Legendary Learning

Chance to Win a Free Copy of my eBook

The indomitable Kathy Sprinkle is holding a party over at her Bliss Habits website, with lots of guest posts and giveaways! To check out my guest post on “Kitchen Sink Poetry” and a chance to win a free copy of my ebook, Legendary Learning, just click here. The deadline is Friday May 18th, so don’t [...]

A Typical Day of Homeschooling – 13 Years Ago

Since writing about how great journaling is for remembering our homeschool days, I went back through some of my old binders and found this piece about “My Typical Day,” which I wrote for my local homeschool newsletter in 1998. Jesse was seven, Aengus was five and Emma was two. I have been trying to decide [...]

How Do You Know if Your Homeschooling is Working?

It’s getting toward the end of the school year now, and you might be looking anxiously at all the chapters/lessons left to be done in your textbooks. Some of you might be administering mandatory tests for your kids (and wondering if you covered everything). You may notice with chagrin how much of your to-do list [...]

Homeschooling Planner for Mac Users

Finally done! I’ve just finished a nine month work marathon fixing and beta-testing our homeschool planning software for Mac users. Now it is finally for sale on our brand new website! Boy if I had known how much work this was going to be ahead of time . . . Of course, that’s what I [...]

"All we are, or have been, or ever will be, comes from the quality and force of our thinking." - Orison Swett Marden

Put Some Sparkle on Your Worries

The other night, I found myself laying awake worrying about things. Instead of conveniently scrolling along in a nice neat list, my mental worry list is more like a spider web. As I think about one thing I must do, it leads to two or three more things that go along with it, and so [...]

Teaching Kids Math – Overcome Math Anxiety with Games

Textbooks and workbooks really are not the best ways to start teaching kids math. Even if your child is mathematically inclined, there is no need to pull out the textbooks until they are older and have had a lot of friendly experience with numbers and patterns already. It’s the same way with learning to read. [...]

Math for Social Butterflies

Faces are very important to my daughter Emma, because faces have feelings and stories to tell. Math, however, is not important to Emma, because to her, it is coldly impersonal and meaningless. Word problems are OK, but abstract equations – forget about it. Knowing her “right-brain” nature, I tried to ease Emma into math gently, [...]

Math Picture Books

Math is everywhere in our lives, not just textbooks. Reading math picture books or storybooks to your kids will help to show them the friendly approachable side of numbers and patterns. There are TONS of these kinds of books, but I’ll just show you a few of the ones we used in this video. You [...]

Learning Math using Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner first explained his theory of Multiple Intelligences in his book Frames of Mind (1983). Since then, educators everywhere have learned how important it is to discover how each individual student prefers to learn and solve problems. The eight types that Gardner has identified are: musical, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, spatial, intrapersonal, linguistic, and naturalist. [...]

Math Practice for Kids who Hate Math

If you want your kids to practice basic arithmetic, but they hate using textbooks or workbooks, try using resources from Scholastic Professional Books. These fun books are written for teachers and classrooms, but most can easily be adapted for homeschool use.