One of the great parts about homeschooling is that you don’t really have to worry about snow days. Everyone loves snow days, but they can really interrupt the flow of your curriculum. That said, snow days can provide a really important opportunity to add ‘balance’ to your child’s life. Especially, so for high school students who are working really hard.

That said, you may not want to interrupt your curriculum.  I found what works best is a compromise.  Don’t think that your child won’t know that the public school kids are out for the day.  What I learned worked best was offering the student the morning off.  Sleep, play games, read, do whatever.  During that time I took 30 minutes to 1 hour to come up with a very interactive or ‘fun’ lesson that supplemented the curriculum that we were already working on.  I didn’t simply go into the existing curriculum, but did something more hands on and interactive.

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One of the biggest fears of homeschool parents is how colleges will view home school based degrees and how to prepare home school transcripts.  I have to admit my two prepared transcripts were quite excellent looking, but I cannot take the credit.  The credit must go to Lee Binz.  Mr. Binz has put together some fabulous ideas for creating effective transcripts that give a clear picture of the academic success and rigor of your Christian homeschool program.  Fortunately for you all, Mr. Binz has an e-book out that I highly recommend purchasing if you are thinking about writing a home school transcript for your student.  This is not a review of Lee Binz The Easy Truth About Homeschool Transcripts, but I will say I do recommend it.  Some parents are paying consultants big bucks to write these, I think you can do it for the small cost of the e-book.  Check it outt.

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Many people talk about ‘classical homeschool’, but few actually know what it means.  Classical Christian homeschooling generally occurs in three stages: 1) the grammar stage (grades 1-6); 2) the dialectic stage (grades 7-9); the rhetoric stage (grades 10-12).  The grammar stage corresponds to the development of the brain that is soaking up as much information about ‘what is’ – very little interpretation takes place in this stage, because the mind is phisologically not developed for this cognitive area of learning.  The ‘what is’ part of the homeschool curriculum can be used as a base for future learning.  The ‘why’ and ‘how’ stage of classical homeschool education should occur during the 7-9th grades, but may be useful for advanced students in the 5th grade.  The final rhetoric stages includes in-depth learning of a variety of subjects, usually limited to: Arts, Literature, History, Language, Math, Oratory, Science, Philosophy, Writing, and Bible.

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One of the biggest trends in homeschooling is online instruction.  No matter how innovative and wonderful parents are as teachers, we cannot offer all opportunities to our children.  Online collaboration now offers a wonderful supplement to our existing curriculum.  One of the reasons you see the Alpha Omega ‘ads’ on this site is because I’ve had so much luck with them.  Granted, the stuff isn’t free, but it is top notch.  I tried to scrounge up my online homeschooling resources for free, but it took so much time and I often was using pure junk.  Part of the reason I created this blog was to help pay for these books .  In any event, I will be putting together my favorite books and pieces of homeschooling curriculum to help those just starting out.  I will also do a full review of some Alpha Omega products.

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Welcome to my new blog, Christian Homeschooling Help.  I am a mother of 3 children, two of whom successfully completed their elementary and secondary school education in my Christian homeschooling program.  I have one more ’student’ working to complete his high school degree and head to college.  In this blog I hope to provide help and resources for other Christian homeschooling families.  Best of luck with your own Christian homeschooling curriculum, if you have any questions, please post them in the comments.

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