Is Your Homeschooled Child "On Schedule"?

My oldest son has a great friend who goes to the public school across the street. Ever since she started kindergarten, she'll come over to play after school sometimes. Once I had to get something out of her backpack and peeked in her homework folder to see what kind of homework 5-year-olds get. The stuff was on par with what I was teaching my son, so I was relieved.

Now whenever any school kid comes over, I ask if I can see their homework folder and they are always happy to show me. I have to say I do see a difference between what they teach at the Catholic school up the road and in public school. The private school kids go to private school for a reason. They are advanced in what they are doing by at least a grade level over public school.

Keep in mind that quite a bit of what all kids learn will be gone from their brains by the time they graduate. That goes for homeschooled, unschooled, private schooled, public schooled, TV-schooled, and whatever.

All About Pokemon Hands-On Unit Study Course on Teachable for Grades 3-8

Thanks for dropping by! This post has migrated to Homeschooling in Kansas City. Come on over!

Aspirational and Sentimental Homeschool Clutter

I may not have a lot of books compared to some homeschoolers, but it feels like a lot when I'm sorting through things and feeling overwhelmed. When I realized books had overflowed off of two bookshelves into my storage room and were piled high in stacks on a filing cabinet, I knew I had to do something about that. Thankfully, it was Christmas break so I could finally tackle the project.

Let's take a specific book I've been saving as an example and make it our scapegoat. The book in question is What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know (Revised and updated): Preparing Your Child for a Lifetime of Learning (The Core Knowledge Series) and my youngest child is 11 years old and in 5th grade. This means this dialogue also applies to several more books I own in the series.

My dialogue goes something like this:

How to Conquer Homeschool Clutter

If you came here from the post Aspirational and Sentimental Homeschool Clutter, welcome! if not, please go check it out!

When I first decided to homeschool, every retired schoolteacher I had ever known graciously wanted to gift me the entirety of their saved classroom supplies, which they had each saved for just such an occasion. I was excited at first at the thought of all those books, wall maps, ABC charts and games, but then the clutter of unused and over-saved items took over and I got overwhelmed. Questions swirled in my mind: What might I need in the future? What would I need this year? What could I pass on?

Homeschool clutter can cause you to waste a lot of time searching for things you may or may not own, as well as causing you to spend money buying things you already have! Below are some ways I found to help tame the different kinds of homeschool clutter and paper monsters and find some peace, organization and money saved in my life.

Table of Contents: What Your First Grader Needs to Know

 

Never fear! I will be typing this up soon so you can grab it and print it out from Google Docs, just like I did with the Home Learning Year by Year benchmarks!

Junior Great Books Table of Contents and Overlap in Stories

We discovered Junior Great Books when my daughter Callie took a homeschool co-op course around 5th grade. Now I'm in love with them and try to buy up all of them. Some of them we consume and are not in love with, so we pass them on. Some we save and I hope to teach my own Junior Great Books class at the co-op someday :-) Here you can find the Table of Contents for the books we have read:

Series 2, First Semester (1992) (selling in upcoming homeschool used book sale)

The Happy Lion by Louise Fatio

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter

How the Camel Got His Hump by Rudyard Kipling

Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest, and Piglet Has a Bath by A.A. Milne

Arap Sang and the Cranes (African folktale as told by Humphrey Harman)

Blue Moose by Daniel Manus Pinkwater

Our Reading Box

What Our Box Contains

Bob Books

Explode the Code workbooks

Hooked on Phonics

Reading Pathways

Sing Spell Write

Sounds & Symbols Early Phonics Storybook from Calvert School (when we did virtual school)

Books to read aloud together

Alphabet Books

A Was Once an Apple Pie by Edward Lear

Alphabears: An ABC Book by Kathleen Hague

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin and John Archambault

I Spy: An Alphabet in Art by Lucy Micklethwait

On Market Street by Arnold Lobel

Other Resources:

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (my family did not like this one, but many seem to enjoy it)

Highlights Magazine

Also Check Out:

The New Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease

Read-Aloud Revival by Sarah Mackenzie

Honey for a Child's Heart by Gladys Hunt