Homeschooling My Kinetic Kids

In today's screen-driven age, many kids don't get enough time working on their fine motor skills.  The result is weak fingers and hands and poor handwriting.  More time strengthening their hands is a necessary part of your school day, but it doesn't have to just include play dough kneading.  Here are ways that you can improve your child's handwriting, while encouraging them to learn geography.   Set up these fine motor activities in some trays or bins, so one child can work on them, while you're working with another child.   Landform Trays with Play Dough // Pinay Homeschooler Squishing play dough is a great way to strengthen fingers and work on fine motor skills.  This activity uses colored dough to create landforms in an engaging and interesting way.  Place a few tins of play dough in a quiet bin with some printable cards, so kids can build whichever landform they want during their free time. Tracing Roads on Maps // Housing a...

I was just discussing with my husband tonight how confident I have been feeling lately about our homeschool journey.  It is February 2021, so we're well into the school year, and I thought I'd share with all of my readers what is working for us.  I am schooling three "unique" kids (as they all are), who are currently 9, 8, and 7.  School has been a struggle with us so far, so my kids are roughly in 2nd grade, kindergarten, and 1st grade.  I will be referring to my my children as Dragonfly, Skimmer, and Tadpole. READING Dragonfly (9) has been a reluctant reader so far, but she has recently come back to wanting to be taught how to read.  Previously, she was wanting to slog through "real books" and learn how to read from them.  After seeing her brothers work on reading with the "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons" book, she has decided that she is also willing to learn some phonics and sight words in a more methodical way.  She's now blazin...

Before I begin with this post's content, can I vent a minute about blogging in general?  I had the hardest time figuring out what to use for a headline.  I really wanted to saying something like "How to be Productive even though You're a Relaxed Homeschooler without a Schedule."  Or something less wordy (wink).   Or even something more direct, "One Tip for Your New Homeschool Year."  Unfortunately, neither of those ranked very well on the headline analysis website, so here we are with the super long and slightly bait-clicky one.  But, you're also here, aren't you?  So, I guess it worked? I bet your wondering what my ground-breaking tip is to revolutionize your homeschool year is, right?  Once I tell it to you, all the magic and suspense is gone.  I don't know if I should just drop it or string you along.  Google doesn't like it when I write one sentence blog posts, so you have to put up with my wordy blathering.  Blogging ...

True confessions time!  My house is a mess.  My husband and I are both very creative people with lots of hobbies and crafts.  We like to joke that between us, we own every department of Hobby Lobby.  If you're looking for a craft supply or tool, we probably have it (haha).  But, cleaning is NOT creative, and it's really hard to motivate anyone in the house to get some work done.  This morning, I was sharing with another special needs mom some of the games we play at our house to make cleaning more fun. Side Note- A few weeks ago, I posted this picture to my Instagram account  and caused an absolute storm of controversy.  I had no idea how many people think that kids should not do chores of any kind.  How many people think that asking kids to clean is child abuse. On this particular day, this child made a huge mess on the window.  I attempted to clean it up several different ways (with his help), but nothing was working, so I t...

The public school teachers call them "morning tubs."  They're also sometimes called "Busy Bags" or "Quiet Bins."  For the sake of consistency, I'm going to call them "busy bins."  The concept for all of them is pretty much the same.  You take a shoe box, a drawer, a ziplock bag, or some other container and fill it with a few items to keep kids busy and/or quiet during school time, when they give up nap time, in a restaurant, while traveling, or wherever. For this blog post, I really wanted to focus on fine motor skills or what I'm amusingly calling "The Finger Gym."  I've done a lot of research on the internet and have filled this post with activities that don't work on any academic subjects (that would be a whole other list).  If you search around on this blog, you should find many hands-on learning ideas for math, handwriting, and reading. Classic toys like  Lego  or  Play Dough  make great busy bin items...

I asked all three kids why they think we homeschool.  The boys were confused by the "why" question, but Dragonfly (almost 8) had a few suggestions.  "So that bully people won't bully us."  "So you won't miss us too much when we're gone all day."  "So we can learn." Now that July has started, the stores are full of school supplies and fall clothes and many people are starting to think about back to school.  Perhaps you've been thinking about last year and wondering if you should homeschool this year.  I'm hoping in this article to give you some reasons why we home educate and to persuade you to come to the dark side. Before I go into my list, I thought I should talk a bit about homeschooling in general.  (1)  Homeschooling is not "school at home" and every family is going to home educate differently.  (2)  Parenting your children's education is legal in all 50 US states and many countries; although, the law...

We recently got an Instant Ink compatible printer for our homeschooling.  I had been putting off buying ink on our old printer for several months, not wanting to put out the money to purchase new cartridges.  Then, I heard about a great deal on a new HP printer .  For the price of two cartridges for the old printer, I bought a brand new wireless printer with 10 months of free ink!  I've wanted a wireless printer for a long time, so it's even more perfect. The printer is part of HP's Instant Ink program, a subscription service where ink is automatically sent before you need it (amazing!).  When you sign up for the program, you chose how many pages of printing you think you'll use a month- 30, 100, or 300.  Every month, your printing allowance starts over.  When the cartridge gets low, HP automatically sends you new ink.                                       ...

/> Homeschoolers can turn anything into a field trip.  Trips to the dentist- learning opportunity.  Vacation- what's around there that we can count for school?  Simple grocery store run- not anymore. I belong to several homeschool groups on FB.   Over and over, the question of field trip ideas comes up.  This post was inspired by those questions and many of those ideas (as well as many from my head and some from Pinterest ).  We all know that we could find another museum, but if you need some fresh destinations, check out this list of one-hundred-and-ten ideas.                     [1] behind the scenes at the Grocery Store                     [2]  Park/Playground                     [3] identify t he Rhopalocera at th e Butterfly Garden                 ...