Homeschooling During the Pandemic: We’ve Become the Stereotype

So the world all of a sudden grew perfectly OK with homeschooling. After being harshly judged, interrogation-styled questioned, and being scoffed at for my choice to homeschool, parents everywhere saw themselves without any other option than to teach (or not teach) their kids at home. I saw posts everywhere about how homeschooling is going, and I had two reactions. The first was “well, hopefully after this is all over, people will be more open to and less judgmental about homeschooling.” My other reaction was… “people still have no idea what homeschooling is.”

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Why I no longer follow the Ontario Curriculum

Saying goodbye to the Ontario Curriculum

 

A year of road travel will teach you to be less rigid in your scheduling. I’ve always thought that I’m a pretty laid back person, not really prone to anxiety over small things, and that I’m flexible with my planning. While that’s all very true, I also came to the realization in the last year or so that I was way too attached to one way of doing things when it came to education. Which is ironic, since I’m a fairly eclectic homeschooling parent. But the teacher in me was still hanging on the the Ontario curriculum.

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Free Homeschooling Resources: The Ultimate List

The Ultimate List of Free Homeschooling Resources

Homeschooling can get pretty expensive when you get excited about all kinds of curriculum and when you add in all the extra-curriculars that homeschoolers love to participate in. But homeschooling doesn’t have to break the bank. In the age of information, resources are abundant, and you can learn almost anything online for free.

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Homeschooling Planning Resources

Homeschooling Planning for flexible homeschoolers

I’m starting my homeschooling planning for September. While I see the appeal and benefit of unschooling, it’s not the right choice for our family, for a variety of reasons, so we do have some planning involved in our school life.

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Homeschooling: Teaching Kids About Money

I’m starting (perhaps a wee bit late) to prep our homeschool lessons for the upcoming school year. First things first: I must remember to send our letter of intent this year. Second things second, I like creating my own curriculum, as that was my favourite thing when I was still a school teacher. Creating lesson plans is definitely part of the fun of teaching for me. I figured I might as well share my curriculum with you guys! This year, I’m doing a “home economics” curriculum, and one of its main features will be teaching kids about money management.

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Homeschooling: Brazilian Heritage Lessons

Teaching Brazilian Culture & Heritage (or not)

One of the expectations of the Ontario Elementary Curriculum in almost every grade is that children be made aware of their heritage and be encouraged in their traditions. Let me be honest: as an immigrant, homeschooling mother, I’ve been doing a terrible job of this.

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Homeschooling Posts

If you’ve been reading the blog even semi-regularly in the past year, you know that I wrote about our RV trip a lot. I also wrote about multi-niche writing quite a bit, as this is what I’d been doing as we travelled all over Canada and the US from August 2008 to the late spring of 2009. I severely neglected all other parts of this website during the past year, and I’m itching to get them going again.

One of the topics I’d like to start writing more about is homeschooling. I’d like to share some of my lesson plans with you guys, talk about the challenges and joys of homeschooling, and generally share our experience educating our kids.

While I do write for myself quite a bit (my several journals are proof), and I have lots of ideas on what to write, I want to make sure that readers are getting the most out of this blog, too. So I’d like to know: what would you like to read about homeschooling? Is there a topic in this area you really want to learn more about? Drop some suggestions in the comments or email me at mariana@dreamsintogoalswriting.com.

Homeschooling posts will come out every Thursday.