My daughter has avoided word games like the plague in the past. She really didn’t like doing plain word lists, or vocabulary lists. Last year I even asked a fellow home schooling mom to “teach” my daughter spelling because it was just a serious point of friction with us. This year, I tried a different [...]

Have you ever had one of those days when you couldn’t get your child to do vocabulary or spelling words?  At our house we have had to come up with some pretty interesting ways to get those vocabulary words learned.  Some children enjoy the structure of writing the words, and looking up the definitions.  I [...]

Something really cute happened this weekend.  My Natalie wanted to play school with me but I was busy so I suggested that she play school with her stuffed animals until her friend was available to play.  She hesitated for a while and tried whining in an effort to convince me that I should play instead.  [...]

I can’t believe it’s been five years since my youngest daughter was born. Natalie, now five years old, started Kindergarten this week, but it was towards the end of this years school year that it hit me. She was moving from Pre-School 3 days a week, 3 hours per day to Kindergarten, 5 days a week, all day long. My first concern was making sure that Natalie was ready for school, no only socially and emotionally but also that she was ready intellectually. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t about to make my child spend the entire summer doing school work just so she could be “ready.” But I also did not want her to fall behind, so I did some research for books, online programs and other homeschooling programs.