind" at said bookstore so I could referance something in it and noticed that a number of the "teacher" books available were dealing with disipline issues. Normally I wouldn't notice something such as this really but there were such an overwelming number of them you couldn't help but notice. I think it's funny that it would take a huge panel of people to do a lot of data collecting (and wasting a lot of tax payers dollars to do it) to come up with a three page brief when all they really needed to do was walk into the same bookstore I did to find out the same information. With that number of books there it would seem that homeschoolers are not the only ones who are concerned with the school environment.

Okay so that has nothing to do with savings but I was wanting to share that with someone and hubby started to tune me out and actually fell asleep cause he's so tired! So on to my tip! I was wanting to do some finger painting with the girls and help reinforce letters and their sounds. So we went to check out finger paints and I about had heart failure at the cost of them. So instead we went over to the pudding aisle. We picked up strawberry (pink is favorite in our house with two girls), and chocolate (mommy's favorite) instead. They cost us thirty three cents each since they were a store brand and then mommy had a coupon for them too! We brought them home and did Home Economics (cooking) math, reading all in one with following the recipe. The we got out some Ziploc bags. We put about a cup of pudding into two of them and the rest went into containers in the fridge for snack later. Now we had two easy wipe boards that we could reuse and we didn't have the mess from finger paints. We took them outside and played around in the sunshine and wrote letters and numbers in them. Then of coarse as usually happens we started being silly and drew funny faces and other things too. A bird with a squirrel tail, or a big sister with a duck beak. Then the stories to go with them! Then it was time to go inside and have our snack, we had spent close to two hours playing with our pudding boards and they really needed thrown away.

Hope you find time to sunbath like us!

Our school.

Last October we ended up pulling the kids out of school and deciding to teach them ourselves. Since then we've tried undoing some of the things we had problems with. So far it's going well. The hardest part I think was that one day they were in public school and the next they weren't. I didn't really have time to pick out a curriculum that would work for us. We were worried about meeting the state requirements and making sure that everything was legal. Of coarse it goes without saying that we (mostly my hubby, lol) wondered if I had lost my mind. Surprisingly we found the stress had lowered considerably. NowI think I've found what we're going to use as our curriculum permanently (at least till we've found if it's going to work for us or not). It was passed to me and now I'm passing it on to you. "The Well-Trained Mind" by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer is the book that was recommended as reading to me. In it the classical education or trivium is explained and how they used it. They have a number of other books that can help but it's not needed. In the book they show you how they've done things that work for them. I'm going to be using a lot of their recommendations. As with anything my advice is use what works for you and leave the rest. There is so much information out there that your head can spin. Try something if it sounds like something you like, if it works great, if not be willing to put it aside and move on.

I added some sites that we use at different times with our homeschooling. I use all of them as supplements to what I use. They are all free for me to use. I will continue to add things. The Discovery Streaming may not be free for you in your state. And here soon it may not be for home schools in SC either. They are considering if it is a viable service for schools. I encourage anyone who enjoys using it to write in and let them know how you use it and that you do use it. If you have children in the school systems find out if your child's teacher, or school uses it and write in about that too. With times being what they are budgets are being looked over again for pennies. This is one service that I really think helps in many ways and I hope that it stays around.